Weatherford, Texas Black School Photos

The Will Jacobs Story

Will Jacobs’ Fiery Piano Life

Stokes Danger into a Musical Inferno

By Jeff Clark

        Something’s gone horribly wrong.

Piano player Will Jacobs fought a pitched 40-year battle with his demons inside ragged honky tonks stretching from Austin to Oklahoma City. Today he plays rest homes, when they’ll let him.

For free.

Will’s just been approached by a national agent wanting to set up a tour, he says. He won’t open for another artist, he tells me. We sit inside his two room rented house.

Will can play nine hours and never repeat a song. But nobody’s calling. “That’s got to get inside you a little bit,” he tells me. “Someone sees you with a beer bottle or you cuss out an audience and it haunts you the rest of your life.” Today he wanders the streets of Weatherford, when he’s not laying brick or stone.

            I visited Will’s place a week ago. We talk a while, then he picks up his dead brother’s blue guitar to play. The musician’s 59-year-old stare is captivating.

He doesn’t look away.

            When Will strums the acoustic guitar, he digs deeply into lyrics from his life’s front row anguish. Will considers himself a Throw Away. His words. He tends to bond with other Throw Aways of society, he confides. “We can be happy, you know.”

This man’s been married three times, but confesses another lover always came first. “When I saw that big black man unload that piano when I was a kid, when I saw those black and white piano keys rolling down the ramp into my house, I knew the piano would be the love of my life.”

Will’s lifelong musical tryst has brought him insanity, he volunteers. “I’ve lost my mind over music, then music’s brought me back. Music has been more a part of my life than the women were.” The Rules Don’t Apply Here nightclub life seemed ready made for this man to exercise some demons.

            You can see Will Jacobs walking two or three miles a day around Weatherford, if you know where to look. He’s survived 10 years without a car. “The only thing I like as much as playing the piano is walking. Sometimes it’s meeting someone. It gets tough about the time the bills come due, but I’m living life the way I want to.”

            He’s not about Things, he wants me to know.

The man leans his body into and out of our conversation, much as he does at the keyboard. He’s good in his own skin, the heck with what anybody else thinks.

Jacobs has seen everything while looking across the top of nightclub pianos – old couples dancing, still in love, wicked bar room fights, anguished tears, rowdy laughter hiding sticky stinging beer-stroked pain.

Playing to a honky-tonk crowd can be like snake charming. The greats did this, he tells me – Hank Williams, Sr., as one example. “He’d look into the eyes of his audience – his music could make that audience do whatever he wanted.”

“When I was a kid, people thought the honky tonk music I played was of the devil.” Jacobs disagrees. “God isn’t so strict he has to only hear Jesus songs. When you hear Hank Williams sing “I’m so lonesome I could cry” that’s a human experience –that’s holy.”

Jacobs wakes up each morning and asks, “Okay Lord, what are we going to do today?” His walks are spiritual releases of stress, a way to exercise. “I meet 100 people a year walking. What if one of them becomes a friend?”

            Personal struggles drive his art. “I’m on the other side of hurt now. I’ve struggled with alcohol all my life. But, now I’m trying to keep my mistakes down to a minimum. We have to be real with ourselves. Who we are.”

Bill Jacobs taught his son Will the Missouri Waltz and the Boogie Woogie when he was six, growing up in Weatherford. Bill played the accordion, the guitar, the piano and was song leader at York Avenue Baptist for a time.

Three other men impacted Jacobs’ musical education. “Floyd Cramer taught me technique and simplicity. Ray Charles, that I can arrange my own songs. And Jerry Lee Lewis showed me when I was 11 – you can play the same song 100 different ways.”

You can play the same song 100 different ways.

Jacobs has played Toulouse in Austin, the Diamond Horseshoe in Puerto Rico, The Stumble Inn in Oakhill, the Cedar Chopper’s Lounge in Cedar Park, Leon’s Country Store in Rockne, Weatherford’s Peach Festival and Christmas on the Square, Kickers Palace in Poteet and Austin’s fabled Broken Spoke. He’s performed with David Wills (“I Need a Drink, Here’s $20”), Johnny Lyons at the Flores Country Store outside San Antonio and Kenny Dale, among others.

“I played about 70 nightclubs. Some of them I played once and a lot of them I played many times.”

Will hasn’t had a paying gig since August 2010.

Truly creative people can be misunderstood, he tells me. We talk of John Lennon and Edgar Allen Poe. “People that run the world are clever, but not wise. They’ve got their own little boxes they never get out of.” I can tell looking around Jacobs’ living room he can’t even see his box in the rearview mirror anymore. Will’s house is a working museum filled with achingly honest vinyl records and Polaroids from his attempts up music’s high summit.

A compliment, I assure you.

“A lot of times when you’re not born rich, you have low self-esteem, a chip on your shoulder. You normally don’t ever get over it. There’s such thing as having self respect, however. It’s not ego. You look people in the eye. How are you going to correct them, if you don’t assert yourself? The problem in America is that everyone’s hiding behind this politically-correct stuff. It’s like fake wrestling. The more I keep my ego in check, the better I do.”

His eyes never leave mine, main lining his uncensored thoughts into words the rest of us are then able to hear.

Musicians are struggling these days, he confesses. “There’s a quarter of the world who want to hear blues, gospel and what I do. But they’re not going out anymore. They’re jaded. The rest of the world likes garbage.”

Jacobs has starred in bar fights, been spit on, thrown out, and had a front row seat to 357 Magnum gunfire. The stink of spilled Lone Star and the sour perfume of too-many-dance partners slink along the underbelly of his venues.

Will sometimes lays brick or stone to pay the bills. “My daddy made about $125 a week, so I guess we were poor. He was a genius in electronics.”

The day I visited, we ran up the street to Weatherford’s Keeneland Rest Home. They have a piano. They have an audience. Jacobs might’ve said hello as we burst through the front door, but if he did, I missed it. I do remember that he stepped around wheelchairs and gossip and strode to the piano standing against the wall like he was cornering a long lost lover. He began playing its keys fast and hard, throwing each song to the ground.

No questions.

Just sing.

“The reason I play at rest homes is important,” he tells me. “They’re dying in there. They deserve better.”

Women in wheelchairs rolled up as Jacobs pushed through the first 1950s blue-suede hit. A former stuntman from Gunsmoke walked up, introduced himself. One of Jacobs’ walking-around-Weatherford discoveries.

