MDLF Fellow Feature: Robert Ordway, MDLF Class IV Fellow
“When I was 18, my dad passed away in 2003 after a five-year battle with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. After his passing, I was left fatherless, but luckily, he instilled a framework of values that allowed me to become the driver of my life and now teach others to do the same when life’s challenges seem unbearable. To honor my dad, Doug Ordway, and raise money for I AM ALS, I rode my bicycle for 825 miles in 10 days from Washington, D.C., to Indiana. My Substack features more of Dad’s timeless wisdom and stories from my book about Dad – Millrat: A Memoir about ALS, Adversity, and the American Dream.”
From Indentured Servant to the U.S. Senate: A 380-Year Journey
Authors Note: Since “Robert’s Ride,” I’ve been focusing on finishing the book about my Dad and his life lessons. The process is slower and taking longer than I expected. Yesterday marked 21 years since Dad has been gone. Some memories are seared into my mind while others are fading into the sunset. This Substack will feature more of Dad’s timeless wisdom and stories from the book as I finish the entire memoir.
Introduction
Writing a memoir centered on my Dad’s five-year battle with ALS and the wisdom he bestowed upon me required a deep dive into family history to understand our culture as a people.
The Ordways landed in western Kentucky almost two decades after the territory was admitted to the union, and they only moved about five miles over the next 150 years.
On a research trip, the Crittenden County historian told me while there were cemeteries filled with Ordways, few of them wrote anything down, including any family history. Hearing stories from just a few generations back, you can bet when the Ordways weren’t t subsistence farming, they were either riding horses or deer hunting, followed by stories around the campfire. There was no need to write anything down because we are storytellers at heart, and many would become ‘tall tales’ over time.
Indentured Servitude
Such a culture is deeply ingrained in the family’s history and goes back more than half a millennium. The oldest records start with the birth of Robert Ordway in Worcestershire, England, around 1460. The Ordway clan spent the next 200 years in rural county where the first and last battle of the English Civil War took place. James Ordway Sr might have escaped the start of the war at the tender age of 12, but as part of the Great Puritan Migration across the ocean to Delaware in 1641, he would restart his life in the new world as an indentured servant, a very common practice at the time.
After working for his independence, James Sr. moved to Newbury, Massachusetts, and is listed on a monument as one of the area’s first settlers. The highlight of his life might have been when he testified and financially supported a friend who was put on trial for witchcraft, according to court records. He also lost a court case involving a dispute over a seating arrangement in the church pews. At that time, to be a freeman in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, one had to be a member of a church. The family remained in that community for a century before relocating north to rural New Hampshire, but part of the crew wouldn’t stay there for long.
Army Sergeant John Ordway, the youngest of ten children, volunteered for the Corps of Discovery, which formed the Lewis and Clark Expedition. He was third in command and the only member of the 45 men to add entries for each of the trek’s 863 days over 8,000 miles. After returning from the trip, Ordway sold his journal to Clark for ten dollars but the public would not see it until its formal publishing over a century later.
The New Frontier
He retired from the military in New Hampshire, married, and became a farmer after moving to New Madrid in the newly purchased Louisiana Territory, present-day Missouri. Sgt. Ordway’s post-military life leaves many questions, including his death date and burial location, which wife was the mother of his two kids (John Jr. and Hannah), and why his brother Stephen inherited his estate instead of the kids.
After writing a letter describing his affection for the land, John recruited three of his six siblings to relocate to the new frontier. His brother, Daniel Sr., landed with his wife while their young kids remained in New Hampshire. This part of the ever-expanding new nation was the frontier, not as they had hoped. The causes are unknown, but Daniel Sr. died within months just up the river in the Cape Girardeau District, where a military post was set up for trade with Native Americans.
Most transportation at the time was by navigable waters, and men often died in work accidents. The Ohio and Mississippi rivers also became infamous for piracy whereas well-known gangs operated, a famous one being at Cave-In-Rock, located at the edge of what is now Crittenden County, Kentucky. New Madrid was also a poor location with lowlands that were regularly washed away and the swampy land earned the community a reputation for diseases such as malaria.
