Jersey Joe – Joe Morris, Westerville Cattleman

            Authors often follow the advice to “write what you know.”  In reality, that has produced both wonderfully profound and laughably insubstantial works of both fiction and nonfiction.  Without a judgment on one side or the other, I want to take a look at one Westerville author, his sole book, and how he wrote what he knew, both in terms of his career and his family life. 

            Joseph “Joe” Morris (1883-1955) was not a farmer, but his hometown was at the center of the livestock industry.  Born in Chicago, he came to Westerville in 1920, and soon plunged into the world of the dairy cow.  Morris began working as a livestock sales manager, selling cattle singly or in herds.  He ranged all over the area, creating sale catalogs and then overseeing the sales.  For example, in 1926, he organized a “Complete Dispersal Sale of the Woodcliff Farm Herd” on East Broad Street, where lived 50 head of cows “and a good young Bull or two.”[i]  Closer to home, Morris managed the John C. Barnes auction, one mile west of Westerville, where buyers could purchase “a few good cows” in 1933.[ii]

Morris developed other contacts in the area’s then-rural world.   In 1922, he served as secretary of the Ohio Jersey Cattle Club, where he went on stage to give a report at “Farmer’s Day” at Ohio State.  In 1935 Morris helped (re)organize the Westerville Independent Agricultural fair, and set a show date of September 26th to 28th.  Even after the war, when he concentrated on real estate, his nickname remained “Jersey Joe.”  For a city-born man, he made rural society part of his life.

The climax of his career in cattle auctions may have been the sale of the Hartman Stock Farm in 1929.  Dr. S. B. Hartman, who made millions selling a quack medicine he named “Peruna,” put a chunk of his profits into building a 3000-acre livestock farm just south of Columbus.  After Hartman’s death in 1918, the farm soldiered on for ten more years.  Joe Morris of Westerville was given the chore of arranging a three-day sale as the farm closed down and sold off over 600 head of dairy cows.[iii]  He auctioned the Hartman livestock the same week as the 1929 stock market crash.

In the sale catalog for the Hartman auction, Joe Morris added a page advertising what may have been his quirkiest contribution to rural life.  The ad was for a book, a novel he had penned and published in 1929.  Titled The Colonel’s Thunder, Morris wrote a tragicomedy about, what else, a livestock auction.   With a dastardly judge foreclosing on a widow’s farm, and a good-natured auctioneer given to telling funny stories, who comes to her rescue, the book reads like many melodramas of the era.  It never received much praise or attention, but it was a labor of love, and the love that assuaged a tragedy in Morris’s life.

            The book was published by the Ohio School for the Deaf in Columbus, which at first sight seemed an odd choice.  In the front of the book was a tipped-in label which explained everything:

This book was printed by the State School for the Deaf where my eldest son is a pupil…..

Without naming him, Joe Morris revealed that one of his sons was hearing impaired, and was a resident of the sprawling school then on Town Street.   And although the rest of the Morris family lived in Westerville, the entire family had to adjust to their member who was deaf.  Joe Morris wrote a book; his daughter Mary learned and later taught lip reading.[iv]

            As far as we know, Joe Morris wrote only the one book.  He was an avid reader, however; the preface to The Colonel’s Thunder mentions authors he liked and from whom he drew inspiration, such as the well-remembered Lew Wallace, Jack London, Zane Grey, and the less-known (today) Peter Kyne and Emerson Hough.  In the same preface, Morris rhapsodizes on the way that reading can take us to distant worlds and memorable places.  Yet his sole literary output was descriptive of the world he knew.  While the world of rural Westerville is gone, we can recapture bits of it by reading what Joe Morris wrote – and knew.

[A copy of The Colonel’s Thunder can be examined at the Westerville Public Library’s Local History room.  Due to its condition and age, the book does not circulate.]

 - Alan Borer

[i] Columbus Evening Dispatch, December 17, 1926.

[ii] Columbus Dispatch, November 19, 1933.

[iii] Columbus Dispatch, October 13, 1929.

[iv] https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/184088921/mary-elizabeth-hearley