People start swaying, patting their hands in time, his loud playing fingers dancing up and down the keyboard. Will plays songs his audience remembers, doesn’t start out with gospel music, not caring if they think he knows God or not.

He does.

Jacobs makes intense eye contact with his audience – a hint of danger or purity, I can’t decide which.

Is too much purity the root of danger itself?

His finger-fueled riffs make it hard to look away. I was impressed with his talent, as his textured voice hot-boxed lyrics out into the audience. The Artist Will Jacobs came alive to the touch of his lifelong love, the piano, singing for him beneath his electrified fingertips.

His lover likes it rough.

“One night I sang this song I wrote. I was sitting at the Cameron Road Inn in Austin. Doing songs, having a good time. There’s this guy trying to pick a fight with me because his wife’s over there swinging her hips for my benefit, so I play this song. I was drinking beer and Weller’s Whiskey. I was cocky. The audience froze because the song was so honest:

I looked for an answer, my whole life through,

just thinking that someone would appear in the room,

after 89 questions and 3,000 lies,

I woke up one morning and I opened my eyes.

They’re too scared to live, and they’re too scared to die.

And they shake their fists up, and they cuss at the sky.

They’ll drive to their churches, and they’ll drive to their bars,

because they’re running from the truth, in prestigious cars.

Don’t trust books, because they’re usually lies.

Just learn what you see, with your storybook eyes…

I want to like Will Jacobs. I respect his danger, admire his courage. But no one’s calling him for gigs. Spring turns into summer. His musical life could still go either way.

He knows it.

Will seems at peace with that uncertainty, for reasons I can’t quite understand. “I know there’s a God. If you help people out, that keeps it under control.”

Will’s house sits on the road I take to visit my parents. It’s Saturday night. His lights are on. I have to believe he’s home. I have to believe, for a long list of logical reasons, tonight’s honky-tonks are missing out. Or maybe just taking a break, awaiting Will’s second act.

“I need to connect to an audience pretty soon,” he tells me.

Is too much purity the root of danger itself?

Is History history?

Is Parker County History History?

By Jeff Clark

            There was a time when Parker County history was chased after like a long lost love. Log cabins could hide along forgotten creeks, knowing someone like Mary Kemp would be along shortly, would return their story back into the pages of this county’s recorded history. Doing local history has become like television – we can give it our time, but first it must entertain us.

The story of Parker County was largely written by “hunter/gatherer” historians like Evlyn Broumley, Fred Cotton, Mary Kemp, Dodie Sullivan, Leon Tanner and others. These folks were not formally trained. Most were born here, all were consumed with the desire that their hometown’s legacy be remembered, preserved and celebrated.

These folks slaved away in courthouse basements or chopping brush away from lost cemetery headstones by themselves or in small unorganized groups for decades. No grants, no employees, no hoopla.

Today a robust menu of local groups is still doing important work, each holding a different part of the elephant: the Parker County Historical Commission, the Weatherford Historic Preservation Commission, the East Parker County Genealogy and Historical Society, the Parker County Texas History and Heritage Inc., Parker County Heritage Society, the Parker County Archeological Society and more. There are also individuals like Debbie Liles (the Parker County Oral History Project) making significant contributions.

Still, I sense something’s changing.

The Parker County Genealogical Society disbanded after 41 years. Its 37 charter members have “gotten old or passed away,” charter member Evlyn Broumley told me. The internet has also made the in depth research these trailblazers pursued a rarity, even among scholars.

There’s still a lot of history out there to discover and document, almost all I spoke with agreed. Lowell “Dodie” Sullivan, president of the Parker County Abandoned Cemetery Association tells me three “lost” cemeteries were restored just since August.

Watching bulldozers and dump trucks pave What’s Next across Weatherford’s landscape, I begin to wonder if anyone cares.

            Broumley used to get five to 10 research queries a week. “You don’t get them anymore.” She fills her weekly column with interesting snippets from old Weatherford newspapers. This should’ve been a clue.

            People have become readers, not writers.

The internet is one factor. “You still have to get offline sources,” she told me. “You can’t believe everything online, in a book or what Aunt Mary said until you can prove it.”

People settle for “good enough” research in this bulleted age of blogs and sound bites. The “why things happen” questions sometimes fall by the wayside.

Broumley said she still gets questions from people wanting to know about the area, “but you can’t really separate people out of history – they make it.” She’s come home from “hands on” research and preservation scratched by briars, bitten by a dog and having walked up on a rattlesnake in the woods. “Did you know you can jump flatfooted straight up from the ground?”

I asked Broumley who her replacement would be. She mentioned a granddaughter in college who will be 65 four decades from now. I hear bulldozers rumbling in the background of my concern.

Fearfully, I begin searching for the next Evlyn Broumley, the next Mary Kemp.

            I started looking inside the 18-member Parker County Abandoned Cemetery Association (ACA). They maintain 64 cemeteries within 30 square miles.

Word of mouth delivers most volunteers. “You get to a certain point in your life,” President Dodie Sullivan says, “when volunteering fits your life. You’ve retired, the kids are grown. A lot of people will volunteer if you ask them at the right time.” The ACA has also received help from the county commissioners, volunteers and landowners in the past.

Lost graveyards are often discovered by new landowners clearing brush. A man called them about the abandoned Clower Cemetery near Whitt. The ACA got to work. Census records were searched to match each headstone’s identity. Brush and high grass was trimmed back. Dodie feels like he knows the people in each cemetery after he does all that research. It connects him to the cemetery’s future care.

Few ACA members are younger than 65. The Parker County Committee on Aging reports there are over 13,000 senior citizens in this area.

Mary Kemp worries about the future of “doing history” in Parker County. “Most people don’t remember the Great Depression, don’t remember WWII,” she said. I asked her where her passion for history came from.

            Kemp’s mother took her to visit their family’s Parker County cemeteries when she was a little girl. “She told me their stories, who those people were.” Families would meet at Spring Creek Cemetery to take care of their own plots. “If another family’s plot was uncared for, everyone just pitched in.”

            Children worked beside parents, heard their stories, built community with the folks that came before.

Mary has written five books, edited or co-edited the two Parker County History books, had a hand in 17 state historical markers and helped restore numerous historic buildings and cemeteries. “I couldn’t have done what I did without family, friends and volunteers helping all along the way.”

Those who know Mary, however, know she’s a self-appointed committee of one – her own parade or the leader of small parades when she finds something that needs saved. Still, Mary’s fabled sunbonnet, boots, gloves, and grubbing hoe haven’t left her closet in a while.

