John Ardis Cawthon

John Ardis Cawthon

John Ardis Cawthon as secondary education department chairman at Louisiana Tech University (1966)
Born March 16, 1907(1907-03-16)
Bossier Parish
Louisiana, USA
Died October 5, 1984(1984-10-05) (aged 77)
Ruston, Lincoln Parish
Louisiana
Residence Ruston, Louisiana
Alma mater

Louisiana Tech University
Louisiana State University

University of Texas at Austin
Occupation Historian
Education Professor
at Louisiana Tech University
Spouse Eleanora Albrecht Cawthon (1948-1984, his death)
Children Elisabeth Albrecht Cawthon Saunders

John Ardis Cawthon (March 16, 1907–October 5, 1984)[1][2] was an educator and regional historian from Ruston in Lincoln Parish in north Louisiana, who was affiliated with Louisiana Tech University from 1939–1940, 1948, and from January 12, 1954, until retirement on May 31, 1972.[3] Cawthon was a frequent contributor to North Louisiana History, which named its John Ardis Cawthon Memorial Printing Fund in his honor.[4]

Contents

Background

Cawthon was born in south Bossier Parish to James Alexander Cawthon (1878–1961), a native of the McDade community, and the former Maggie Mae Dance (1878–1968), originally from nearby Webster Parish. He was named for a family friend, John Houston Sibley, and the Reverend H. Z. Ardis, a pioneer Baptist minister who had taught at the early Mount Lebanon College in De Soto Parish. He hence shared his father's initials, "J. A." He was first home-schooled by his mother, who had attended Athens Academy in Claiborne Parish. From the fifth through the eighth grades, Cawthon attended the one-room school in the Koran community of south Bossier Parish. The family then relocated to Doyline in south Webster Parish, where John Cawthon completed high school.[5]

James and Maggie Cawthon married in 1905 in Athens in southern Claiborne Parish. Cawthon had a brother, James Dance Cawthon (1915–2011) of Shreveport, who taught briefly at Springhill High School in Springhill in northern Webster Parish before he began a long career in the accounting department of the United Gas and Pennzoil companies. James Dance Cawthon, who served as the business administrator for a decade of the First Presbyterian Church of Shreveport, also did some historical writing which was published by the North Louisiana Historical Association.[6] Cawthon had two sisters, Maggie Lee McIntyre (1911–2007) of Doyline, a state social work supervisor from 1935 to 1976, based in Minden,[7] and Miss Annis Ella Cawthon (1909–1999), a former educator in Springhill. In 1950, Annis Cawthon was elected president of the Webster Parish Classroom Teachers Association.[8] She later taught mathematics at Louisiana Tech from 1959-1974. [9][10] Cawthon's parents and sisters are interred at Doyline Cemetery.[11] All of the Cawthon siblings graduated from Louisiana Tech.[5]

Cawthon studied English and history and received his Bachelor of Arts in secondary education from Louisiana Tech and his Master of Arts from Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge.[12][13] He taught in Webster Parish high schools during the 1930s at Cotton Valley (1934–1935)) and Sarepta (1935–1939).[3] In the 1939-1940 year, he taught at the A.E. Phillips Laboratory School on the Louisiana Tech campus, recruited for that position by Professor Phillips himself.[5] From 1940-1942, Cawthon was a member of the faculty at Northwestern State University (then known as Louisiana Normal) until he was conscripted at the age of thirty-five into the United States Army during World War II. He served in Europe in the Education-Orientation Division of the armed forces.[5] In 1974, some three decades after the event, he wrote the article, "A School Teacher Gets Drafted," in North Louisiana History.[3][14]

After the war, Cawthon returned briefly to Northwestern and then left to study for his Ed.D. (since recognized by the National Science Foundation as equivalent to a Ph.D.) at the University of Texas at Austin.[3] His major professor, J.G. Umstattd, had worked with him during the war at the Biarritz American University in France.[5]

Historical publications

In 1944, Cawthon, while still in the Army, published in the since defunct Mississippi Valley Historical Review the American Civil War article "Letters of a North Louisiana Private to His Wife, 1862-1865."[15]

In 1955, he wrote for the Arkansas Historical Quarterly the article entitled "George W. Dance", a biography of one of his own kinsmen, George Washington Dance, a native of Oglethorpe, Georgia, who spent his life primarily in Claiborne Parish just south of the Arkansas state line. Cawthon writes: "Referred to as poor whites from the hills, by the plantation owners on the big rivers, George Dance and his kind were not considered worthy of historical record. . . . The unpretentious George Washington Dance, however, wrote news articles for the Claiborne Parish weekly newspaper and compiled a history book. He expressed amazement at the progress of a wonderful nation, which he and his neighbors believed they had helped to produce."[16]

