Lakewood Lore

Gardner Oakes supplied music, color to community

Gardner Oakes, neighborhood fiddler and sometime farmer, supplied much of the music and local color in Lakewood during the 1840s. His violin filled the need for merrymaking and relaxation to ease the rigors of pioneer life.

Oakes’ tall slim figure, lilting stride, merry black eyes and ever-present smile, together with his fiddle and his humor, were familiar to all.

He was reported to have been no Paderewski in his manipulation of the divine instrument, but the best fiddler around these parts. He was a natural musician who never took any lessons and played by ear.

No matter how bad the weather, he would sally forth with his fiddle to all the dances and social gatherings in the area. He never missed circuses, either. He sometimes would sell a load of wood chips in Cleveland to get enough money to see one.

Typical of his humor was his direction for planting: “Put a pound of turnip seed in the pocket of your jeans. Put a pin hole in the pocket. Run like old Scratch across a 10-acre field.”

He is believed to have come from Connecticut but not much is known of his family life. A marriage to an Abbie Fowler produced three offspring -- Ellen, Eugene and Dan.

His log cabin was where the Edwards Block now stands at 11912 Detroit. There is no record of when the home was built; however, it was tumbling down when Dr. Richard Fry brought the Oakes property in 1863.

When excavation for the three-story brick Edwards Block was made in 1906, evidence of the Oakes cabin was found in the discovery of a handful of silver coins dating back to 1840.

Although Oakes owned acres of land in the vicinity of his cabin, he spent little time in farming them. Like the character Fiddler Hones in poet Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology,” Oakes was in such demand for dances and outings that he could never finish his plowing. Small wonder then that some of the early settlers referred to him as a ne’er-do-well.

One day Oakes rigged a prairie schooner and moved his family to Irving, Wisconsin. After that, Lakewood lost track of him.

Though there are no reports of Oakes’ fate, it is our guess that, like his Spoon River counterpart, he ended up “with a broken fiddle, a broken laugh, and a thousand memories, and not a single regret."

This article appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post June 22, 1989. Reprinted with permission.

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