Letter from Lola Tracy about the ‘slave mansion’

Patrick Kenney was born in Drangan County Tipperary, Ireland, on Aug. 9, 1929, and died Jan. 11, 1908. He was a First Lieutenant and Regimental Quartermaster, First Regiment of Cavalry MSM (Missouri State Militia)1862 to 1865. This information was taken from “The Toll Stone” in Kenney Cemetery at Kidder.

He did not own slaves!

He helped runaway slaves to go north. He helped in the building of the railway, where so many people would take on so many miles of building the railroad.

He wrote my grandfather Mark Fitzgerald, who was also from Ireland, a cattle buyer in his early fifties, to come work on his part of the railroad. So he came and bought his farm four miles west and south of Hamilton a couple of years later and helped on the railroad.

Early on, Kenney was a town. Then later the town moved east and was renamed for a man named Kidder. My grandfather Mark Fitzgerald is also in the Kenney Cemetery.

Before the railroad it used to be a stage line through there.

Somewhere along 1950-1980 Roy Underwood and Edel Sigmen came from Brush County and owned or ran the farm for quite a few years. Rex Underwood, a son of Roy, was killed in a car wreck in Cameron as I remember.

They were the ones that tore the house down. I heard the staircase was made of cherry wood.

My parents owned the farm where the Kidder Cemetery is (and they are buried there). A lady by the name of Coffee donated the land for the cemetery and built the square house (east) in 1900.

My father was William Mark Fitzgerald.

My husband Gerald and I farmed in Daviess County, from 1954, for 57 years. I sold the farm on Hwy. 6 north of Winston to my cousin’s son, Sean Fitzgerald of Osborn.

Lola M. Tracy, 91-years-old, The Village, Cameron