In 1948, Cawthon and the former Eleanora Albrecht (born December 6, 1917), a native of Mission Valley in Victoria County some 135 miles west of Houston in south Texas, received their Doctor of Education degrees from UT at Austin, some twenty-four hours after they were married at her Lutheran Church in Mission Valley. Eleanora had also studied under Dr. Umstattd[5] subsequently assisted Cawthon in the preparation of his 1965 book The Inevitable Guest: Life and Letters of Jemima Darby, based on letters by friends and relatives in North and South Carolina to Miss Darby, John Cawthon's great-great-great aunt.[17][18]

Another Cawthon work of local history, since out-of-print, is Ghost Towns Of Old Claiborne,[19] which notes the lack of information available on the ghost town of Russellville, named the seat of Claiborne Parish in 1828. The parish government is now based in Homer. Cawthon's relative George W. Dance said on the moving of the courthouse: "When the courthouse moved, the glory departed. The village is now an old worn-out field."[19]

Here is a listing of other Cawthon articles, written after his retirement from Louisiana Tech and published in North Louisiana History, formerly The Journal of the North Louisiana Historical Association:

[20]

Cawthon's last work is entitled "E. H. Bolin, School Man of Webster Parish," Louisiana History in Vol. 15, No. 1, Winter 1984: 41-48. Bolin was a school board member from Doyline and the father of future State Representative and Judge James E. Bolin.[20]

For most of his careet at Louisiana Tech, Cawthon was the secondary education department head.[12]

Eleanora A. Cawthon

Eleanora Cawthon, who is of German extraction, was from 1955-1988 the Louisiana Tech placement services director, though the position had various titles over the years. She is a former president of the Ruston Business and Professional Women's Club. She graduated in 1936 from the two-year Victoria College in Victoria, Texas.[21] She received her three degrees from UT in 1938, 1939, and 1948, respectively. Elenora and John Ardis Cawthon married in 1948, spent the summer of that year at Louisiana Tech, and then accepted faculty appointments from 1948-1954 at Arkansas Tech University in Russellville, Arkansas. (Coincidentally, he had written about the ghost town of Russellville, Louisiana.) Cawthon was an education professor at Arkansas Tech, and Eleanor was the director of teacher education there. One of his first publications there was "The Curriculum: Secondary Schools" in The Encyclopedia of Educational Research.[22]

The couple returned to Ruston in 1954 to accept their terminal faculty appointments. They lived in a white house on the edge of the Tech campus. Eleanora remained in the house for fifteen years after her husband's death, At the age of eighty-one in 1999, she returned to Mission Valley to become a working cattle rancher, which had also been her father's occupation.[23]

In 1984, Mrs. Cawthon deposited their family and professional papers dating back to 1827 to Louisiana Tech Special Collections.[24] In 1994, Mrs. Cawthon completed an oral history about the careers of her husband as well as herself for Louisiana Tech Special Collections.[25] Eleanor Cawthon is also a former appointed member of the Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors, having served in that capacity after her retirement from Louisiana Tech. In 2003, she was honored by Tech with its "Distinguished Service Award."[23]

Eleanor Cawthon resides in Victoria County, Texas, where she is active in the Lutheran Church.[23] Daughter Elisabeth Albrecht Cawthon Saunders (born 1957) is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington in Tarrant County.[26] Elisabeth is married to John Stephen Saunders (born 1954), and the couple has two children. They reside in the Dallas suburb of Coppell.[7][23]

John A. Cawthon is interred at the Lutheran Cemetery in Mission Valley, Texas.

