Mordica Homestead

In a previous post,  July of this year,  I wrote about the Mordecai (anglizied as Mordica) family members buried at the Rocky Fork Primitive Baptist Church.  This time around I am showing pictures of the original Mordecai homestead located north of Columbia off of the Old No. 7 road.

These pictures were taken this summer but I have just now gotten around to publishing the story.  I visited the old home place with my mother, Virginia Perkins, who was born at home in the old house pictured below.  The original homestead sits in a picturesque valley with the home sheltered by hills and ridges overlooking vast rich fields, and with the family cemetery perched overhead overlooking the valley on a high hill. It is overgrown, littered with junk cars and dilapidated out buildings, but still you can tell that at one time this was a handsome place.  You can tell that the location was picked with care.

We were not able to gain access to the original house (cabin?) itself but were allowed to visit the cemetery and traveled back and forth from that location just north of where the  building was located.  The house as been modified and somewhat updated but has been abandoned for years.  Yet, underneath the original structure is still there.  I just learned that the owner of the property has died so we are going to try again to gain access to the old house, and go inside at least to take pictures.  Somebody in the family should buy up this little piece of property which contains so much of the family history.

Here are some pictures of the cemetery as well as the corner markers.  There are stones lying all over the place torn down, neglected, and lying in a field where cows graze.

Grave by a tree.

 

View from the top of the hill, roughly facing south, where the cemetery is located overlooking the fields where the Mordecai family farmed.  The old house is to the east.

View facing the opposite direction from the above picture.  Facing approximately north with the original house (cabin) to the right - on the east side.

 

One of the four original boundary, or corner, markers for the cemetery.  Probably made of cast iron.  This particular marker is in the north -west corner of the cemetery.

 

Here is another view from much further back at approximately where the south-west boundary marker (which is now missing or covered up) was placed. 

Anonymous grave marker.  Maybe there was never a name on this marker but time has certainly reduced it.  There is a slight chance it is a foot marker but that is highly unlikely.

Typical marker.  There are probably many more like this one which are now covered up and hidden from view.

Yet another stone knocked down.

Here is one of the boundary markers on the east side which has been broken off at the base.

 

This picture is out of sequence since it was taken on the way  up to the cemetery walking in a westerly direction up the hill.  It is included here since it offers a different view of the old house.

  This is the house my mom and most of her brothers and sisters were born in. This was picture was taken coming down off the cemetery hill walking in an easterly direction.

Another view of the house.

Yet another view of the house showing more of the surrounding area.  Facing approximately west with the hill where the cemetery is located obscured from the low angle view from where the picture was taken facing east.

 

The Mordecai family has been in this area for over 150 years.  This old homestead and what else remains of the family legacy should be preserved.  As of this writing the fate of the old building is unknown and it have already been torn down.

Rocky Fork Primitive Baptist Church and the Mordecai (Mordica) Family

Located North of Columbia is the historic Rocky Fork Primitive Baptist Church. I have many relatives, from the Mordica side of the family, buried there. These relatives are descendants of Moses Mordecai, before the name became anglicized, and before most of the family had unfortunately become assimilated.

The Mordecai family has been in Missouri for over 150 years and is mentioned in the book Missouri Pioneers Volume I, by Audrey Woodruff and Nadine Hodges, the History of Boone County, Missouri published by the Boone County Historical Society and which is currently out of print but available online, at least in parts, from Google Books. Also, the Daniel Boone Regional Library has two copies in Columbia and one in Ashland.

This is an excerpt about Moses Mordecai from the Jewish Encyclopedia online:

American trader; founder of the Mordecai family in America; born in Bonn, Germany, in 1707; died in Philadelphia May 28, 1781. He went to America about 1750 and settled in Philadelphia, where he engaged in the brokerage business. On Oct. 25, 1765, Mordecai signed the celebrated Non-Importation Agreement, by which the merchants refused to import goods until the repeal of the Stamp Act. In 1777, after the outbreak of the Revolution, he signed an agreement to take the colonial paper currency sanctioned by the king, instead of gold and silver.

