The Homestead Years

This photo of Xavier King was taken at the Chazy Lake Railroad Station in the late 1800’s or very early 1900’s as best we can tell.  I’m not sure where I got the picture, originally Grandma had it (Delia King) and then I think Mark LaVigne had the negative which he lent to me.  In any case this image of Xavier is one of very few that we know of.  He was a hard working man who worked everyone and everything around him as hard as he worked.  His son Howard said he had a strong tempered man, and I think most people who knew him would have agreed.  Howard did not believe in spanking because his father had believed in it so much.

Again the issue comes up of what this ill-temper means.  Xavier was an important person locally, people came to him for work, for help, for favors.  He ran a number of business: a bed and breakfast for vacationers to the mountains, a timber business, a farm and he worked for the mining company as a contractor, he bought and managed land and worked with and for relatives in the lumbering business as well.  This was a man who had no space between work and sleep and for whom rest must have been a stranger.  Add to that a household full of people, 8 living children, one more who died at about a year; long visits from relatives, hired men and girls who lived in and hired laborers who came by the day, but needed feeding at midday; and fishing and hunting to do and supervise, boys to teach, cows to milk and employees to supervise.  I imagine that he could not afford to suffer fools lightly.

It seems odd to defend him, when everyone said he was “mean”.  But I knew his sons, and they were mostly the sweetest men, but each could be tough as nails and completely unmoveable once their minds were set.  Was that how he was?  A pioneer’s son, working to make a comfortable life for a family that didn’t stop with sons and daughters.  A man who had obligations, wanted obligations and met obligations by force of will and work.  I bet he was mean.