Page 16 - Always Virginia

4 Virginia Day Fritscher

causing them to retreat west to reservations managed by the Bureau
of Indian Affairs founded by the War Department in 1824, making
the formerly sovereign native peoples wards of the government.
In 1819, five families of pioneer whites immigrated into the
area, settling near the only structure, an Indian trading post. The
first apple trees were planted and the first ferry was launched. The
last few visible Indians were exiled westward by 1835, fifteen years
before John T. Day, the colonist immigrant from an occupied
country, found himself caught up, perhaps with a certain judge-
like empathy, occupying a county whose ancient civilization could
not survive his. In the sweep of history’s ironies and erasures, as
cultures rise and fall, he could not have predicted that a century
later the very Kampsville postoffice where his nephew, Bartholomew
(Bart/Batty) Day III, would be a rural carrier, and his grandniece,
Cecelia Day Stelbrink, would be postmaster for thirty-six years,
would become, fate’s full circle, a world-famous laboratory for the
international Center for American Archeology founded to study
and preserve the grace and refinements of Calhoun County’s local
Native American culture.
As a new citizen in Calhoun County, John T. Day, Senior, was
a Democrat who served on election and other boards in the county
named—long before he arrived as the first of four generations
of impartial Day family judges—for the family of the ill-famed
Democrat John Calhoun who as a Southern nationalist won the
Electoral College vote to be the seventh Vice-President of the
United States in 1825 and then resigned as a defender of slavery
and states rights in 1832.
At a Lincolnesque six-feet-two, Judge John T. Day, Senior, was
a slender, dignified, handsomely moustached man who, unmar-
ried at the start of the Civil War in 1861 when he was 41, was
drafted for service in the Union Army, but was exempted, after
his travels as a fit young man, because of a leg crippled, likely
by the Irish heritage of arthritis, or perhaps by a farming injury.
That infirmity and his farming success eventually impelled him