Old Man Sawyer

April 28, 1933  I repaired the cow corral.  Mama and Mary did miscellaneous.  In the afternoon we went to Old Man Sawyer to get us a dog.  Mama stayed at John H. Doerksen’s while we went to Sawyer.

Old Man Sawyer was a hermit who lived a few miles east of the Siemens in a primitive shack.  At a time when only the poorest people did not have cars, he still drove his wagon to Meade with his dogs running along beside.  He would drive by the Siemens’ place, and Cornelius would always go out to visit with him.  Sawyer had plenty of time to talk, and Cornelius enjoyed visiting, so they would talk for a long time.  To Cornelius it was absolutely unimportant what someone’s social position was – whether high or low, he could easily approach people and talk to them.  Cornelius always invited Sawyer to come in for dinner, but he always refused.  

Since Sawyer had plenty of dogs, that was the natural place to go for a dog.  Margaret probably was not as eager to go to Sawyer's shack as Cornelius was, so she went to visit the neighbors.

The story around Meade was that Sawyer had asked a Sunday school teacher to marry him, but she had rejected him, and so he withdrew into a reclusive life.  When he got older, it was hard for him to take care of himself.  Once after a particularly bad winter storm, when someone went to check up on him, he was found lying half in and half out of the doorway to his shack with frozen feet and his stove not burning.  He was taken to the hospital and then put in the nursing home where he died sometime later.

1940 census record of Charley Sawyer in Logan Township, Meade County, Kansas.  This is probably Old Man Sawyer.  In the 1930 census, he was living with his parents in Texas County, Oklahoma.