Stone Gardens: A young lawman who fathered ten children died at age 44 from malaria that swept the area in 1916
Charles Marion Adams was born August 30, 1872, in Yell County, Arkansas, the son of George Washington Adams and Louisa Eliza Rogers Adams. His father, born February 15, 1840, in Meigs County, Tennessee, served the Union in the Civil War, survived it, and later moved west with his family.
George died July 2, 1909, in Latham ( LeFlore County) and was buried in an unmarked grave at Milton Cemetery. Louisa, born in 1834, died in 1882. Their children included Alzada Adams Carter, Jason Arthur Adams, Charles Marion Adams, Simon Wylie Adams, James Franklin Adams, and infant Lovinia Adams, who died the year she was born.
The family was part of the postwar movement out of the Tennessee and Arkansas highlands into the river country that became eastern Oklahoma. Charlie grew up among farms, timber, and small settlements. As a teenager, he and an older brother played the violin for family, neighbors, and community gatherings--ne of the few details later generations kept of his youth.
On March 7, 1891, in Logan County, J. A. Adams posted a one-hundred-dollar marriage bond and swore an affidavit that Charles Adams was 19 and Mary E. Riddle was 18, both single and of legal age. County Clerk Henry Stroup issued the license the same day. The next day, March 8, 1891, Elder M. J. Ryan solemnized the marriage. The license was filed March 12, 1891, and later certified of record on July 18, 1891.
Family tradition remembers Mary Elizabeth Riddle as fifteen at the wedding; the county record gives her age as eighteen. Charles, born in August 1872, was eighteen and would turn nineteen later that year; the license listed him as nineteen.
They had ten children: Etta Mae Adams Potter (1893); Arthur Leedell Adams (1895); James Hobart Adams (1898); John Wiley Adams, known as Wiley Ervin (1900); William Richard Adams, called Bill (1902); Harvey Lee Adams, called Dude (1904); Myrtle Estelle Adams Szabo, called Maria (1907); Audrey Viola Adams Manion (1910); and twins Edward Lee Adams, called Eddie, and Edgar Everett Adams, called Joe (1913).
Charlie worked as a sheriff in Indian Territory towns in what became Oklahoma, in the last years of the territorial order and the first years of statehood. Sequoyah County, formed in 1907 from Cherokee Nation land, was still a country of scattered farms, river bottoms, and small towns such as Gans.
Law there mixed federal marshals, tribal officers, and local town officers. Family tradition remembers him as one of those local officers. The surviving record does not name the towns he served or the cases he handled--only that he wore a badge in a region still unfinished.
He died of malaria on May 3, 1916, in Brent Township, Sequoyah County, at forty-three, and was buried in Brent Cemetery at Gans. Malaria was a common killer in the low country along the Arkansas River. His death left Mary Elizabeth with a house full of children, the youngest only three.
James Hobart Adams died in 1919. Around 1923, Mary Elizabeth Riddle Adams disappeared from later family accounts. That same year Edward Lee Adams also died. The oldest daughter, Etta Mae, then about thirty, took on the raising and support of her younger brothers and sisters.
Audrey Viola died in 1930 at twenty. The others lived longer:
Arthur died in 1979, Wiley in 1952, Bill in 1980, Dude in 1962, Myrtle in 1977, and Joe in 1985. Etta Mae lived until 1981.
What survives is not a story of famous gunfights or printed headlines. It is the story of a Union veteran’s son who played the fiddle, married young in Logan County, fathered ten children, kept the peace in small Indian Territory towns, and died of fever in the river country.
After he was gone, and after his wife vanished from the record, the household held together under the eldest daughter. That is the lineage and the labor the family remembered.
