Florence Gillingham, pioneer Caddo County resident, celebrated her 100th birthday Tuesday, June 25, with her family in attendance.
Mrs. Gillingham has been a resident of the Carnegie Nursing Home since July 5, 1983. She spent most of her life in the Hinton community. She was the daughter of Isaiah F. and Ida Jane Copley, and was born near Ashland, Ohio, June 25, 1885. She grew up in a typical 19th century environment with wood for cooking and heating, candles and kerosene for lights, water heated on the stove or in the yard, and horses for travel and farming. It was a typical subsistence farming community. Four of her five brothers and three sisters are still living, with the oldest at 94.
Her six children are all living. They include: Leonard of Binger; Alpha Browning of Vega, Texas; Bill of Spokane, Washington; Jessie Abrahams of Meadow, South Dakota; Clair Johnson of Joliet, Illinois; and Irving of St. Louis, Missouri. She has 17 living grandchildren, 28 great-grandchildren and eight great-great-grandchildren.
The family had a sugar orchard--a grove of maple trees they would tap when the sap began to flow in late February or early March. Hollow pegs were inserted into holes bored into the trunks. Buckets were hung on these spouts and the sweet sap would drip into the buckets. The sap was collected morning and evening and poured into cans or a tank on a sled drawn by horses and taken to a "sugar shack," and poured into a tank or evaporator vat heated by wood. It would be boiled down for syrup or to make sugar.
The Copley family came to the newly opened Caddo County just before Christmas, 1901. All summer preparations has been made for the move. Food had been prepared by canning and drying and a number of large "cheeses" were made. Mr. Copley chartered a railroad box car to transport food, feed, four horses, cows, chickens, implements, a buggy and wagon and other items for use in the new country. He and the older boys rode with the equipment, while the rest of the family came by coach. Some of the cheese was sold along the way. Their destination was Bridgeport, where they arrived about December 23.
Everything was unloaded, and a small house was rented. The father had previously visited south of a solitary mound called Lone Mound. He and the boys hauled lumber to the new claim and built a small house with a sleeping loft. The family lived in Bridgeport the rest until the fall of 1902. Lone Mound School was built on their farm.
At that time there were no roads and they drove across the prairie. There was still a caravan route across the north end of Caddo County used by the stage and covered wagons going west. There was a stage stop about three miles northwest of their claim, dating back, perhaps, to the days of the California Gold Rush. The main crossing of the treacherous Canadian River was at Bridgeport, which perhaps pre-dated Anadarko, and some have said that it may have had a population of some 5,000 people at the height of the influx of the opening. It had a first-class post office. The treacherous quicksand devoured many buggies, wagons and horses. Several railroad cars and engines lie buried under the old railroad bridge, and some people lost their lives.
Florence, at 16 or 17, had finished enough schooling to be able to get a teaching certificate, and taught at Possum Hollow, north of Bridgeport in Blaine County, and later at Deer Creek in Northern Caddo County. She had some very interesting experiences and even harrowing, during those early days. Her early wages were $30 per months and she did the janitor work. She taught all eight grades. Teachers were also expected to prepare school programs and help out with monthly "Literary Society" meetings and the local Sunday Schools on Sunday at the Schoolhouse.
As people fenced their land, regular sections lines roads were laid out. Rural schools were built every three miles apart. These were the community center, school, religious services, entertainment and for voting.
Florence met Len Gillingham at one of the Lone Mound social events. He was from Indiana, and had drawn a claim nearby. On February 7, 1908 they were married. He sold his claim, and as soon as her school was out they went to the Estancia Valley in the Territory of New Mexico and filed on a claim of raw prairie land near Stanley. It was beautiful land but water was scarce, and the rains scarcer. He supplemented the income by trapping and carpentering. Two children, Leonard and Alpha, were born on the claim. It was rugged going, and as soon as they had lived there the minimum time, they came back to Hinton. While staying with the Copleys the house burned and they lost most of what they had.
The rest of their active lives were spent in the Hinton area farming and carpentering. Four more children were born: William, Jessie, I.C. and Irving. In 1923 they were forced to moved from their farm on the South Canadian River because of the flood current eating its way toward the house. Neighbors helped them to move about midnight. The river could devour as much as 30 to 40 acres in a single day.
Her mother died in 1930 at Oklahoma City. In June, 1942, Mr. Copley was killed as a result of the vicious tornado that struck on SW 29th Street. In 1949 her husband died after several months of illness. Later she spent several years in Seattle at a Sorority House. She moved back to Hinton where she kept house until 1980. At the age of 85 she underwent eye surgery. Because of Glaucoma she finally lost one eye, and sight diminished in the other almost totally. In 1980 she went to live with her daughter, Mrs. Alpha Browning, at Vega, Texas. In July, 1983 she became a resident at the Carnegie Nursing Home.
Her life has been built around a great faith in and dedication to God. Her goal in life could be summed up in the quotation "Do all the good you can, to all the people you can, in all the ways you can." If there was no Sunday School in the community where she moved, she worked very diligently to get one going, and was faithful worker in it. She spent many hours visiting patients at the Hinton Hospital and was a great supporter of mission work, and Homes for orphans.
Although she never expected to live to reach the century mark, yet her life has spanned the most remarkable changes in living conditions in all of history. In the homes, candles and kerosene light gave way to gas lights, gasoline lamps, and electricity. Wood and coal-burning heating and cooking stoves have been replaced by natural gas, bottled gas, electric energy and microwaves. Washday drudgery with tubs, rub boards, water heated on top of the stove gave way to P & G and Crystal White and soap flakes. Now entire shelves are loaded with cleaning agents.
