Trigg County, Kentucky, U.S.A. will, in 2020, celebrate its bicentennial. As part of that commemoration, its historical society is researching short biographies of native sons and daughters and other distinguished former residents who moved away and were lost to local history. J. Marris Binns is one of those residents, who spent time in Meota and who had children remain in Saskatchewan even after this own return to Trigg County.
Trigg County is situated amid gently rolling farmland, deciduous oak forests and limestone bluffs on the shores of Lake Barkley in rural western Kentucky. Its county seat, Cadiz, is 83 miles northwest of Nashville, Tenn., 240 miles west of Lexington, Ky., and 1,812 miles southeast of Meota, Saskatchewan, Canada.
In Cadiz’s East End Cemetery stands a gray granite tombstone that marks the graves of J. Marris Binns and his wife Annie. The road between Cadiz and Meota was one that the Binns family traveled often in the early 1900s. They and their children were among the Canadian town’s founders. Meota’s war memorial bears the name of their grandson Ronald Binns, who was a childhood resident of Trigg County. He was killed in action Sept. 3, 1944 near Ancona, Italy, while serving in the Royal Canadian Regiment during the Second World War.
Little can be discovered about J.M. Binns’ early life. He was born somewhere in either the north of England or Scotland, probably in the Glasgow region, in 1856. He, his wife Annie, and his older brother Walter (1849-1926) immigrated to the United States in 1870-71. Their names first appear in Christian County records in the middle 1870s. The Binns brothers prospered as merchants and became members of the social elite of Trigg and Christian counties.
Walter Binns purchased Binns’ Mill, then known as Brewer’s Mill, on Little River near Pee Dee in Christian County in 1888. J.M. Binns bought Glenwood Mill, located about three miles east of Cadiz in Trigg County shortly afterward. Glenwood Mill was built in 1871 after fire destroyed a mill known as Jackson’s Mill on the site, built around 1830. Glenwood Mill burned in November 1921 and the site was abandoned. The remains of the mill dam across Little River can still be seen at times of low water.
According to William Henry Perrin’s History of Trigg County published in 1884, the water powered Glenwood Mill was capable of grinding 50 barrels of grain in 24 hours. J. M. Binns modernized the mill, but what those improvements were is unknown. Glenwood Mill ground and sold “patent” flour under the brand names “Ladies Choice” and “White Elk” and did custom grinding for farmers. J.M. Binns owned a 490-acre farm “the Tyler place, on the [Hopkinsville] pike two miles east of Cadiz” where he, his wife, and seven children lived in a “very desirable home” that was equipped with a telephone.
In the spring of 1900, the Binns brothers decided to visit the “old country” and, while in Europe, take in the Exposition Universelle world’s fair in Paris. J. M. and Annie Binns, Walter Binns and his wife Elizabeth, and their adult son Thomas, then a resident of Clarksville, Tenn., boarded a Louisville & Nashville Railroad passenger train at Hopkinsville the morning of April 16, 1900 bound for Evansville. They spent that night in Evansville and then boarded a train to Buffalo, N.Y., and Niagara Falls, where they spent two days before going on to New York City via Albany and south down the Hudson River Valley on the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad.
The train took them to the elegant old Grand Central Station – later torn down and replaced in 1913. They would have had a choice of nearly a hundred first class hotels like the new Empire on 63rd Street, the Morton House facing Union Square and the Hotel Albert a block west of Broadway that offered “good airy rooms from $1.00 per day upwards.” Bathing facilities were separate from the room, and cost 25 cents extra, with soap and towels provided.
Their itinerary, published in the Hopkinsville Kentuckian newspaper, indicates that the Binns saw New York in a whirlwind tour. The least expensive way to see the city would have been to ride the elevated railways. One mile in a horse-drawn taxi cost as much as a night’s hotel bill. The New York that they saw was a city in transition to modernity. New York was still a largely pedestrian city. Many streets served as open air public markets where vendors sold produce from pushcarts. Streets were crowded with horse-drawn hacks, cabs and delivery wagons. On some streets horse-drawn street cars and electric-powered trolley cars operated on side-by-side tracks.
The tallest building in the city was the Park Row Building, completed a year earlier. The “Classical Revival” style skyscraper’s 29 stories towered 391 feet above the street. Only three other buildings came anywhere close to being as tall. From its upper windows one could look a few blocks north and see the crowded tenement slums and sweatshops of Little Italy whose workers, many of them children, earned barely enough to survive. In the tenements, toilet facilities were communal, either in the hallway or in an outhouse in the alley between buildings. Coal burning stoves furnished heat and did the cooking. Looking in the opposite direction one saw the rooftops of Wall Street where multi-millionaire financiers dominated the world’s economy.
The Binns boarded the British Anchor Line steamship S.S. Anchoria, docked at Pier 54, North River, at the foot of West 24th Street, early on Saturday morning, April 21, 1900. The ship sailed at noon bound for Glasgow, Scotland. The Anchoria was an old ship built in 1875. She had an iron hull 408 feet long and 40 feet abeam, painted black; a white box-like amidships superstructure, and one tall cylindrical smokestack, painted black.
The ship looked more like a cargo freighter than a passenger liner, and had the slow speed of one. The ship’s reciprocating steam engine and single screw propeller was capable of driving her at 12 nautical miles per hour. The ship’s main business was in the immigrant trade. Anchoria had accommodation for 200 first class passengers, 100 second class, and 800 people in steerage, but on eastbound voyages across the Atlantic carried far fewer people, all of them in first and second class. First class passengers paid $40 to $60, depending on cabin size; second class fare was $25 to $35.
