A Wedding

On June 1, 1899, a wedding took place in Camptonville; one of the largest and most popular weddings ever to be held in this small mountain community. Earl LeRoy Cleveland, age 19, and Lottie Adeline Meek, age 19, were united in marriage by the Rev. Sims of the Congregational Church of Nevada City.

The bride was the daughter of William Bull Meek, Camptonville merchant, pack train operator, stage driver, and Justice of the Peace, and the wedding was held at the Meek home on Main Street.

The weather was wet, and so were some of the participants at the wedding; champagne and other liquid refreshment was on hand following the ceremony and many imbibed (as people usually do when it's free!).

The groom stated later on that everyone was intoxicated except himself, the bride and the minister, and that he thought the latter would like have had a little snort, but that it wouldn't be appropriate.

I doubt this, however, because my grandmother Meek was not one to imbibe in the spiritous liquid, and I think there were a few more present in the same category.

A good storm had taken place the two days prior, and the roads and streets, which were not oiled in those days, were quite muddy, and some of the participants became involved in the mud. Jim Johnson and Bill Jenkins had on their best bibb and tuckers and following the wedding as they progressed up the muddy street, their pants started to slip down. Instead of pulling their pants up to keep them out of the mud they rolled the cuffs at the bottom!

The groom was the son of Mrs. Martha C. Langdon of Nevada City. His father, Thomas Cleveland, had been killed when a wagon load of black powder exploded at the powder house in North San Juan. He had a younger brother, Clarence, and his mother took in washing to support the two boys, one aged 3 and the other 4, for 14 years until she remarried John S. Langdon.

There was no such thing as welfare departments in those days, and many times the family hardly had enough food to eat, and the boys had to go barefooted because of the inability to buy sufficient clothing or shoes. As a boy, after school, he carried messages for the Western Union Telegraph Company, and while engaged in this, the woman telegraph operator taught him the Morse Code and how to dispatch and receive messages.

After he quit school, he went to work for the Nevada County Narrow Gauge Railroad and became an expert telegrapher, taking messages directly from the wire onto the typewriter.

The bride was also an expert telegrapher and held the position of dispatcher at the old Mountain House Hotel, twelve miles east of Camptonville on the old Downieville Road, and the two first made their acquaintance over the wire, via the Morse Code, and thus the romance started which culminated in their wedding.

On August 4, 1900, at five o'clock in the morning, to this couple was born a ten-pound boy, and that's where I came into the picture. Dr. F. Lord, the town doctor and my mother's sister's husband, officiated and told me later that he found me under a cabbage leaf. But even in my extreme youth I didn't believe him.