RITES SET FRIDAY FOR GRANDIN WOMAN, 108, STATE'S OLDEST PERSON

GRANDIN, Mo. -- Nellie Joplin of Grandin, who the late Gov. Mel Carnahan thought was Missouri's oldest living resident, was 108 when she died Monday in the Ripley County Memorial Hospital at Doniphan, Mo.

"She was a true pioneer woman," said Doris Ann Davis, wife of Joplin's grandson, Poplar Bluff physician D.L. Davis. Joplin raised him along with her own seven children.

A funeral for Joplin will be held at 1 p.m. Friday at McSpadden Funeral Home Chapel in Ellsinore, Mo. Burial will follow in Joplin Cemetery in Grandin.

Joplin, who lived her life in Carter County, except for two years in Butler County, was considered a good neighbor by those around her.

Definite ideas

She had definite ideas about a woman's place in the world.

"She definitely wasn't a women's libber," said Dennis McSpadden of Van Buren, Mo.

Her world was her home where she did her own cooking until the few months before her death. Her limited vision and declining health dictated that she finally had to live in a nursing home.

Family members lived nearby, but for more than a century she was as self-sufficient as she had ever been, raising a garden, canning, growing flowers.

"She was a marvelous cook and homemaker," Davis said. "She always seemed to have a quilt going. I'm told that in years past she always had a flock of geese and she would pull out the feathers and fill pillows and things. I've got one of them and they are something else."

Lending helping hand

She said, "If anyone needed a place to stay they would always come to Grandma. She'd take care of you until you got back on your feet. "

Davis recalled a family in Grandin down on their luck with some "raggedy kids." A little girl in particular caught Joplin's heart.

On her treadle sewing machine, Joplin made the little girl a dress, took the child in, cleaned her up and gave her the new dress.

"She was always doing things like that," Davis said. "That's the type of person she was. She would send me churned butter, back when she was able to do her own milking. I would get a package every now and then of fresh butter she had churned, and oh boy! That was her way of remembering you, making you something, giving you butter, a dozen fresh eggs."

Davis remembered one time "when we were having a particularly difficult time, running a little behind getting things done."

She said, "She came down and did my laundry. She would say I have come to help.'"

Married at 15

Nellie Joplin was a petite attractive young girl with dark curly hair when she married at age 15. She had seven children and took in Davis' husband when his mother was divorced and went to work to support him.

She was the "one who wiped his nose and spanked his hiney," Davis said.

She raised her family on a farm and moved into town in the 1940s, but she kept chickens, hogs and cattle.

In those early days, she kept her butter, milk and eggs in a cistern to keep them fresh. She dried peaches and apples on the roof of her home, taking care not to let the dew get on them.

Washday was all day long and involved boiling clothes in lye soap in kettles in the yard, then scrubbing them on a washboard. The next day was spent ironing the clean clothes with a flat iron.

"I've heard my husband talk about his grandmother working all day, washing all day long," Davis said. "Life was not easy, but she never remembered his grandmother complaining. It was accepted as part of life."

Joplin could make the best out of hardship.

Davis said Joplin "would chink the holes in the walls, because the houses weren't constructed very well," then she'd "plug the holes with whatever she had."

Joplin make her own glue and glued burlap bags to the walls. Or she'd use sand and cement or mud.

"That's what she had to do," Davis said. "Then she'd get some wallpaper and you would never know what was underneath."

Queen of Grandin

Davis recalls that Joplin and Carnahan, who was a native of and is buried in Carter County, were related in some way. Carnahan had once said that as of last February, Joplin was Missouri's oldest living resident. He was researching that when he was killed in a plane crash last fall while campaigning for the U.S. Senate.

Joplin had been recognized for her long and interesting life by presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton and received recognition from senators and congressmen and by the state legislature.

She was named "Queen of Grandin," has a street in Grandin named after her and her birthday, June 26, is Nellie Joplin Day in Grandin.