Mary’s “Shaw-Kemp Open House” draws 4,000 visitors each spring to see bluebonnets blooming among an 1856 log cabin, a 1918 homestead and many other historic structures she’s preserved south of town.

Mary went hard core into her historical pursuits when she was in her mid-50s. “Who’s the next Mary Kemp?” I ask.

Mary smiles. “I love all my grandkids, all my great grandkids equally.” They call her “Great Ma.” Mary’s 11-year-old great granddaughter Taylor Todd Kemp has come to Mary when working on school projects, has her same love of dolls (Mary’s collection numbered in the thousands), and is asking the right questions a young Mary Kemp might ask.

Taylor was born while her family lived in the historic Causbie House, a big two story brick home built in 1916 on far South Main. Maybe that had an impact.

Taylor has come to Mary and told her “I’d like to go to the 1918 house on the Shaw-Kemp place and spend some time. Someday I’ll live in that house.”

If Taylor cranks up her research in her mid-fifties like Great Ma did, the Mary Kemp machine will lay silent for 40 years.

That’s a long time for this county to wait.

The Doss Heritage and Culture Center opened four and a half years ago, the 25 year culmination of work by a small group of local leaders called Civic Development. Many don’t realize the beautiful stone building at East Park and Texas Drive houses a museum. The Doss often adds the new tagline “A Texas History Museum” to their promotions.

Exhibit Coordinator C.B. Williams shares that a recent seminar for museums she attended said that the typical format museums use to showcase their history archives is changing. Museums must compete with places like Six Flags for the attention of potential visitors.

Looking to the east, I notice that the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History changed their approach. Quiet “nailed to the wall” static displays have been replaced by lively “hands on” exhibits, videos, and interactive games.

The Doss has learned that their opportunities for educating youth will grow if current traditional exhibits are enhanced by interactive displays, video games, and turning the Mary Martin Collection into a more dynamic “Broadway Experience”, as one example.

The Doss already boasts interaction with area youth through school programs, Doss Wranglers weekend classes and “Gone to Texas” and “American Indian” summer camps for kids.

“We have so much to compete with for kids’ entertainment,” Williams says. “We’re going to be the Kimbell someday, only about history.” The Doss would be a destination.

The Doss sits on seven acres leased from Weatherford College for 99 years. It hopes to fill these seven acres with six log cabins now in private hands. The Doss just started tapping into Weatherford College as a resource, using students to design video games for future exhibits or using archeology students to research Parker County’s prehistoric history.

The Weatherford Public Library boasts a great history/genealogy collection – old maps, newspapers, files on families and old groups. And let’s face it, newspapers, magazines, websites, blogs – surely this flood of information will positively impact future researchers.

            Mary Kemp is still always on call, even with her health challenges. Evlyn Broumley still writes, still answers questions that trickle in.

            Broumley received a request for information last week. “There’s no way I can lift those big deed books anymore.” Mary tells me she turned over many of her cemetery records to the ACA last year.

            “You have to encourage people to become active,” Broumley told me, “as we become inactive.”

            The Good Old Days often weren’t. A story like this written 20 or 80 years ago would’ve revealed a haphazard approach to the gathering of county history. People like Mary, Evlyn and their deceased forebears were out on a mission and worried little about public image, Roberts Rules of Order or strategic plans.

Harder to document would’ve been the little girls and boys hearing their family’s stories, visiting ancestral hallowed places, taking within their own heart stories of where they came from, of who their bold heritage would allow them to be in their own lives.

Look around Weatherford. The days of story-telling old men drinking coffee together are coming to an end. Children are rarely pulled away from their computer keyboards and handed a grub hoe to tend grandma’s grave. What’s out in the woods will have to wait, will have to hope the bulldozers can be distracted until the next Mary Kemp or Evlyn Broumley make their entrance onto Parker County’s historic stage.

Plowshares Into Keyboards,

Quick Hits of History for Next Generation

People often confide “I wished I’d paid more attention to grandma’s stories about the old times when I was growing up.” Today’s college student or history researcher will likely hit Google or rootsweb.com websites, before thinking to ask grandma (who lives in another state) or God-forbid opening a library book.

I became curious about the future of “doing history” in Parker County. Through the years, our first hand oral history changed to second hand written history and now heads toward filtered, anonymous online history. The computer becomes the storyteller, instead of whoever generated the original “content”.

We can’t ask a black man in Weatherford what it felt like to be discriminated against, unless we go knock on his door.

Indiana Jones didn’t use the internet.

Early on, I suspected internet access to websites like Ancestry.com was the culprit. That’s not the entire answer. History is like football. It can be learned, played, or watched. Imagine learning to play football by reading a website. The gathering of history is no different.

Professor Brad Tibbitts teaches history at Weatherford College. “Students entering college are being taught history in a very interactive way.” They are exposed to computers and DVDs to receive information. This trend will increase as time goes by, he believes.

College courses still offer lectures, but students want content to be as interactive as possible. Many textbooks have DVDs in the back. Companies selling learning materials realize this and push the envelope, developing progressively more interactive means of learning, moving away from lectures and original research. Searching for a relevant book becomes passé.

Students learn with computers, video games and online. They become “recipients” of information, not discoverers.

Most of what Tibbitts’ five and ten-year-old grandsons requested for Christmas consisted of electronics. This year’s high school graduating class will be the first Google Generation, being born the same year the search engine came into being. These students believe the answer will hit their screen, if they type in the correct question.

When Tibbitts was a kid he occupied himself outside, his imagination or friends providing the chief search engines of his entertainment. Now many kids remain inside watching hours of TV or playing electronic games. Goofing around with your friends has become a schedule of activities organized by adults.

No one knows the long term implications. “Things don’t get melted in the melting pot like they once did,” Tibbitts said. “People don’t get to talk to different types of people like they once did.” Children “talk” through the filters of text message, email or Facebook.

Even the use of the telephone is becoming limited. Each semester Tibbitts explains to new students that telephoning or dropping by his office will facilitate better interaction. Students are resistant to using the phone, though it’s hard to text message the same subtlety of 1950s race relations that one can see in person on the twisted face of an 80-year-old man who suffered it first hand.

We talk more AT each other using electronics, not WITH each other like we did in the past. Public discussion is often lost in a tide of cynicism and reproach.

