John Wesley Robinson & Katherine "Katie" Lewis Robinson

Their Story

John Wesley Robinson was born March 18, 1880, in Perry Township, St. Francois County, Missouri — the son of Absalom Parker Robinson and Josephine Parks. He came to Des Arc, Iron County, as a young man, and on November 30, 1902, he married Katherine Lewis — called Katie by everyone who knew her — the daughter of William John "Uncle Billy" Lewis of Annapolis. J.W. was twenty-two; Katie was twenty-four. Together they had seven children, a son and six daughters, and built a life in the small communities of Iron and Crawford Counties.

In Des Arc, J.W. ran a blacksmith shop that served the whole community. He made horseshoes, wagon wheels, and entire wagons over the forge. There was no funeral home in Des Arc, so he also built the caskets — each one his own design, finished with satin and lace. His daughter Opal, writing about him decades later, described him as a man the whole community counted on: not a specialist, but someone who could make whatever people needed because there was nobody else to do it. At some point he added a grocery store, running it on the barter economy of rural Missouri — eggs and chickens traded for dry goods, cash being scarce. In 1928 he sold the blacksmith shop but kept the store going.

By the 1930s the family had moved to Steelville in Crawford County, where J.W. worked as a truck driver and then started a sawmill with his son Walter — J.W. Robinson and Son. On October 27, 1941, he wrote to his half-brother William from Steelville. He had just come home from nine days in a St. Louis hospital. Two months later, on December 27, 1941 — twenty days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor — he was dead. He was sixty-one years old.

Katie survived him by five years. She eventually moved to Pine Lawn, in St. Louis County, to live with her daughter Opal and son-in-law Vernon Rayfield, and died there on May 18, 1946. The Des Arc Missionary Baptist Church had been the center of her community life throughout, and her obituary named it as such. Her mother's Bible — a black leather volume stamped with Katie's name, filled with handwritten records of births, deaths, and marriages — was preserved by Opal and passed down through the family. It is still in the family today.

Name Variations in Records

Business name:

Katie's name: Katherine, Katie, Kate. Obituary uses "Katherine." Opal always wrote "Katie." Census records show "Katie" and "Kate."
Surname also appears as: Robinson, Robison.

John Wesley Robinson — Vital Facts

Katherine "Katie" Lewis Robinson — Vital Facts

Children

All Source Records

Connections to Other Profiles

• Father: Absalom Parker Robinson (~1856–1936) — sewing machine salesman of Des Arc
• Father-in-law: William John "Uncle Billy" Lewis — Katie's father, of Annapolis, Iron County
• Daughter: Opal Myrtle Robinson Rayfield (1911–2002) — married Vernon Rayfield
• Featured in: The Rayfields — A Family History, Chapter 7