The family is also mentioned in Ways of Wisdom: Moral Education in the Early National Period by Ruth H. Block; Journal of Southern History, Vol 69, 2003 and the book Ways of Wisdom: Moral Education in the Early National Period by Jean E. Friedman published in 2001 by the University of Georgia Press (ISBN-13: 9780820322520) and here is a synopsis of that book from the Barnes & Noble web site:

In Ways of Wisdom, Jean Friedman traces how Jacob Mordecai and his family, German American Orthodox Jews*, adopted the Anglo-Irish enlightened pedagogical system developed by Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his daughter Maria. In 1808 Mordecai founded the Warrenton Female Academy on the enlightened principles described in the Edgeworths' guide, Practical Education, and he enlisted family members to teach and manage the school. Rachel Mordecai, inspired by her father's progressive methods, initiated an Edgeworthian experiment in home education on her young stepsister, Eliza. Rachel's diary, reproduced in full in Ways of Wisdom, chronicles the moral instruction of Eliza. While retaining the traditional didacticism of wisdom literature, the diary also describes Eliza's resistance to enlightened discipline and method.

Our family history is indeed the age old history of assimilation of the Jewish people witnessed by the fact that my relatives are buried in church cemeteries rather than a Jewish burial ground.









Some Mordecai/Mordica graves:







This is at the very back of the cometary on the western border:


Located at the back of the cometary are many stones, or markers, which have been removed but not discarded. My father tells me that these are foot markers that were put at the foot of the grave in addition to the more familiar headstone.

More footmarkers with initials?
Standing at the western end of the cemetary looking east.

Our disrespect for the dead manifests itself in many ways. The most recent event was when St. Mary's Church in Wimbledon, the one in England of tennis fame, sold parking on grave sites for 20 pounds in the annual money grab that occurs during the famous Wimbledon tennis match. When pictures of cars parked in a cemetary on graves were released along with the story (I first heard of it on the BBC) this statement was released which is basically an after-the-fact-we-got- caught "apology:"

Reverend Mary Bide said that although the cars look ‘odd’, they were only parked in the oldest part of the graveyard and funds raised would make a ‘valuable contribution to the Church and the Diocese’.

But the church has since apologised for the car parking arrangement and has stopped the use of the churchyard.

‘Over many years, during the Wimbledon Championships, the parish of St Mary Wimbledon has offered this service to the public,’ a church spokesman said.

In other words this was not a money making scheme but rather a public service and it was okay since it was an old part of the cometary.

I was also appalled years ago when a cometary was moved, including the digging up of thirty graves and the remains for re internment, to accommodate the expansion and development along Smiley Lane in the North part of Columbia which continues unabated:

The next two pictures are of those graves that were moved:

The rest are just some miscelanous photographs:








-----------------------------
*
The reference to Orthodox Jews in the book is an odd one since the division into formal branches I think is a slightly more modern distinction which, although emerging at the time period under discussion, was not yet formally a term in common usage. There were just Jews at various levels of observance. This is my understanding from that fascinating historic period when Judaism in America succumbed to the schism aliment so common in American Christian denominations. My understanding is that the term orthodox was used disparagingly by progressive elements in Judaism (which the author correctly identifies as coming largely from Germany) but that it was latter adapted by the traditional "Orthodox" movement as a convenient shorthand.

See:
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history/Modern_History/1700-1914/Denominationalism/Orthodox.shtml

http://www.religionlink.com/tip_070827.php

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/orthostate.html

Evidently the church web site is no longer maintained. However, Google's cache still had a copy of the history of the church and I was able to get it so the history would not be lost. It is located on scribd at this URL: http://www.scribd.com/doc/17427294/RF-History-1971-Mae-Wayland in pdf format.