“It’s important to set examples that are worthy,” Tibbitts believes. “Look more at how we’re alike, not at how we’re different. If we’re losing the ability to talk as people it’s dangerous for this country,” he adds.

Tibbitts sees similarities between the current tenor of public discourse and that shortly before the Civil War. It was easy to see Northerners as Them, not taking the time to know or understand their point of view.

Tibbitts has taught young people for 44 years.

“I think it’s important that we be mindful of who’s coming along behind us,” he said. The path we lay out will be walked by our children and grandchildren.

We are being taught by machines, expelling information input by people we may never know. Many accept the truth of what pops up on their computer screens. The story and meaning of the nation and of Parker County history become shallow and prone to misinterpretation when we become “watchers” of the world instead of people actively digging into Parker County’s soil for its truth.

Donate Grandma’s Stuff

Where It Will Live Forever

“A lot of things get into the hands of people who don’t care,” historian Evlyn Broumley says. Parker County citizens have amassed rich personal collections of papers or artifacts over long life times. “Things get lost,” she added. “Private collections become at risk or disappear once their collector dies.”

Though these collections are viewed as strictly private property by out-of-the-area heirs, the harmful impact to the county’s history when these treasures are lost or destroyed is hard to overestimate. There are core historians in this county who are unsure where they’ll leave their valuable collections.

As Weatherford continues to grow, we don’t know all our neighbors. We don’t know which door to knock on searching for this county’s Holy Grail.

The Doss Heritage and Culture Center’s C. B. Williams reports that a lady recently walked through their front doors with one of Oliver Loving’s quilts. None of her kids wanted it. What if that kind donor had passed away before her important gift?

Broumley encourages heirs to donate at least a copy of important papers somewhere safe. She suggests a local collection, but advises that one ask important questions: do you want these things, will you preserve them, and what happens if you close or change your mission?

Broumley places duplicates of her work in multiple places. Just because an event is recorded in a book, doesn’t mean it happened exactly that way. “You’re taking one person’s report, what he saw and remembered,” she says.

When grandma dies, you can toss her collection in the trash, donate it to a college or university, attempt to maintain the collection yourself or find a local archival facility like the Doss or the Weatherford Library.

The Weatherford Library will copy family bibles and place them in the files (there’s nine filing cabs in the Weatherford Library now). The Doss Heritage and Culture Center will accept items if they comply with their mission statement (www.dosscenter.org). In a nutshell, if grandma’s history happened in Parker County, it has a pretty good shot at the Doss. If not, it could still be used in education.

Researching a recent story, I was told that the late educator Raymond Curtis maintained a lush collection regarding Weatherford schools. Though I was given many clues, I could never locate this treasure trove. I completed my story sensing one of Curtis’ boxes might’ve held an underreported chapter in this city’s history.

Many artifacts are offered to the Doss. Their Collection Committee reviews these donations, which can be made as true donations, conditional donations or loans for an agreed-upon period of time.

“We learned about a 91-year-old lady from her husband,” Williams told me. “His wife lives in a nursing home. When she was born she slept in this wonderful pioneer cradle, which she donated.” He asked if the cradle was being exhibited. Williams told him that she wished his wife could come see the museum to see where she donated her wonderful treasure. Parker County Transportation brought her to the Doss. Her wheelchair was rolled in and she saw her donations distributed among the exhibits. She cried with happiness and shared many old stories.

Doss Archive/Collections Coordinator Delissa Slimp wants to make sure, however, that people know that donating is no guarantee that materials will always be on exhibit, due to space limitations.

There are other great archival facilities like Texas Tech’s Southwest Collection in Lubbock, UTA’s Special Collections and several other Texas colleges and universities. These can offer unparalleled safety and integrity to historical collections, but they lie outside the county.

The Doss has catalogued storage facilities on its ground floor, as well as climate-controlled storage offsite. Like most history museums, they utilize the Past Perfect software to catalog their collection for researchers’ use. The Doss has already assisted college student research, using their four and a half-year-old collection. The Doss is a 501(c)3 entity and is incorporated. The assets (collection) of the organization would be turned over to another non-profit organization or as directed by the board to an organization should the structure of the Doss ever change.

Ideally, historians should visit these facilities themselves. Ask the important questions. Then let their years of hard work go forward to help future researchers piece together Parker County’s important legacy.

Special thanks to Joann Barnhart, Evlyn Broumley, Harold Lawrence, Wayne Lee, Mary Kemp, Betsy Pedigo, Linda Pelon, Delissa Slimp, Lowell “Dodie” Sullivan, Leon Tanner, Brad Tibbits, C. B. Williams, Rae Wooten and the Weatherford Public Library. 

Weatherford, Texas Black School

Black Mount Pleasant School Forges 

Two Communities Into One

Race riots may be coming to Weatherford. That was the talk around town. Images of angry police dogs, fire hoses and bloodied protestors across the Deep South paraded across Parker County TV sets in the early 1960s. Some feared a repeat performance here.

When Weatherford schools opened that first 1963 day of integration, all was quiet. The reasons are both simple, and complex.

Our mystery begins in church. Two years after the Civil War ended, blacks organized the Prince Memorial Christian Methodist Episcopal Church on Oak Street. This oldest “still in business” church in Weatherford was named after the Rev. A. Bartlett “Bart” Prince, its first elder (as is Prince Street, near the first black public school). The church’s building went up in 1871, and was modified in 1912.

The “CME” sign in front meant “Colored Methodist Episcopal” until the 1960s, when it changed to Christian Methodist Church. It’s believed to be the second oldest CME church in the nation. There’s no Texas Historical Marker here. Within this pioneer church’s walls, black students received their first education, until the county built them a schoolhouse. Smythe’s 1877 “Historical Sketch of Parker County” lists thirty-seven county schools that year, each tied to a geographic “community”, save one: School No. 33 – The Weatherford Colored School.

Seymour Simpkins taught thirty-nine “colored” students. Prince Memorial pillars Willis Pickard, Rev. Henry Johnson and Rev. Prince served as trustees. The “Colored School” gets mentioned in the newspaper off and on down through the years. In 1887, land just south of West Oak and west of Prince was purchased for $200, its schoolhouse built in 1917.

 A brick school house replaced that structure in 1927. Today that forgotten brick schoolhouse stands proudly among the weeds. The September 8, 1933 Weatherford Democrat lists five ward schools that year, plus the “Colored School”. Tillie Woods was principal and Ella Varnel was the teacher.

