Tobe Kinsey is my great-great grandfather. Well, his name is actually Madison Monroe Kinsey, but he went by Tobe. He was my grandmother's grandfather and i can tell she adored him by the way she talked about him. She said he was a jokester and jovial man. He spent his years supervising teams of men clear cutting timber. He did this throughout Dunklin and Stoddard Counties in the Missouri Bootheel. He would buy the land, cut the timber and the resell the land for farming. After years of this kind of work. he decided to move to Campbell Missouri to retire. Tobe was in a position where he could enjoy the life and the amenities of the small community. He checked on His farm outside town and other timber removal jobs as needed. He frequently made trips to the farm with friends to hunt game in the adjacent forests and to fish in the St. Francis River. He actively participated in the local Democratic Party and ardently supported party candidates. He was a proud democrat and he let people around him know it. He had a large circle of friends and he spent his days fishing and enjoying family. He was also pretty progressive for a retiree. He bought his first car, a 1915 Maxwell. In 1915, Tobe bought one of the first automobiles in the area. In fact, he was featured in a local news piece in the Campbell Citizen:
“Tobe Kinsey smashed a wheel off his new Maxwell the other day trying to turn a sharp corner at high speed. Mr. Kinsey is one of our numerous north end progressive farmers who think an automobile is far above the horse and buggy, as the riding cultivators is above the old-time bull-tongue plow, and since he has lived in the “sticks” all his life, he is now entitled to the best on the market, to convey him over the hills to town, so he bought a Maxwell.”
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Kinsey FamilyEd Adams Archives
June 2014
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