Regardless of how Daniel Sr. died, his widow Elizabeth quickly remarried, and the kids rejoined the family. Shortly thereafter, New Madrid would experience three major earthquakes, causing church bells to ring over 1,000 miles away in Boston, Massachusetts. There were thousands of aftershocks that lasted through the next year. Today, they remain the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history east of the Rocky Mountains. Thousands of families lost everything, including the Ordways. Seeking stability, the family moved 100 miles northeast, landing in the Fredonia Valley of the newly created Caldwell County, Kentucky. They likely picked the location because it was in the Black Patch, a place where dark-leaf tobacco was already commercially grown. From there, Elizabeth started a second family with her husband Kinsay Robison. They relocated to Illinois for the rest of their days after the last Ordway child was married.
The Civil War & Reconstruction
The oldest of the Ordway kids was Daniel Jr. He was in his mid-30s when the Cherokee Nation walked the most northern route of the Trail of Tears just outside Fredonia and camped out for several weeks during the winter of 1838. He was buried in the small Hill Cemetery, located on the famous route recognized by the National Park Service (NPS). Daniel Jr. would live long enough to see the second year of the Civil War, a complicated situation for many Kentuckians. Official census documents revealed none of the Ordways owned slaves, but they made up 26% of county residents in 1860, well above the state average. Caldwell County was raided and occupied by both sides during the War. Confederate forces camped on the grounds of Princeton College, and the Union army used the courthouse for military purposes, leading Confederates to burn buildings there and in neighboring Crittenden County. After the war, Daniel Jr’s son, James Grant, moved north just a stone's throw away to Crittenden, where most of the family would remain as they engaged in farming and running livery stables for another century.
Spar Mining
Crittenden County has always been agricultural, but it’s also part of the Illinois-Kentucky fluorspar district. While mining for lead and silver commenced somewhere in the early 1830s with one owned by President Andrew Jackson, it didn't boom until the turn of the 20th century when the open-hearth process of steelmaking became widespread, whereas fluorspar was used to remove impurities from the iron. The industry, in general, however, became sporadic during the Great Depression when imports first arrived. The district was the largest producer of fluorite during World War II, but foreign goods ramped up afterward in the 1970s until all mining production ceased in 1985.
While the counties in the western part of the state were loyal to President Franklin D Roosevelt, Crittenden was one of very few to vote against him all four times. Without his electrical cooperative grants, there is no telling how the place would have survived, given some parts of the county did not get electricity until the 1950s. Some suspect Crittenden became Republican after reconstruction because the owners of the mines were, and one’s job prospects might be tied to political affiliation. Regardless, the industrial economy would never recover, but with agricultural subsidies minted in FDR’s New Deal, going back to farming seemed to be the most natural play.
Wars of Sorts
James Alexander lived through those hard times but was one of the few in the family to diversify beyond farming. According to his grandson Bruce, James got into blacksmithing, and his shop was second to none. He had ten kids, one of which one was my Great Grandpa Virgil. As a boy, he would witness the Black Patch War, a five-year battle between the Dark Tobacco District Planters' Protective Association (PPA) and the monopolistic American Tobacco Company (ATC), which paid deflated prices for their product. At the time, this area was the leading worldwide supplier of dark-fired tobacco.
Making national news, the war was the longest and most violent conflict between the end of the Civil War and the civil rights struggles of the mid-1960s—vigilante resistance farmers known as the Night Riders fought non-cooperative and businessmen who opposed the dark tobacco pool. Just a few miles away in Princeton, raiders burned down multiple tobacco warehouses with kerosene and dynamite. The war did not come to an end until the Kentucky State Guard was deployed and arrested many who were involved. Three years later, the United States Supreme Court dismantled the tobacco monopolies.
Like his dad, Virgil was also a multitasker beyond farming, wrapping his service in the Navy during World War I with a job at the Haffaw mine, an operation owned by the Aluminum Ore Company. Just a decade earlier, state tax revenues from mining in Crittenden would put the county second to none in Kentucky. While tensions rose between coal miners and operators in the decade-long Harlan County War in Appalachia during the 1930s, labor strife and unionization within the spar mines of western Kentucky didn’t occur until 1943 and received virtually no media attention.
When World War II rolled around, Virgil’s draft card said the mines still employed him, and he continued work as a ‘groundsman’ as noted in the 1950 census. I chuckled at the document because Papaw Hollis is also listed, and it says he was 18-years-old and worked 60 hours a week doing ‘general work’ for the farm. I can testify only Ordway men beat this kind of worth ethic into their sons at a young age.