What Anchor Line ships lacked in speed, they made up for in service, at least in first class. Facilities included an elegantly furnished ladies’ lounge, a gentlemen’s smoking room and bar, and a formal dining room whose service and cuisine rivaled that of a five star European restaurant. A typical dinner menu began with hors d’oeuvres of Russian caviar, olives or anchovies on toast and the choice of consomme au ris or green turtle soup. Passengers could choose a main course of salmon with sauce homard and sliced cucumber, filet de soles with sauce tartare, mutton cutlets served with puree of mushrooms, roast sirloin beef and potatoes al la princesse, spring lamb with mint sauce, baked Westphalian ham with spinach or roast turkey with cranberry sauce. Vegetables included baked, plain boiled and snow potatoes, cauliflower, green string beans and tomatoes. Dessert was diplomatic pudding, apricot tart, charlotte russe or French and German pastry.
British newspapers indicate that the North Atlantic weather was “fine and warm” during the Anchoria’s twelve day crossing, perfect weather for the strolls, dances and entertainment on deck that were typical aboard Anchor Line ships. The Anchoria stopped briefly at Moville in Lough Foyle, where she met the transfer boat that went upstream to Londonderry, Ireland, and then continued on to Glasgow. She arrived there Wednesday, May 2, 1900.
Unfortunately there is no account of the Binns’ travels in Europe. If they gave one to the newspapers upon their return home, it was probably printed in the Cadiz Record in July or August 1900, no copies of which survive. The Hopkinsville newspaper reported that they spent time visiting a younger sister, Jennie Binns, and other unidentified relatives in England, but gave no names or locations. However, a rare motion picture of the scenes like those they saw at the Paris Exposition survives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-4R72jTb74.
The next mention of the family in the Hopkinsville newspaper is on April 4, 1908, when it was reported, “Mr. J. M. Binns and family will leave between the fifteenth and the last of April for Canada where they will make their future home.” Meota’s town history Footsteps in Time notes that J. M. Binns “purchased Bertie Mannix’s homestead, the N.E. ¼ 4-47-17. The family were Walter, Ed, Edith, Lizzie, Kate, Ruby and Bert with his wife Annie and son Hubert and Annie’s brother Frank Wallis.”
Frank Addison Wallis was born in Trigg County Sept. 9, 1889, the son of Charles A. and Lula (Lassiter) Wallis. He homesteaded a farm near Glaslyn, and later became a mountain hunting guide at Banff, Alta. He was killed in a railroad accident July 12, 1920, and was buried in Banff.
Annie Wallis Binns, the wife of Bert Binns, was the last surviving member of the family who came from Kentucky. She was still alive at age 93 in 1980. The Binns family lived in Canada until November 1910, when Mr. and Mrs. Binns and three daughters returned to Cadiz. The following June, J. M. Binns advertised his farm near Glenwood Mill for sale and again returned to Canada. He was at Meota in the summer of 1912, when he wrote a letter to the American Miller magazine in which he stated his intent to return to the United States and “try to rent or buy a small mill.” In January 1913, J. M. Binns returned to Trigg County and bought “the P. K. Redd farm on Little River, six miles east of Cadiz” but announced that he would “live in Cadiz, where he can have access to a good school for his children.” The newspaper stated, “He has done well in Canada from a financial standpoint.”
A daughter, Edith Binns, remained in Canada, where she had “a splendid position at the Indian Industrial School at Brandon, Manitoba.” In August 1913, the Cadiz Record (reprinted in Crittenden-Record Press) reported that the Binns had received a “Letter by Aeroplane” from her. The letter was “postmarked aboard the aeroplane with the aviator written on it in red ink” and was carried from the Indian School “possibly as far as Winnipeg” by air.
J. M. Binns apparently lived in Cadiz until after the First World War. On Monday, Nov. 24, 1919, he, his wife and daughter Edith left “for their new home in Meota, Sask., Canada.” They initially planned to make the long trip by automobile, but thought better of it and decided to travel by train.
The newspaper reported that “Edwin, the son, left on Friday before with a [train] carload of household goods, livestock, and the like, and Misses Ruby and Elizabeth who are teaching, will remain here [Cadiz], but their plan now is to follow the family to Canada in the early spring. Mr. Binns owns property in Canada ... and will devote his time to farming and wheat growing. Two sons, Walter and Bert, and a daughter, Miss Kate, are already in Canada.”
Miss Ruby Binns was teacher at Roaring Springs school in 1918-19.
Footsteps in Time recorded that the Binns family at first “lived in a comfortable log house, but later built a beautiful home where family and friends enjoyed their hospitality. The Binns family also had beautiful saddle horses they had brought up from Kentucky.”
J. M. and Annie Binns sold their Canadian farm to Arthur Barry and returned to Cadiz sometime before 1936, when Annie died and was buried in East End Cemetery. Their daughter Edith, who never married, evidently returned to Kentucky with them.
Their sons Bert and Edwin remained in Canada, where they were farmers and grain buyers. Daughters Kate and Ruby were schoolteachers; Ruby in Meota and Kate in North Battleford. J. M. Binns lived with his daughter Edith in Hopkinsville until his death of a paralytic stroke on Monday, Feb. 28, 1944. Edith Binns later returned to Canada and is buried in the Meota Cemetery.
Son Walter and his wife Bessie Emma Binns lived in Trigg County at some time between 1923 and 1944 and, although he was born in Canada, their son Ronald was considered a native son. After Ronald Binns was killed in battle, the Cadiz Record printed his obituary with the headline “Former Trigg Countian Killed in Action.” Private Ronald Binns was mourned by two small hometowns in two countries, and lies buried in a soldier’s grave that is in Rupert Brooke’s words “some corner of a foreign field,” in his case the British military cemetery at Ancona, Italy.