The “Colored School” taught Cub Young, who pitched against Satchell Paige in the Negro Baseball League. Weatherford’s Negro League team played where Weatherford High School is now.

Within this pioneer church’s walls, black students received their first education, until the county built them a schoolhouse. Smythe’s 1877 “Historical Sketch of Parker County” lists thirty-seven county schools that year, each tied to a geographic “community”, save one: School No. 33 – The Weatherford Colored School. Seymour Simpkins taught thirty-nine “colored” students. Prince Memorial pillars Willis Pickard, Rev. Henry Johnson and Rev. Prince served as trustees.

The “Colored School” gets mentioned in the newspaper off and on down through the years. In 1887, land just south of West Oak and west of Prince was purchased for $200, its schoolhouse built in 1917. A brick school house replaced that structure in 1927. Today that forgotten brick schoolhouse stands proudly among the weeds.

The September 8, 1933 Weatherford Democrat lists five ward schools that year, plus the “Colored School”. Tillie Woods was principal and Ella Varnel was the teacher. The “Colored School” taught Cub Young, who pitched against Satchell Paige in the Negro Baseball League. Weatherford’s Negro League team played where Weatherford High School is now.

Leonard Smith entered first grade at Mount Pleasant in 1939, three years after it was renamed the Mount Pleasant School. The school’s two classrooms taught nine grades then.

Most black students walked to Mount Pleasant from four Weatherford neighborhoods – The Flat (First Monday Trade Day Grounds area), The Hill (West Oak Street area), Sand Town (near Akard & Sloan) and The Neck (near Cherry Park).

Black and white kids played baseball together, had rock fights, and cut up like children still do. Raymond George and some of his white friends walked to school together in the late 1940s. When they reached the Stanley School, the white boys went inside. Raymond kept walking.

“That’s just the way it was,” he said.

Mount Pleasant was a two room school, several grades in each classroom. Florine Roddy taught in the southern room, when Raymond was a student. The northern classroom was Lucille Rucker’s. Outside sat two outhouses and a water well whose pipe led over a trough. “One kid pumped while another drank,” Raymond told me.

Raymond remembers there being about fifty students, though that number swelled when migratory families came to town with the railroad or picking cotton. Raymond’s teachers (1946-1953) included Ella Varnell, Lucille Rucker and Mrs. Roddy.

“Lucille Rucker built the foundation beneath those black kids’ sense of respect,” Raymond said, “respect for others and for themselves.” Not only was she a good teacher, she was highly regarded by whites and blacks alike. Rucker made the boys play out back and the girls play out front during recess. “She taught us to treat the girls like ladies. Because of her, my generation of students stayed married, kept one job our whole lives, and successfully retired from those same jobs.” Still, when Mount Pleasant closed, Mrs. Rucker was forced to do odd jobs to survive. “She wasn’t taken care of,” he reflected sadly.

Wilson Hall was added to the northwest edge of the Mount Pleasant campus around 1944. Named after Superintendent Leonard B. Wilson, it was a barracks-like building used for classes and assemblies, with a stage on its west side.

Mount Pleasant sits high atop the western skyline of Weatherford, looking down on the Courthouse to its east. Below its majestic perch, blight stares back from where working black families once raised families. “Wood-burning stoves sat in the corners of each classroom,” Charlie Simmons told me, “replaced by gas heaters.” Flue holes still puncture the school’s two chimneys.

Each large classroom had wood floors and large windows along two walls. One can see daylight looking up through fourteen foot ceilings to the sky. “These classrooms were filled with little desks,” Charlie told me. “There were kids everywhere.”

“Every morning all the kids would walk out here, to the flag pole,” he said. “Say their Pledge of Allegiance and sing a patriotic song.” The flag pole base remains. He showed me where the swings were, the slide, the concrete front porch to Wilson Hall. “We had more fun than you can shake a stick at.”

The schoolhouse road entered from Prince Street, rising up the hill then circling the school. The old schoolhouse sits on private property, contiguous to Love Street Park on its west.

This was a time of separate white and black drinking fountains in our city. Blacks couldn’t enter white restaurants (unless they worked there) or attend most theaters. Blacks could buy Texas Theater tickets, as long as they sat in the balcony. Raymond remembers walking through the Texas Café to the kitchen out back as a little boy, wanting to spin the bar stools around. He couldn’t since the place was whites only.

Weatherford had black churches, a black tabernacle, and a two-story black Masonic Lodge on Fort Worth Highway, east of the courthouse. There were few black businesses.

If black students aspired to go to high school, they were on their own. Raymond and Leonard went to Fort Worth’s I. M. Terrell High School. Most of these kids didn’t have bikes, much less cars to make the thirty-one mile journey each way.

Raymond’s dad John Lorenzo “J. L.” George stepped up between 1953 – 1963. He left his upholstery shop twice a day to drive black students to Cowtown in his Ford station wagon at his own expense. Local businessmen later chipped in to buy gas. When J. L’s car got too crowded, a bus was finally supplied. J. L. spent five hours a day toting school kids, losing this time at his store.

Mitchell Rucker was another pillar of the black community here, born in 1899. “He was respected by the white community,” Raymond told me, “but held at a distance.” In the white community, Rucker was employed at the M & F Bank as a janitor. In the black community, he was superintendent at Prince Memorial for over fifty years, taught classes to Senior Citizens for the WPA in 1944, taught soldiers at Camp Wolters and was a board member at Texas College in Tyler for forty years. Rucker was one of the main conduits between Weatherford’s white and black communities.

“Pappa Ike” Simmons was another black leader. He attended school at Prince Memorial, before Mount Pleasant was built. “Pappa Ike was more of a politician – he knew everybody, running that mouth 100 miles an hour,” Charlie told me. Ike and brother “Uncle Charlie Simmons” each raised families off shining shoes at the Palace or Texas theaters and at barber shops.

Many prominent white families had black nannies, butlers, and groundskeepers. There was a parallel but unseen black society here, one from which trusted black men like Rucker, Pappa Ike and J. L. George could communicate informally with the white establishment.

Equally important, several white leaders reached out to the black community – Jack Borden, Borden Seaberry, the Cotton Family, and James and Dorothy Doss, among a few others. Respected whites and blacks interacted, albeit at a distance. Though not treated equally by any means, attacking one group would’ve meant attacking their own.

Mary Kemp remembers when the integration meetings took place in the third floor study hall of the old Weatherford High School. “It was a great time for all, very peaceful. I remember thinking, ‘This is a great historical time.”

