Katie May Atchison Gordon Nelson
1877 - 1953
Mollie Bailey (left) and Kate Atchison (Right)
My husband and I bought the 100 year-old Tukey-Hill house in 2008. After a fortuitous conversation with Ann Henning at the Clay County Archives, I was able to meet Louise Hill Shanks, a woman in her late 90s who moved into the house in 1919 when she was five years old. I took notes of our conversations before she died in 2016, and she told me details and information about her family that increased our appreciation for our house.
Early on I asked her about the coal chute and the long-gone coal furnace. I asked whose job it was to fill the furnace with coal, wondering if it was considered a man’s job or the housewife’s job. Her reply had a patrician delivery that I never heard in real life.
“We had help.”
Like the help. People of color who lived as servants. Over the course of a few conversations about her family and the house, Louise told me about Katie May Atchison Gordon Nelson, an African American woman who Herbert Hill hired to cook and do laundry for the Hill family.
The Hill family previously lived in a house at Leonard and Mill Street where Cody’s Quick Stop stands today. They moved because the interurban railway was being constructed and making their real estate less desirable. In 1919 they bought Ralph Tukey’s house on Wilson Street. Flora Hill’s father, the aging Captain Phillip Reddish of the Confederate Army, was a widower who lived at Lightburn and Miller Street. Due to his age, he also moved into the Wilson Street house. Flora now had to care for her father as well as raise her three daughters.
Shortly after moving in, Herbert hired an African American woman to cook and do the laundry. One of the stipulations for working there was the person had to be tolerant of young Louise and old Captain Reddish sitting in the corner next to the stove where it was warm. The new lady was having none of that, so she quit on the first day.
The second day, Herbert brought Katie Nelson home, and she had no problem with Captain Reddish and little Louise in her workspace. Whatever discomfort or challenges Captain Reddish presented ceased when he died in 1924. Katie worked for the family for nearly twenty years, until after World War II.
Louise remembered that she and Kate would eat their lunch together in the kitchen where Kate was also preparing dinner. On laundry and ironing days, Kate would go up and down the stairs between cooking and doing the laundry in the basement. There were giant tubs against the stone wall where she would soak and scrub the laundry. Kate then ran the clothes and linens through a wringer before taking them outside to hang them on the clothesline.
Louise told the story about how, when she was too small to really help, she wanted to try the wringer herself. When Kate’s back was turned, Louise ran a white tablecloth through the wringer and made an impossible tangle of fabric. Louise was scared of getting into trouble for the mess. Kate got a pair of scissors and cut the tablecloth out of the wringer. She said to Louise, “Your momma has so many linens that she won’t even know this one is missing.”
Later she taught Louise and then Herbert’s granddaughters, the Joy sisters, to cook. The granddaughters adored Kate.
Kate claimed that her biological father was David Rice Atchison, the white, pro-slavery senator from Clinton County, Missouri. Her paternity claim may be true, although David Rice Atchison would have been 70 years old at the time. Another possibility is that Kate was a granddaughter of the man, or maybe the father was his nephew, a younger David Rice Atchison. Kate’s father George Atchison and his family were enslaved persons, and later in the 1870 federal census, George, his mother, and little sister are living next door to the senator’s brother, William Atchison. The family was listed as “Mulatto,” a term referring to a person of mixed white and Black ancestry, in the 1870 census.
We do not know how Herbert Hill knew that Kate was available to work, but since he was a local undertaker, he had contact with a lot of families in the area, including the Black community. When Kate began working for the Hill family, she was married to her second husband, Park Nelson, a long-time day laborer for the Yancey family. Only a few years before that, Herbert was the undertaker for two of Park’s children and Kate’s first husband, Ben Edward Gordon. Maybe on account of that Herbert knew of Kate.
During their 20-year marriage, Ed and Kate had three children: Pansy, Marjorie, and Virgil Rhodus, aka Buster. All three kids attended Garrison School, the one Liberty school that served all local African American students from the first to tenth grade. Of the available records now at the Clay County Archives, someone wrote in the margin next to Marjorie’s name that she was “a very good student.”
In the 1920 federal census, Pansy was in nursing school at the Wheatly-Provident Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. At some point in the 1920s, she moved to Los Angeles, working as a nurse for the rest of her life.
After a year of college, Marjorie followed Pansy to California and founded a Black-focused newspaper and later worked in real estate.
Buster attended two years of college or trade school and then moved out to Los Angeles to be with his sisters. He enlisted in the army for WWII and eventually ended up in Virginia. No grandchildren have been found.
Kate retired in the 1940s and moved to California to live with her children. When she heard that Herbert Hill died in 1948, she thought enough of her former employer to take the long train ride back to Liberty, Missouri, so she could pay her respects to the Hill family. Kate died in California in 1953.
Written by: Erin Martin, Resident of Liberty, MO
** While Kate is not buried in Fairview Cemetery, we honor her on this site as part of the origin story for how this memorial project began. **