Condley–Rhea: a blacksmith's long road to Cross Timbers
Wilson's county history skipped the Condleys. The Index did not. When Elisha Thomas Condley died in 1897, the paper gave him the kind of send-off neighbors give a man everyone called Grandpa—particular, proud, and long enough to walk you from Virginia to Turkey Creek.
Elisha was born in Halifax County, Virginia, on November 21, 1814. In 1830 the family moved to Giles County, Tennessee; in 1837 he married Elizabeth Beck. The next year he rode west to size up Missouri—Springfield then little more than a store, a blacksmith shop, and a handful of cabins—and liked what he saw well enough to bring Elizabeth out in the spring of 1839.
They settled on a ridge about five miles northeast of Quincy (then still Benton County), farmed and worked iron, and in 1847 moved to a place on Turkey Creek that folks still knew by the Condley name. Cross Timbers came later, in 1873, when he tried merchandising for the first time—Heath & Condley—after a lifetime of hammer and plow. He sold goods almost to the end; only days before he died he passed the stock to Heath & Spickert.
Church and lodge claimed him too: Christian Church from 1853, elder at Cross Timbers at his death; a past master among the Masons. He never held high office, the obituary notes, but he stood for law and neighborliness in country that had been nearly empty when he arrived. Elizabeth died February 10, 1897; Elisha followed after about three months' illness, aged eighty-three.
Five children: Beverly, gone at four; Calvin M., dead of smallpox in St. Louis in 1864 while serving in the United States Army at twenty-one; and three daughters who survived him—Ann E. Williams, Mary Ihrig, and Martha Rhea.
Sources: Obituary of E. T. Condley, The Index (Hermitage), Nov. 11, 1897 (Vol. XIII, No. 18, p. 2); Condley–Rhea family materials preserved by the Society. Portrait from the county historical photo collection.