Charlie Simmons was one of the first black students at Weatherford High School in 1963. He did well, as hundreds of other black students had before, riding atop the shoulders of Mount Pleasant’s teachers and black leaders. “It was a simple transition,” he said. “Nothing happened.”

This would be another “happily ever after” Weatherford story, save one omission. Unlike so much of this great town’s heritage, the Mount Pleasant School hasn’t been added to the roll call of hallowed historic touchstone sites in our town.

Raymond George tried to ignite a movement to get Mount Pleasant a historical marker some years back, maybe have the site turned into a museum or park. The Mount Pleasant School site and several surrounding acres can be accessed from the city’s Love Street Park and four city streets. The old school’s roof stopped turning back the rain many years ago. This historic place is not long for the world.

The Mount Pleasant School marks a chapter in Weatherford’s history where two communities became one. Unlike much of the South, this town pulled it off peacefully and with respect. As I put my camera back in its case, I noticed graffiti on the wall of Miss Rucker’s last classroom:

“Hold on to the ones you love,

cuz you never know when you’ll lose them.”

Leonard Smith entered first grade at Mount Pleasant in 1939, three years after it was renamed the Mount Pleasant School. The school’s two classrooms taught nine grades then. Most black students walked to Mount Pleasant from four Weatherford neighborhoods – The Flat (First Monday Trade Day Grounds area), The Hill (West Oak Street area), Sand Town (near Akard & Sloan) and The Neck (near Cherry Park).

Black and white kids played baseball together, had rock fights, and cut up like children still do. Raymond George and some of his white friends walked to school together in the late 1940s. When they reached the Stanley School, the white boys went inside. Raymond kept walking. “That’s just the way it was,” he said.

Mount Pleasant was a two room school, several grades in each classroom. Florine Roddy taught in the southern room, when Raymond was a student. The northern classroom was Lucille Rucker’s. Outside sat two outhouses and a water well whose pipe led over a trough.

“One kid pumped while another drank,” Raymond told me. Raymond remembers there being about fifty students, though that number swelled when migratory families came to town with the railroad or picking cotton. Raymond’s teachers (1946-1953) included Ella Varnell, Lucille Rucker and Mrs. Roddy. “Lucille Rucker built the foundation beneath those black kids’ sense of respect,” Raymond said, “respect for others and for themselves.” Not only was she a good teacher, she was highly regarded by whites and blacks alike. Rucker made the boys play out back and the girls play out front during recess. “She taught us to treat the girls like ladies. Because of her, my generation of students stayed married, kept one job our whole lives, and successfully retired from those same jobs.”

Still, when Mount Pleasant closed, Mrs. Rucker was forced to do odd jobs to survive. “She wasn’t taken care of,” he reflected sadly.

Wilson Hall was added to the northwest edge of the Mount Pleasant campus around 1944. Named after Superintendent Leonard B. Wilson, it was a barracks-like building used for classes and assemblies, with a stage on its west side.

Mount Pleasant sits high atop the western skyline of Weatherford, looking down on the Courthouse to its east. Below its majestic perch, blight stares back from where working black families once raised families.

“Wood-burning stoves sat in the corners of each classroom,” Charlie Simmons told me, “replaced by gas heaters.” Flue holes still puncture the school’s two chimneys. Each large classroom had wood floors and large windows along two walls. One can see daylight looking up through fourteen foot ceilings to the sky.

“These classrooms were filled with little desks,” Charlie told me. “There were kids everywhere.” “Every morning all the kids would walk out here, to the flag pole,” he said. “Say their Pledge of Allegiance and sing a patriotic song.” The flag pole base remains. He showed me where the swings were, the slide, the concrete front porch to Wilson Hall. “We had more fun than you can shake a stick at.”

The schoolhouse road entered from Prince Street, rising up the hill then circling the school. The old schoolhouse sits on private property, contiguous to Love Street Park on its west. This was a time of separate white and black drinking fountains in our city. Blacks couldn’t enter white restaurants (unless they worked there) or attend most theaters. Blacks could buy Texas Theater tickets, as long as they sat in the balcony.

Raymond remembers walking through the Texas Café to the kitchen out back as a little boy, wanting to spin the bar stools around. He couldn’t since the place was whites only.

Weatherford had black churches, a black tabernacle, and a two-story black Masonic Lodge on Fort Worth Highway, east of the courthouse. There were few black businesses. If black students aspired to go to high school, they were on their own.

Raymond and Leonard went to Fort Worth’s I. M. Terrell High School. Most of these kids didn’t have bikes, much less cars to make the thirty-one mile journey each way. Raymond’s dad John Lorenzo “J. L.” George stepped up between 1953 – 1963. He left his upholstery shop twice a day to drive black students to Cowtown in his Ford station wagon at his own expense. Local businessmen later chipped in to buy gas.

When J. L’s car got too crowded, a bus was finally supplied. J. L. spent five hours a day toting school kids, losing this time at his store.

Mitchell Rucker was another pillar of the black community here, born in 1899. “He was respected by the white community,” Raymond told me, “but held at a distance.” In the white community, Rucker was employed at the M & F Bank as a janitor. In the black community, he was superintendent at Prince Memorial for over fifty years, taught classes to Senior Citizens for the WPA in 1944, taught soldiers at Camp Wolters and was a board member at Texas College in Tyler for forty years. Rucker was one of the main conduits between Weatherford’s white and black communities.

“Pappa Ike” Simmons was another black leader. He attended school at Prince Memorial, before Mount Pleasant was built. “Pappa Ike was more of a politician – he knew everybody, running that mouth 100 miles an hour,” Charlie told me. Ike and brother “Uncle Charlie Simmons” each raised families off shining shoes at the Palace or Texas theaters and at barber shops. Many prominent white families had black nannies, butlers, and groundskeepers.

There was a parallel but unseen black society here, one from which trusted black men like Rucker, Pappa Ike and J. L. George could communicate informally with the white establishment. Equally important, several white leaders reached out to the black community – Jack Borden, Borden Seaberry, the Cotton Family, and James and Dorothy Doss, among a few others. Respected whites and blacks interacted, albeit at a distance. Though not treated equally by any means, attacking one group would’ve meant attacking their own.

Mary Kemp remembers when the integration meetings took place in the third floor study hall of the old Weatherford High School. “It was a great time for all, very peaceful. I remember thinking, ‘This is a great historical time.”

