By his own description, Grant Ewing's formal education was limited to about the third grade. Being the oldest living boy in William Ewing's family, Grant was expected to be the main help on the homestead as soon as he was big enough to be useful. That meant that "going to school" would be limited to a very few primary years. But that didn't mean that his level of learning stopped there.
Grant's interest in everything in his world encouraged him to read almost anything he could get, which at first was the local newspaper that his father received by subscription. That eventually led him to become an anonymous writer of "personal items" from his rural neighborhood which appeared in the Irving, Kansas, newspaper when Grant was just a teenager. As an adult, he continued to contribute written items to a number of local newspapers, sometimes under a column heading of, "Notes by the Wayside," with a by-line giving him credit for the writing. Some of those appeared in newspapers as early as 1902, but very infrequently. In his later years, Grant started contributing his "Notes by the Wayside" columns to the Marshall County News on a more regular schedule... sometimes weekly, other times every two or three weeks, or whenever he could conveniently get to the newspaper office in Marysville.
Grant's columns that appeared in the Marshall County News from 1930 to 1933 have been transcribed and are available for your perusal through the links below. Most of the columns don't read like a "story" or a novel, but rather like a "personal items" column or daily diary entries, giving a broad insight into Grant's activities, events and conditions of the time, or tidbits of information about people and families that Grant knew or encountered in his daily routine. Many of the columns contain clues that could lead to genealogy discoveries for anyone with family ties to Marshall county and surrounding areas. To that end, each volume below has been indexed with interactive links to the names mentioned in each column, as well as to some of the places and events that are discussed. Be sure to check the alphabetized index at the end of each volume.