09/05/2026
🪦 Meet the Residents - Thomas A. Clinton Gullett (1871 - 1902)
On a Sunday in February of 1893, three miles southwest of Mount Vernon, eighty-one people sat down to dinner for "Uncle" Ed and "Aunt" Missouri Ragain's fifty-third wedding anniversary. The Fountain and Journal sent a man out. He wrote that the day was fine overhead, the dinner "grand, rich and racey," and that Uncle Ed went round afterward with eighteen silver dollars, one for each of his children. The paper printed every name present. Among them: "May, Hattie and Clint Gullett."
Thomas Clinton Gullett was twenty-one that afternoon. The papers never called him anything but Clint.
Somewhere in that crowd was Ed and Missouri's granddaughter, Lulu Belle Ragain. She was fourteen.
Four years and eight months later he took out a license. The next day, the seventeenth of October, 1897, Rev. G. F. Harbour married them at the bride's residence on Honey Creek, and a wedding supper was "served to the large number of relatives and friends present."
They rented. In the summer of 1900 the census taker worked southwest through that same neighborhood — J. J. Ragain's houseful, then old Aunt Missouri's, widowed now at seventy-nine — and came at last to Clint and Lulu, married three years, a baby in the house. Against Clint he wrote Farmer. In the owning column he wrote R.
Erville Glenn had come in January of 1899. Evelyn Gladys came on the first of March, 1901.
By the next winter Clint was past working.
He died on Monday the third of February, 1902, of consumption, in a rented house on Henry Hoberg's ground. Thirty years, four months and three days.
There was no village of Hoberg then. The post office came in 1905, the township in 1910. It is on the map now.
Consumption was tuberculosis. It killed more Americans in 1902 than almost anything else, and it was slow — a year or more of it, the cough, the fever, the weight going off him, in the same small rooms as his wife and his babies. There was no medicine. There was rest and clean air, and nowhere in Missouri to get them.
Rev. Harbour, who had married him, buried him on the Tuesday at one o'clock — the service at Big Spring, and then out here to this ground.
Nineteen days later they sold everything at the door. A two-horse wagon. A set of double harness. A plow, a harrow, a drill, a cultivator. Two heating stoves. A sewing machine, a bedstead, an extension table. "Terms of same eight months credit on all sums over $5.00.—Lulu Gullett."
She was twenty-three, with a boy of three and a girl of eleven months. She took them home to her mother.
Four years later the state broke ground on a tuberculosis sanatorium at Mount Vernon, up on Chigger Hill where the air was high and dry — which the town had bid sixty acres and three thousand dollars to win. The first patient was admitted on the seventeenth of August, 1907. Five and a half years too late for a farmer three miles southwest of it. In time for a great many others.
In 1910 the census taker found the three of them still in Nancy Ragain's house. Lulu Belle, thirty-one, widow. Occupation, seamstress. Industry, private families. Own account.
She had sold a sewing machine in 1902.
We told her own story here on the first of June, before we knew who her parents were. We know now.
She married Job Boyd in 1914 and buried him in 1948 — Mrs. Boyd for forty-six of the fifty-eight years after Clint. She died in 1960. They laid her down beside Clint. Her marker lies flat in the grass at the foot of his stone.
Sunday: Thomas Jefferson Ragain — her father, in whose house Clint was married.
Do you have any stories or memories of Clint — if so please share. If you'd like to participate in the graveyard please comment below.