Charlie Simmons was one of the first black students at Weatherford High School in 1963. He did well, as hundreds of other black students had before, riding atop the shoulders of Mount Pleasant’s teachers and black leaders. “It was a simple transition,” he said. “Nothing happened.”

This would be another “happily ever after” Weatherford story, save one omission. Unlike so much of this great town’s heritage, the Mount Pleasant School hasn’t been added to the roll call of hallowed historic touchstone sites in our town.

Raymond George tried to ignite a movement to get Mount Pleasant a historical marker some years back, maybe have the site turned into a museum or park. The Mount Pleasant School site and several surrounding acres can be accessed from the city’s Love Street Park and four city streets. The old school’s roof stopped turning back the rain many years ago. This historic place is not long for the world.

The Mount Pleasant School marks a chapter in Weatherford’s history where two communities became one. Unlike much of the South, this town pulled it off peacefully and with respect. As I put my camera back in its case, I noticed graffiti on the wall of Miss Rucker’s last classroom: “Hold on to the ones you love, cuz you never know when you’ll lose them.”

County Poor Farm, A Little Girl in the Woods

County Poor Farm
A Little Girl in the Woods
By Jeff Clark

We may lose everything.

There's a depression heading our way. That's what the newspapers tell us. The economic kind. Here in Weatherford. Nibbling around the edges of our little town - taking its first taste.

Millions of everywhere-but-here folks have lost their jobs already. Swept away by the same tidal wave. Whose shadow we don't yet see. Most in this nation, in this town, live three paychecks from the abyss. It will frost my britches, if my parents were right.

A family doesn't need nice cars, a big house. You don't OWN anything. You can't DO anything. Why, your father and I made do with so much less. We didn't have to worry about tomorrow. We didn't have to.

Then a little girl calls out to me. "I survived," she whispers. "So must you."

That young girl's childhood, remembered by her through a prism of almost eighty years, haunts me this day. She was my storyteller. I didn't see it at the time. I visited her home expecting a Great Depression story of hardship and woe. That cup was handed back to me, overflowing. But in the midst of today's woe, her small farm girl's smiling stories keep bubbling to my surface. In the swirl of terrible suffering, humiliation, of death, there had been joy. I pull out my notes from our visit. I listen to her words.

Parker County Commissioners bought land for the County Poor Farm in 1883. It operated until about 1946. The county still owns the site, about three miles south of town. A few of its buildings, along with its lonely pauper cemetery still wait out there.
Individuals and families deemed insolvent were "sentenced" to live there, many decades ago. When neither family nor neighbors would take them in. Many were old. Were infirm.

Pride still governed our society back then. These folks weren't happy to be out there. They weren't looking for a free ride. Weatherford resident Nila Bielss Seale remembers those times as a girl. Remembers those people. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Alvin Bielss were the Poor Farm's caretakers. Hired by the county from the late 1920s through the early 1930s.

"It was like a big home," she said. "All the people there were like aunts and uncles. My mother and dad took care of them. They were doctor, nurse, and psychologist".

The Poor Farm consisted of two 160 acre tracts of land. The superintendent and his family had a home out there. The house still stands, barely. There was a barracks-like dormitory across the road from the family's house. Each Poor Farm resident had a room off its center hallway. The dormitory had a large porch across the front where the residents would often gather.

The Poor Farm's large barn, smaller outbuildings, and a water trough inscribed by Nila's daddy in 1923 also still remain. There's also a shack of a house off by itself, being eaten alive by a tree, shared back then by a blind man and the farm's Delco electrical system.

Joe C. Moore was one of the early Parker County Commissioners. He reflected on the court's thinking in starting the poor farm, in a Weatherford Weekly Herald story September 21, 1911: "Editor: I desire to answer some of your questions as to why the county poor farm was purchased, how used and what revenue it produced. About 1881, soon after A. J. Hunter was elected county judge, B.C. Tarkinton, Joe C. Moore, Frank Barnett and W. A. Massey were commissioners. After an investigation, this court found that other counties had farms that were a source of good revenue, a large savings to the taxpayers, and a good thing in general."

Moore says there were then thirty-eight people on the county indigent list who were each receiving $3 - $10 monthly. Parker County spent about $3,000 annually on its poor, back then. So the county bought this 320 acres, he said.

"George Abbott and wife were employed to superintend the farm with instructions to feed and clothe well all inmates of the farm, and to give each of the inmates a task according to their fittedness or ability."

The farm was free and clear of debt after only three years. The commissioners additionally used jail inmates to work at the farm. They received credit against their sentences.

All thirty-eight paupers under the county's financial support were then notified of the day and time to assemble, to be taken to the Poor Farm. Steaming Nazi locomotives pulling wooden-slatted cattle cars pop into my imagination as I write this. Though that's probably not fair. I'm sure some thought, in Parker County back then, these people must've brought it on themselves. They had it coming.

Apparently only about half showed up, Mr. Moore tells us, "showing that the county had been paying out money to those who had other means of support." No such testing goes on today. Far as I know.

The Poor Farm usually had between fourteen and twenty people living there at any one time. Those that were able worked in the fields, gathered eggs, raised hogs and cattle, milked or helped cook and clean back at the dormitory.

Aunt Mary, one of the residents there, was a cook while the Bielss Family lived there. The woman showed kindness to young Nila. "Aunt Mary made the best tea cakes," she remembered. Once Nila's pet goat Billy, who followed Nila everywhere, somehow got into Aunt Mary's room when the little girl was visiting. Though Billy created quite a mess, Aunt Mary, known for her organization and cleanliness, acted like nothing had happened. 

Aunt Mary grew tired in her later years and decided she was not going to help out around the farm any longer. Her back was bothering her, she said. She could no longer get around, she told some others. One afternoon, Nila's dad came up to the dormitory's porch, where Aunt Mary was still feigning illness. He let a harmless snake loose that promptly sought Aunt Mary out. Terrified of snakes, she leapt from her chair and took off, promptly cured of her affliction.

"We were almost totally self-sufficient," Nila said. "The people there were very busy people. My mother and dad alternated each month in buying groceries. Mother would get mad if the grocery bill was over twenty dollars for the month (for about eighteen people). My dad butchered hogs after the first cold spell and cured the meat. The cellar was full - the walls were lined with fruits and vegetables my mother put up."