Food preservation was accomplished by drying and canning for the first half of her life. Now refrigerators and freezing units do the job so easily. Electricity that we take so casually has greatly eased the domestic duties and added to our convenience and leisure.
During her last 45 years she has enjoyed the availability and ease of most all of these electric gadgets for rural people, light, fans, cooking and heating devices, air conditioning, refrigeration, rural water systems, food mixers and grinders, water heaters and modern indoor bathroom facilities, vacuum cleaners, to name just a few. Try to imagine a life without any of these! Well, 100 years ago they weren't!
Going to town, church or just visiting? Well, you could walk, ride a horse, or go in a buggy or farm wagon drawn by horses. Sleighs for snow were also available. Railroads were at the height of their expansion for distance and mass transportation. Thousands moved to new areas by the "Prairie Schooner,: the covered wagon, drawn by horses or oxen. Then came Henry Ford, Barney Olds, and others with the automobiles about the time Florence came to our county. Today, life might stop without them. She has watched our development of air travel, jets, and space travel. People have walked on the moon, and can circle the earth in less than two hours.
Look at communication! The telegraph was about 40 years old. But the telephone was just getting started when she was a girl. Now we have unbelievable magic in our telephone systems. We have an instant communication around the world by radio and television.
Present day agriculture has practically no resemblance to farming in her youth. It was all manual, with horses, slow, laborious, and difficult. Oxen might be the power. Much grain and hay was cut with scythes. The reaper had just made it appearance, which cut the stalks in a swath, leaving them on a platform to be raked off, later to be tied by hand with a wisp of stalks. Then came the binder that cut bundles, tied, and bunched the grain or threshing machine, all by horse power and man power. During her lifetime she has watched combustion engines power the various tillage and threshing and harvesting machines. And farm economy has gone from subsistence farming to a cash flow basis that can be very cruel and nerve wracking. It had became very big business.
By subsistence farming the family lived very largely off the land by their own labor. Large gardens and an orchard were a necessity. The fruit and vegetables were canned or dried, or stored in the cave or root-cellar. Hens were "set" on a nest full of eggs to produce chickens to provide for meat, eggs for food, and a cash income. Hogs were raised on practically every farm and fed home-grown corn for meat and lard. Fat hogs were the fashion. Florence was well-versed in the art of preparing the meat for the meat needs of the family. She knew the hard work and also the joy of accomplishment at "Butchering day." There was a use and a method for almost every part of the animal for future food needs. Meat had to be canned or cured, because there was no refrigeration for preservation. The lard was the product of the extra fat after it was rendered in a large pot in the yard. Old lard or extra would be turned into "lye soap" for wash day or the dish pan.
Mild cows were very important to the family for food and to provide a supplemental income. Originally, milk was placed in a stone crock or other vessel and let stand, in some cool spot if possible. After several hours the cream would rise to the top and it would be skimmed off and placed in a container for use in cooking, for churning by hand into butter, or into a cream can to take to the cream station to sell. Later, a cream separator did the work while the milk was still warm. That cream and egg check helped pay for the "store-bought" items that could not be produced on the farm. All milking was done by hand, a very regular twice-a-day job, under every kind of weather conditions, in the open lot or in a snug shed. Today, most city children consider bread, milk, cream, butter and eggs as a supermarket product. She has lived to see it happen and to enjoy letting "the other fellow" do it. Or, let electricity do it.
She has seen Caddo County change from a wide open sea of waving grass previously populated by buffalo, cattle, deer, and other wild animals, and by nomadic Indian tribes, into one of Oklahoma[s most productive areas. It is one of the State's leading producer of wheat, peanuts, cotton and cattle.
It is probably a safe and accurate statement that those of her age have seen more progress and development during their lives than had occurred during all the previous history of the world. The total fund of knowledge has doubled several times during her lifetime. It boggles the mind!
A toast to you Florence, and to many others your age, who have had a part in bringing it to pass.

Florence Gillingham
Hinton--Services for Florence O. Gillingham, 101, of Hinton will be at 2 p.m. Saturday in the Hinton First Christian Church with the Rev. E. Leonard Gillingham of New Mexico and the rev. Oscar Ramming of Hinton officiating.
Gillingham was born June 25, 1885 in West Salem, Ohio and died Wednesday in the Carnegie Nursing Home.
She moved to Bridgeport in 1901 and homesteaded a farm in the Lone Mound community before moving to Hinton. She was a housewife and a member of the Hinton First Christian Church.
She married Leonard L. Gillingham Feb. 7, 1908 in Anadarko. He died April 1, 1948 in Hinton.
She was also preceded in death by her parents, one sister, three brothers and two grandsons.
Survivors include three sons, Leonard I. Gillingham of Binger, William H. Gillingham of Spokane, Wash., and Irving Gillingham of Arnold, Mo.; three daughters, Alpha M. Browning of Vega, Texas, Jessie Abrahams of Meadow, S.D., and Ida Clare of Joliet, Ill.; two brothers, Irl Copley of Noble and Gladis Copley of Phoenix, Ariz.; two sisters, Ruth Tracy and Naomi Nelson, both of Oklahoma City; 17 grandchildren; 30 great-grandchildren, and nine great-great-grandchildren.
Burial will be in the Hinton Cemetery under direction of the Hinton-Turner Funeral Home.
The family requests memorials be made to the Cookson Hills Children's Home or a favorite charity in lieu of flowers.