Great White Migration
By the time Papaw Hollis came of age, the South was falling far behind cities in the industrial North economically. After returning from the Korean War, he and Mamaw (along with young aunt Sue) joined 20 million white southerners who relocated north for opportunity. His six-month younger, second cousin, Bruce, grew up across the street (then a gravel road) and would also migrate north to work at Dupont. He recalls how primitive Crittenden County was during their childhood. They didn’t have a hospital, so he was born at home. Without electricity, they used Aladdin oil lamps to light the inside. Bathrooms were nonexistent, lanterns were essential to finding the outhouse at night or feeding the cows before dawn.
Refrigerators then consisted of a 100-pound ice box and they ate beans for every single meal. To change things up, they added mustard for flavoring. High-tech communication with others included a phone with a party line that was wired into six neighboring houses. When Bruce received hand-me-down shoes from his brother, there were holes in the bottom so he put cardboard in them to provide structure.
On equal footing economically, Papaw never told me about his childhood, and I only remember him as that retired steelworker who was always double-fisting, with a Marlboro in one hand and a Busch Light in the other.
It is that hardscrabble upbringing that made its way into his parenting of my dad and, in turn, down to me. Ordways treat their children like adults as soon as they can walk, handing off chores and other responsibilities that only accumulate over time.
Dad followed in Papaw’s footsteps, landing at U.S. Steel’s Gary Sheet & Tin mill. He was laid off in the 1980s as the company faced a multitude of challenges, including a recession, international competition, and more automation. He was eventually called back but turned down the offer as he’d landed a much safer and cleaner job at Metro Metals, a steel contractor that inspected coils for quality and cut them into sheets for Ford.
Even though Dad’s job was not dangerous like his friends at the large integrated mills, the shift work took a toll on his body, but he never complained. His only directive was that I could do anything I wanted with my life, but working in a steel mill was not an option. It’s a narrative I’d read many times in books with Millrats speaking to their sons. He knew people ‘trapped’ by overtime, or the “golden handcuffs,” where men get addicted to the high pay, adjust their lifestyle accordingly, and then miss out on a meaningful marriage or parenting experience. You can always make more money, but time spent with family is something you can never get back.
I eventually got a taste of the mill just after I turned 18 in 2003 as a teacher helped me land an internship working for her husband, owner of an engineering contractor based in Gary. Although we were offsite, I made several visits to various parts of Indiana Harbor Works, the largest integrated mill in North America. The hot summers and lake effect chill of winters ensured I would never pursue a career in such a place while also respecting the people who chose that path.
My professional journey has had many twists and turns over the past 15 years. My time in public service, both as a civil servant and political appointee, began because a degree in finance was near useless during the Great Recession. My investigation into the housing crisis led to a strong interest in public policy, which took me back to grad school.
A Masters in International Commerce & Policy (ICP) was an about-face to the free-market fundamentalism I was taught in undergrad and helped me understand my own upbringing as a ‘union kid.’ While I never intended to work in Congress, timing is everything. Being able to use both my degrees in service to the public has been a rewarding experience and something one should never take for granted.
I’ll never know James Ordway Sr's motivations or what led him to get on that boat at such a young age, leaving his family behind to pursue the New World. One thing I do know is that resilience and grit are in the Ordway DNA. Giving up is never an option. Risk-taking is expected. Failure is a teaching tool. Showing up on time is free, and hard work does a body good.
Ordways never talk about the secular pursuits of money, professional titles, or status. I was raised that, in the end, none of those things matter anyway. It takes all kinds to make the world go round, and that’s one of the reasons I regularly talk to the Senate lunch ladies, maintenance staff, and capitol police. Some have made it known that I am one of the few staffers who engages them beyond the transactional.
Last week, a capitol maintenance employee refused to get in the elevator after I stepped in because he thought his cart would inconvenience me. In his eyes, I was an *important* Senate staffer with places to be. I demanded that he get in, and when the doors closed, I reminded him, “Nobody is any better than anyone else in this building. Your job is just as important as mine.”
From indentured servants to the U.S. Senate, that is the Ordway way.
Read more here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-150211505
Learn more about Robert and his upcoming book Millrat: A Memoir About ALS, Adversity, and the American Dream at: https://robertordway.com