During harvest season, when they would thresh the wheat, county commissioners would pay people from Weatherford one dollar a day to work (during the Great Depression). And people from town would come out, to help out - to get paid.
Nila's dad would salt meat and hang it from the rafters. When Poor Farm folks became ill, her mother or dad would sit up all night with them.

Nila had a horse as a little girl. The commissioners apparently had confiscated the animal from someone, to stop its abuse. "The horse wasn't quite right," she remembered.  "He would be perfectly sweet and normal, then all of the sudden just go crazy for a little bit." Nila loved that horse. One day she was riding him up by the big barn, through some old tree stumps. The horse had one of his episodes. Threw her through the air and onto the ground. Her dad was nearby. Thank goodness. Made sure she was okay. She remembers this part. He told her to get right back up on that horse. So she did.

The Poor Farm owned a few other horses to pull the plows and wagons, even a couple of Percherons at one point. Nila remembers her dad being partial to mules. These teams would take corn to the gin in Granbury in a wagon, and would help harvest the wheat. When it was ready.

Nila's father often woke up at 3 a.m. to begin his endless work around the farm. Near the end, most of the farm's residents were advanced in age. Were not a lot of help.
"Daddy liked to whistle," Nila told me. "He was known for that. You could hear him, even at three in the morning, out there whistling." He was a deacon in the local church, where her mom taught Sunday School and played the piano. Before they were married, Mr. Bielss had to sell his beloved horse Penny. He needed the money. He wanted a proper wedding ring. He sacrificed.

Nila's folks were good people, were hard workers. Nobody helped them out much except for Moses, Mr. Taylor, and sometimes Aunt Mary. "Mr. Taylor, who was blind, would want to help out more, but we were always afraid for him, when he got around the big saw," Nila told me. He was a nice man, she said. Mr. Taylor.

Nila remembers her family having a small record player. One day she and her brother Eldon were playing "He'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain" so loud that her mother could hear it down the hill. They got into a storm of trouble. Before electricity was common, the farm had a Delco unit powered by a windmill to run a few things, like the single bulbs that hung from a few of the ceilings. The Delco was located in same little house that Mr. Taylor lived in. The blind gentleman.

Poor Farm residents washed their clothes in big black number five wash pots. The man named Moses kept pecans in a Maxwell Coffee can. He cut those pecans into laser-perfect halves. Moses did. Moses was paralyzed on one side. Had a peg leg that he made himself.

Nila told me about Mrs. Baker, who'd been addled after being struck by lightning. It stayed with her. Mrs. Baker. Whenever a storm approached, Nila's parents had to comfort her fears.

Nila told tales of a happy childhood at the farm. At the Poor Farm. Where her parents took care of so many. Nila never lacked for anything, she wanted me to know. Nila bottle fed her goats. Had a menagerie of livestock to keep her entertained. She listened to Little Orphan Annie on the family's radio.

Around 1946 the dormitory building where the residents lived was moved to the 100 block of Throckmorton in Weatherford. It there served as a home for the aged. The move was the end of the true operation of the Poor Farm. The building was later relocated to Rusk Street, where it still stands.
I drive past it. Often. Though I've never ventured up to it. Wouldn't be polite.
After World War II, the federal and state governments increased social services for the poor and the elderly. For the nation. Not just Parker County.

The Poor Farm pauper cemetery still sleeps off in the woods. The place was forgotten until the early 1980s, rediscovered by a group of hunters. It appeared to have about forty adult graves. And one child's grave. No one knows for sure.

The earliest documented burial was 1904. The lonely site had no fence. At that time the county commissioners were considering selling the farm. The Parker County Historical Commission persuaded commissioners to let them restore the dignity of the cemetery. This, they did.

Later in 1986 a historic marker was awarded by the state, now visible from Tin Top Road. A right-of-way was established from Tin Top to the cemetery. The Parker County Abandoned Cemetery Association continues to maintain the cemetery, with the help of donations. They do this, to this day.

I need to finish this story. There's much to do. To prepare for. I feel nauseous. Unsure.

I need a snake to scare me off this porch.

One man living at the Poor Farm was insistent that he not end up in the pauper cemetery. When the time came, Mr. Bielss buried him off in the woods. Wayne Thompson, who ran a dairy on the property in the 1950s remembers three lone graves off together near a lone tree, about a half mile away. This man's presumed to be one of the three. But I'm not sure.

J. G. Godley's death was particularly tragic. Godley died of suicide November 11, 1929. Nila recalls that Godley was once a wealthy man (related to the family that started the Godley community to our south). He was divorced, was 87 at the time of his passing. He apparently squandered his fortune and died a pauper at the farm. He was always very bitter and depressed, Nila told me. Many times he pleaded with her dad to kill him.
One morning the Bielss Family was having breakfast. Before sunrise. The cows down the hill started bawling. Her dad got his lantern. Said he'd better go check on what was wrong. On what was the matter.

Mr. Godley had cut his throat inside the farm's two hole privy. In the Poor Farm's out house. He lay dead on the floor. The county death certificate lists no relatives and no birthdate. The November 12, 1929 Daily Herald obituary shows one daughter in Austin. I never found her.

Nila remembers Mr. Godley being buried outside the paupers' cemetery fence by her father. County records show his final resting place as Oakland Cemetery, in an unmarked grave. Stories about Mr. Godley conflict around this town, even today. I believe that little girl, though bottom line, Mr. Godley is lost as well.

The Poor Farm Cemetery has one of the highest ratios of unmarked graves in Parker County. Out forty known graves, only one had a marked headstone. There is a newer granite marker listing the people who died at the farm, but were buried in other locations. The Abandoned Cemetery Association did that.

Association members Mary Kemp and Billie Bell spent long hours going through records trying to learn the names of those interred at this cemetery. Mary helped me with this story. Nila was its ringside witness.

I don't know how this story comes out. The Poor Farm. Parker County. The American nation writhing in doubt and uncertainty. Today's headlines could be an echo to that earlier time.

We could be in for the surprise of our lives.

The Poor Farm woods south of Weatherford probably hold this nation's answer. The souls in that graveyard. The whispers in those trees.Those times seem so foreign. Listening to that little girl. To the slip-sliding past. Our future's out there. A cradled secret, walking around in the faded front overalls pocket of another time. But those folks aren't talking. Not today. Not to me.

SUGGESTED CAPTIONS

Depression-Era residents sit on the front porch of the Poor Farm Dorm.

Nila’s Family near the Poor Farm barnyard.