Stone Gardens : WWII veteran helped bring sweet corn and cantaloupe strains to the Fort Gipson farm area
Connie Eugene Meeks Sr. was born June 6, 1920, at Webbers Falls in Muskogee County, Oklahoma, the son of Charles Meeks and Mary Ann Lowrey Meeks.
Charles, born about May 1881 in Indian Territory, and Mary Ann, born October 30, 1881, also in Indian Territory, married on May 7, 1900. On the Dawes Rol,ls Charles appears as one-half Cherokee by blood and Mary Ann as three-quarters, with early children Polly and William listed at five eighths.
Charles’s parents were William Meeks and Polly Downing. Mary Ann was the daughter of James B. Lowrey, called Black Dog, and Clarinda Downing, a full-blood Cherokee whose lineage reached into earlier generations of the nation.
The couple raised a large family on the land near Webbers Falls, a place shaped by Western Cherokee settlers under Walter Webber, the plantation and steamboat enterprises of Joseph Vann, and the Civil War headquarters of Stand Watie.
Conniee was the youngest among siblings that included Polly Isom, William McKinley, Charles J., Robert Lee, Lillian Landers, and Aaron. Eight brothers and sisters preceded him in death. Formal records of his schooling are scarce, yet the challenges of farm life in the Arkansas River country, the soil, the seasons, and the stories of Cherokee endurance formed the background of his boyhood.
When the United States entered the Second World War, Meeks entered service with the Army’s 42nd Infantry Division, the Rainbow Division. The division, famous from the First World War for drawing National Guard units from across the country, was reactivated on July 14, 1943, at Camp Gruber in the Cookson Hills of eastern Oklahoma, only a short distance from his home.
There the men trained through the seasons before the infantry regiments, organized as Task Force Linden, left for Europe in November 1944. They landed at Marseille in early December and were rushed into the line near Strasbourg just before Christmas. On New Year’s Eve 1944, the Germans launched Operation Nordwind, their last major offensive in the West, into the bitter cold of Alsace.
Green troops of the Rainbow held extended fronts against armor and infantry, fighting hard in the villages of Hatten and Rittershoffen where Americans and Germans occupied opposite ends of the same streets while civilians sheltered below. The full division later advanced through the Hardt Mountains, broke the Siegfried Line, crossed the Rhine, and fought through Würzburg, Schweinfurt, and the approaches to Nuremberg. On April 29, 1945, elements of the division liberated the Dachau concentration camp before moving on to Munich and into Austria as the war in Europe ended.
Meeks served proudly with the Rainbow, though available records do not identify the precise regiment or battalion in which he fought.
After the war, he moved to California and worked as a foreman at cotton gins. He later returned to Oklahoma and became a full-time farmer near Fort Gibson. He took pride in being among the first in the area to raise sweet corn and cantaloupe, crops that reflected his lifelong attachment to the land.
Proud of his Cherokee heritage, he found pleasure in farming, playing cards, and reading Western novels.
Family life continued. With Mary Lee Weeks, he had a daughter, Yolanda, born in Porum in 1944 and raised in Bakersfield. Later children included a son, Eugene, of Okay, and a daughter, Debra Kerr, also of Okay
Meeks lived to the age of ninety-seven and died on July 24, 2017, in Muskogee. Services were held at ten o’clock on the morning of July 31 at Tom Girty Cemetery near Webbers Falls, with grandchildren serving as honorary pallbearers under the direction of Lescher Millsap Funeral Home.
The cemetery is a small, seasonally maintained burial ground in rural Muskogee County, named for the Girty family and holding the graves of many residents whose lives were rooted in the same countryside. It sits amid the hills and river bottoms that had shaped Meeks and his ancestors, a quiet resting place for a man who had carried the Rainbow patch through the final campaigns of the European war and returned to the soil that sustained him.
His long life traced an arc from the Cherokee allotment years through the crucible of the Second World War and back to the fields of eastern Oklahoma, marked by service, endurance, and a steady devotion to family and the land.
