A Birthday Treasure

Similar style Cylinder Roll-Top Desk

Similar drawer pulls

The fascination with my grandmother's cylinder roll-top, executive style desk began when my family lived with Nana at 134 Harrison. Its strategic placement in Nana's bedroom kept it as a focal point and a forever memory, like the upright, console tube radio that I found intriguing, the one with punch buttons like the buttons we pushed to activate the lights at my grandmother's house on Harrison Street.

Nana and MJD, 1949

That early 1900's desk stands now as a treasure, like the memory I hold of my grandmother, my Nana. Like many women of her generation, she held herself poised as a lady of strength because life offered her few other choices.

The youngest of five sisters and a brother, Mildred Gordon (Nana) watched her sisters marry and establish their own homes while she and Janie, her sister with a profound brain injury suffered at birth, and her mother (Ella Jane Ritchie Gordon) moved into the  circa-1913 house on Harrison Street after living for a time on Jackson Street with brother George Gordon and wife Emma Sue until the new house was completed, standing on the original home acreage.

Having moved from Union to Ouachita County prior to 1890, the family lived together, my grandmother being the only child born in Camden. After the turn of the century, the women found themselves alone after school master and public servant Charles T. Gordon unexpectedly died in 1906. Mildred graduated from Camden High School the next year, met and married Claude Garland Horne not until 1917.

Mildred and Claude returned from Altus, OK where he practiced pharmacy with his brother-in-law Bert Holt. Being pregnant, she and he returned to the security of her close-knit family in the early 1920's and by agreeing to live with Ella and Janie brought financial stability to the family at 134 Harrison Street. Mildred lost that first baby at birth, naming her Jane for her mother Ella Jane and sister Janie Louise. By 1937, when Ella died, the intact Horne family lived together along with Janie whose guardianship transferred to Mildred along with ownership of the family home.

Mildred with Margaret and Janie

As Janie Gordon's guardian, Mildred was accountable for every dime spent from Janie's estate. At that desk, Mildred (Nana) kept documents of petitions to the court, probate files, and records of monies spent, even for clothing and other necessities for the family after the sparks from a lumber yard fire flew onto multiple homes in the area. The fire burned sections of the Harrison Street house. Clothes and other combustible materials were reduced to ashes. Valued furniture pieces were saved by military men on weekend furlough from their base in El Dorado. They hauled valuable items to the front lawn, throwing some items from upstairs windows.

similar desk

Seated at her desk in her bedroom, built onto the house after the 1941 fire, Nana heard each hour chimed by the Courthouse clock directly across the street. The clock sounded every 15 minutes, signifying the steady march of time. She recorded daily events on her calendar or in her devotional book, kept record of prescriptions filled at Horne's Drug Store, paid her tithe and pledge, cared for the communion cloths, and maintained paperwork associated with all business interests which included the land and timber on Mary Sue Gordon Estate (Auntie's Place). She also kept detailed records of oil lease revenue from holdings in Ouachita and Union Counties.

Claude Garland Horne, the vibrant and virile hunter, fisherman, and pharmacist suffered from Parkinson's disease and became bound to a wheelchair and was bed-ridden. Nana hired a private nurse for him (Susie Sevier) and worked alongside her as she also cared for her husband and her sister, Janie. Claude (Granddaddy) died in 1950 and Janie died in 1953.

Thomas and Nana

The extended family including my mother, father, brother, and I moved to the Harrison Street house for the same reason Mildred and Claude moved there originally. We had not moved from 134 Harrison Street to 980 Truman for very long when, in 1959, the unthinkable happened.

Lightening struck the house on Harrison Street on a Sunday afternoon in August of 1959. Its demise shocked the family, but it had begun to drain Nana's monthly income and was holding the drug store as a financial hostage. My father was relieved, but when the house was razed, everything changed.

Many treasured heirlooms were saved, including my grandmother's desk. It was water soaked, singed by fire, and warped by steamy heat. Family members rescued and refurbished the desk along with other heirlooms so that it could be in Nana's office area in her next home on Truman Road, two doors up from our house.

During the 1960's, cousin Pam and I spent time together at the Truman Road house when our parents were out. On one particular time, we were left alone and, true to our personalities, we used the opportunity to snoop. We went through the desk, drawer by drawer, our imaginations fueled by Nancy Drew mysteries like Secret in the Old Attic, or Secret in the Old Clock. We found no secrets and no stashed cash, to our disappointment.

Now, after decades of life in various places, the desk has finally come to me from cousin Pam whose father claimed the desk in 1980 at Nana's death. Pam used the desk in her house in Camden but put it in unconditioned storage about 15 years ago. My husband and I rescued the desk from its sad state, bringing it to his workshop after Pam's sudden death on January 5, 2019.

Over this past year, he has cleaned it, repaired it, made it beautiful again, the gem that it always was. He moved it into my office and project room this week, putting it exactly where I had envisioned it. It is a rare piece, as he is for bringing this desk back to the glory it deserves.

It honors my grandmother and her life, serving as a reminder of how I should always conduct my dealings with family and business.

It is a gift, a birthday treasure.