A memorable trip to visit my grandparents, Irvin and Aetna Clough in
     Elk County, was my great grand-father David Clough's 80th birthday. He
     raised and trained trotting horses, and was breaking a colt to the sulky
     that day. He lived near and in Sharon from 1879 for many years. He and my
     grandmother built the native rock barn three miles south of Sharon that
     was a landmark for many years.
          My mother, Ethel Clough, was born near there. When she was a teenager,
     she was a telephone operator for the first telephone exchange in Sharon. 
     When my older sister, LaVon, and I started to school, we attended the 
     same country school our mother attended, College Center, Dist. 49.
          Her cousin, Roy McKeever, took us to school, driving the folks' horse
     and buggy. The following year the district was consolidated with the Sharon
     school. We rode a school bus, which was homemade on a truck bed by Woody
     Duncan, our faithful driver for many years.
          My father, J.E. (Earl) Dewitt, oldest child of Matthew Pleasant and
     Alice DeWitt was born in 1888, on their farm southwest of Sharon. After
     finishing 8th grade at Central View School, he worked in the Sharon bank
     for Herbert Hobble, before attending Wichita Business College in 1906. Later
     he worked in the Coats bank for Jim Hellings. In 1909 he married Ethel Clough.
     They moved on a farm two miles from his birthplace, where he raised Hereford
     cattle and hogs in addition to farming. Five of their children were born there.
          Some of our land was several miles from the homesteat. Wheat was cut with 
     a header pulled by horses. The summer I was four we took our collie dog and
     blind calf and spent a couple of weeks near the harvest fields in a cook 
     shack. The hired girl, LaVon, and I slept on army cots in or under it. The
     folks had bed springs and mattress nearby, the collie dog sleeping at mama's
     head. The hired men slept in header barges or on rock ledges near the corral 
     that held horses and the windmill and water tank where they bathed. In the 
     afternoons we went back home by springwaton to tend the garden and chickens,
     do laundry, and bring back food from the cellar and garden.
          A very vivid memory is the day "My Daddy" rode horseback to a schoolhouse
     in Cedar township to register for the draft for World War I. That made Armistice
     Day a special joy for me, a child of six years.
          In the spring of 1923 we moved to Sharon. It was my 11th birthday, so I
     got to ride in the wagon with Uncle Tag, the grindstone, and other tools. 
     Later my father was manager of the Farmer's Elevator, where there was a radio
     in the office. That's where I started listening to Bruce Behymer give the
     markets.
          My older sister, LaVon, taught school at College Hill, her first year
     out of high school. She lived with Mrs. Green Harris and son, Wallace, who 
     later married my sister, Donna. The next year, LaVon taught at Central View
     and married Harry Rucker. She died in 1960.
          The younger children were Doris, Pleasant Earl, and a younger sister,
     Peggy Jean, who was born after we moved to Sharon, and died before she was
     two years old.
          Our family left Barber County in 1929. I'm the only member now living
     in the county, having returned to Medicine Lodge when I married Wendell Adams
     in 1940. My father died in 1963. My mother resides at Attica in the Hospital
     Annex.
               
     Source:Chosen Land - Barber County, Kansas,  pg. 80  
     Submitted by: Aetna Adams