St. Clair County Obits

MARGARET DICKINSON

St. Clair County Courier
18 November 2005
Remembering Margaret Dickenson
Dear Editor:
Margaret Cox Dickinson died Sept. 21, 2005, quietly at home in San Diego, having turned 100 years old earlier in the month, close to fully functional almost to the end. Her daughter, Doris Dickinson, wrote me that earlier in the month a 100 people attended a celebration honoring Margaret’s 100th. The turnout says something about the esteem in which Margaret was held in her community. Only a few in Osceola, her birthplace, remember her. Margaret was born here, a daughter of Edwin Cox and Alice “Allie” Hancock Cox in 1905, graduated from Osceola High School in 1923 and from the University of Missouri in 1927. After that, she never lived here again.
I discovered her existence when my wife Ruth and I received the Christmas card Margaret sent to my mother in 1977. Margaret didn’t know that mother had died in July that year. I wrote to Margaret then, and we corresponded intermittently. I told my sister Elizabeth Lewis Caldwell in Escondido about Margaret, and told Margaret about my sister. They got together and became friends. Besides Osceola, one thing they had in common was membership in the San Diego Natural History Museum. In 1990, when Ruth and I made a mid winter visit to my sister and brother-in-law, we all had lunch with Margaret and her daughter at the Museum, and then spent some time at their apartment.
Margaret’s most recent visit to Osceola had been in 1957 or so. At that time she went to see my parents, Bernard and Myrtle Lewis, and her aunt by marriage, Agatha Daniel Cox, who lived around the corner from them.
Margaret’s great grandfather, Pleasant M. Cox, M.D., was the first physician in St. Clair County, having settled near the crossing of the Osage at Crow and Crutchfield’s in 1836. Later, Dr. Cox practiced medicine in partnership with my great grandfather, Dr. Lawrence Lewis, four years his junior, who moved to Osceola in 1839. It was a strange feeling for me, sitting in a living room in San Diego and talking with someone whose great grandparents were closely associated with my great grandparents in Osceola. They were all members of old Virginia families.
I found Margaret Cox Dickinson remarkable. Although she was in her mid 80s when I met her, she still actively volunteering with the Natural History Museum, and swimming laps daily in an indoor pool in her neighborhood. Just as remarkable to me now is that though neither of us knew it at the time, Margaret Cox, a native white St. Clair County, was soon to acquire a “black family”.
It began when I read a letter to the Courier from Marleeta Cox Parks. She was living then in Kansas City, Kan., but was from Appleton City, where her father worked at Zink Motors. She was looking for descendants of Dr. Pleasant M. Cox because she and other family members wanted to thank them. Dr. Cox had seen to it that her grandfather, born to slaves on his farm, was taught to read at a time when slaves were expected to stay illiterate. I knew two of Dr. Cox’s descendants, one in Kansas City, one in San Diego. I wrote to both of them asking if they wanted to hear from a granddaughter of one of their ancestor’s slaves. The Kansas Citian did not write back. Margaret in San Diego wrote a resounding affirmative. I then wrote to Marleeta, giving her Margaret’s contact information. The two of them took it from there. After all the letter writing, Ruth and I got with Marleeta in person and we three became friends.
One outcome of the correspondence between Marleeta and Margaret was that the black Cox descendants on the west coast sought out Margaret. Marleeta’s two sisters lived in the Bay area, but one of them had a daughter in metro San Diego. They began to invite Margaret and Doris to family gatherings, like the celebration when a grandniece of Marleeta’s graduated from Stanford University. Margaret had many friends in San Diego, but apart from her daughter Doris, no relatives. Margaret’s sister Eleanor, was a long way off in Connecticut, and I think her brother, Harris Cox, an oil man in western Canada, had already passed away. Margaret was delighted to find family in the person of descendants of Joseph Cox, who upon being freed from slavery adopted the white Cox family surname. A person never knows what boundaries love will cross.
The San Diego Natural History Museums’s “Volunteer News” earlier this fall featured “Spotlight on Margaret Dickinson”. It sketched her life and detailed several of the achievements of her volunteer service which had begun in 1972 and continued for years. From the biography, “From the Midwest, Margaret and her husband moved to California in 1939. Tragically, he died six years after they came here. Margaret and their daughter Doris stayed on, investing in and managing property.” As a volunteer, among other things, Margaret started a tradition of monthly luncheons, kept the Museum scrapbooks for 14 years, and worked out the logistics of choirs and youth groups singing from the Museum steps as part of the “Christmas on the Prado” events.
A lot of people will miss Margaret Cox Dickinson, and I’m one of them. Besides writing back and forth we also talked on the phone now and then. Margaret cared enough to go Escondido in 1994 to attend the funeral of my sister, who, by the way, as Elizabeth Lewis, taught in Appleton City High School in 1942-43. Wilbur Zink was one of her students. Readers who would like to learn more about Margaret Cox’s “black family” would do well to begin with Marleeta Cox Parks’ biography of her grandfather Joseph Andrew Cox in the St. Clair County Historical Society’s “Families, Vol. 1, 1995”, and continue with other sketches she wrote for the same volume, including the one on her maternal grandmother, Henrietta Freeman.
Marleeta died an untimely death from lymphoma in 1996. It was at her funeral at a United Methodist church in Kansas City, Kan., that I met California members of the black Cox family, teachers, librarians and very successful business people. They and I had both Marleeta Cox Parks and Margaret Cox Dickinson in common. I was honored to accept their invitation to me to sit with them during the service. We stay in touch. From time to time St. Clair County has produced remarkable citizens of the world. I’m grateful to have had my life enriched by some of them, including my friends Margaret and Marleeta and their white and black families.
Lawrence B. Lewis
Osceola