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References

  1. ^ "Social Security Death Index". ssdi.rootsweb.ancestry.com. http://ssdi.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/ssdi.cgi. Retrieved July 8, 2010. 
  2. ^ The Louisiana Tech records reveal Cawthon's date of death as October 5, 1984, but North Louisiana History uses October 2 of that year.
  3. ^ a b c d Confirmed by the Human Resources Office at Louisiana Tech University
  4. ^ "North Louisiana Historical Association". northlouisianahistory.org. http://northlouisianahistory.org/page4.html. Retrieved July 17, 2010. 
  5. ^ a b c d e f "John Ardis Cawthon (1907-1984): A Short Sketch of an Outstanding North Louisianian," North Louisiana History, Vol. 15, No. 2,3 (Spring-Summer 1984), pp. 96-98
  6. ^ "James Dance Cawthon obituary". Shreveport Times. http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/shreveporttimes/obituary.aspx?n=james-dance-cawthon&pid=148801841. Retrieved February 24, 2011. 
  7. ^ a b "Maggie Lee Cawthon McIntyre". Minden Press-Herald, January 19, 2007. http://www.nwlanews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2127&Itemid=86. Retrieved July 20, 2010. 
  8. ^ "Miss Cawthon Elected President of Webster Parish Teacher Group", Minden Herald, April 28, 1950, p. 1
  9. ^ "James Alexander Cawthon (father of John A. Cawthon)". mccsc.edu. http://www.mccsc.edu/~lbonde/miller/fam01490.htm. Retrieved July 8, 2010. 
  10. ^ "Cawthon Rites Slated Today." Minden Press-Herald, May 31, 1968, p. 1
  11. ^ "Index to Doyline Cemetery". files.usgwarchives.net. http://files.usgwarchives.net/la/webster/cemeteries/doylineindex.txt. Retrieved July 19, 2010. 
  12. ^ a b Louisiana Tech University yearbook, The Lagniappe (1967), p. 24
  13. ^ Louisiana Tech records do not indicate when Cawthon received his first two degrees.
  14. ^ "A School Teacher Gets Drafted", North Louisiana History, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Summer 1974), pp. 130-134
  15. ^ "Letters of a North Louisiana Private to His Wife, 1862-1865," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 30 (1943-1944), cited in Allan C. Richard, Jr., and Mary Margaret Higginbotham Richard, The Defense of Vicksburg: A Louisiana Chronicle. Google Books. http://books.google.com/books?id=vjG_f6riSLMC&pg=PA300&lpg=PA300&dq=John+A.+Cawthon+(history)&source=bl&ots=KUxBggLydE&sig=iMogigvyWr2y-RwJAQ9YOpNYuMA&hl=en&ei=Tz82TI7LG8OBlAf3jeHSBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CDUQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=John%20A.%20Cawthon%20(history)&f=false. Retrieved July 8, 2010. 
  16. ^ George W. Dance. JSTOR 40037990. 
  17. ^ The Alcalde (September 1965). Google Books (San Antonio, Texas. http://books.google.com/books?id=ZtIDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=John+A.+Cawthon&source=bl&ots=Ksbor-2ldC&sig=BtwylnidCUODXvUTN9-qHvT-6yM&hl=en&ei=50M2TPeNPMTflgfo4ezUBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CB4Q6AEwBDgU#v=onepage&q=John%20A.%20Cawthon&f=false. Retrieved July 8, 2010. 
  18. ^ The Inevitable Guest is still offered by ARDIS Publications, coincidentally Cawthon's middle name.
  19. ^ a b "Susan T. Herring, Russellville: Ghost Town of Claiborne Parish". claiborneone.org. http://www.claiborneone.org/homer/russellville.html. Retrieved July 8, 2010. 
  20. ^ a b c "Archives & Special Collections". lsus.edu. http://www.lsus.edu/library/archives/indexes/nlhaa.htm#c. Retrieved July 8, 2010. 
  21. ^ "Alumni News, The Victoria College (Spring 2003)". king2.victoriacollege.edu. http://king2.victoriacollege.edu/pubs/spring2003newsletter.pdf. Retrieved July 8, 2010. 
  22. ^ Minden Herald, August 25, 1950, p. 1
  23. ^ a b c d "Dr. Eleanora Cawthon: Distinguished Service Award". 'Louisiana Tech Magazine (Fall 2003). http://www.latechalumni.org/s/810/images/FileLibrary/9788c30c-cf90-4001-8e3f-c244ce75c2b4.pdf. Retrieved July 17, 2010. 
  24. ^ "John Ardis Cawton and Eleanora Cawthon Papers". latech.edu. http://www.latech.edu/specialcollections/collections/m273.shtml. Retrieved July 8, 2010. 
  25. ^ "Centennial Oral History Collection". latech.edu. http://www.latech.edu/specialcollections/collections/m275.shtml. Retrieved July 8, 2010. 
  26. ^ "Elisabeth A. Cawthon". uta.edu. http://www.uta.edu/history/transatlantic/cawhton.htm. Retrieved July 19, 2010.