Page 33 - Always Virginia

Always Virginia 21

MY LIFE IN KAMPSVILLE
1919 to 1930
by Virginia Day Fritscher
hand-written September 1980, age 61

I was born July 12, 1919, on my Mom and Daddy’s eighth
wedding anniversary, in this little town of about 200 population,
named Kampsville, in Calhoun County, Illinois, the only county
in the United States without a railroad. Most everything came
in by boat and things were very expensive. In order to get out
of the county, you had to cross the Illinois River by ferryboat
or go to Hamburg, Illinois, where my Daddy was born and
my parents lived the first few years of their married life, or cross
by ferryboat over the Mississippi.
My mother was Mary Pearl Lawler Day, born in St. Louis,
October 2, 1888–December 6, 1972. My father Bartholomew was
born in Michael, Illinois, October 17, 1887–February 13, 1954.
Because my mother’s former fiancee, Francis Devine, threatened he
would kill her on her wedding day, my parents married in a secret
ceremony in St. Louis in 1911 on July 12 which date in 1919 also
became my birthday, and in 1938 my wedding anniversary.
In later years the State did build a bridge at Hardin, Illinois,
about nine miles south of Kampsville, where one could cross the
Illinois River, and which many times we and others would use as
sometimes there was a little wait to get on the ferryboat because
Kampsville was also a summer resort, with a lovely beach, cottages,
and dance pavilion which was jammed in the summers I was a girl
by people dancing the Charleston, come up from St. Louis and
surrounding other little towns.
One of my first recollections of living in this little town was
the back porch on the house we lived in (in the south end of town