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Plain Folks in Arkansas
Thomas
Watts Goodson
(1856-1936) came from one of those Tidewater
communities in South Carolina still named after a Civil War general. Driven by the
War first to rural Alabama, they had finally ventured up the Red River to
about present-day
Sulphur Springs. Here young Tom opened a teaching
"academy." It may not have been too lucrative, for he accompanied his family back
to Arkansas after his father was able to register claim (1875) to an eighty-acre homestead there.
The government grant may help explain the family's good
will toward Abraham Lincoln. The Homestead Act
had been advanced in earlier years to lure small farmers into the western territories, but had regularly been defeated by Southern
votes. After secession there was all the more reason to
reward any small farmer who had not taken up arms against the government, and the Act was finally signed in 1862. Happily, Tom's father, John Wesley Goodson, qualified, despite the family's South Carolina origins. His grant was situated in
the recently established Miller County, where the deep forest was soon
attracting lumbermen. By 1888, a logging railroad built south
out of Texarkana came through, and a postal station named Boyd was established. Other stops were at Ferguson's Crossing (a saw mill), Roberts
(where Liberty school was situated), Fouke, Black Diamond (where my mother was born in 1899), Dodridge, Ida and other
villages on into Louisiana.
From around the turn of the century that slow train provided
easy,
cheap transportation through the pine and
hardwood forests where Tom delivered the mail with his buggy, and his
children hopped the train to Liberty School at Roberts. The rails were taken
up
about the middle of the
twentieth century, and the last old railroad depot finally disappeared a few years later. Most of the villages had long since faded away, leaving only the cemeteries, where many of my kin are buried.
Family of Thomas Watts Goodson (1856-1936) m. Mary
Elizabeth McClure (1862-1938):
Standing: Gerald, Harry, Albert.
Seated: Florence,
Pearl, Nell, Ora, Raye
Albert followed in
his father's footsteps delivering a rural mail
route, but Ora actually succeeded her father as postmistress in Fouke.
Pearl became an R.N., and Raye followed her example but then went ahead
and became a school nurse, ultimately the head of that department in
the Dallas Public School System. Harry went to the University of
Arkansas, became a C.P.A. and eventually a partner in Haskins and
Sells. Gerald and Florence got positions with oil companies, he in
equipment sales for Continental, she as legal
secretary for Gulf Oil. Although Tom and Molly, children of the
agrarian
age, had nine children (including Little Charlie, who died as a boy),
there were only six grandchildren. Three of their offspring did not
marry; two
who did remained childless. It was the ones espousing urban life who
eschewed
children.
When
Gerald came on a visit to Dallas one hot summer, Nell, Raye,
Harry, Elza and Gerald decided to run down
to Cabell's and get some ice cream. Cabell's was the best ice cream
store
in Dallas. Harry, being the one with plenty of money, was the first out
of the car to go in and buy it. "Will a pint be about right?" He asked.
"Aw, make it a pint and a half," Gerald suggested.
Tom and Molly's grown children would "go home" for
Christmas. Our little family traveled from West Texas, Harry and Raye
and Pearl from
Dallas, Florence from Houston, Gerald from Tulsa. Some might sleep at
Ora and Russell's, others with Albert and Hortense. On Christmas Eve some of the men
would go up
to the Old Place.
Albert Junior would scale a huge holly tree and saw the top out,
letting it fall to the ground. This would be our Christmas tree,
which reached to the ceiling of the front room.
Rough banquet tables borrowed from the church yard were set up from the
living
room through the dining room out onto the back porch. After dinner the
men
would sit around the fire and light their pipe by putting a red coal
into its bowl. For them, Christmas Eve was the time to shoot off the
fireworks
they
had all brought along for me. We would take a shovelful of red coals
out
into the dark backyard. You could stick the fuse of a firecracker onto
a
hot coal and when it began to fizzle, you had to throw it. I remember
when I was about four I did not throw it in time, and my hand was
really stunned. I had Roman candles, too.
In those days pretty much
any field
was
open to quail hunting, and most people could direct you to where a
covey
had last been sighted. One good field was at the Old Goodson Place,
where the
triangular fifteen acres south of the county road was still an
open field surrounded by remnants of the rail fence
the Goodson boys had built. Several old black oaks marked the site
where the house had once stood. The place was surrounded by the big
woods where we got the Christmas tree.
Gerald
and Harry liked to bring their fancy hunting coats, gear, and automatic
shotguns along on visits to the country.
Harry brought the bird dog which his trainer kept for him during the
balance of
the year. Russell (Ora's husband) would take his city inlaws
quail hunting. Harry
liked to show off the
new
set of chokes he had for his 16 gauge. He and Gerald were expert
on size of shot and drams of powder in the shotgun shells. They
discussed the shot patterns of various loads. Albert, the local brother,
did not go, but his teen-aged son,
Albert Jr. did, and he was by far the fastest with his shotgun, speed
being
all important when you flush a covey of quail. As I entered my teens, Russell passed his lore of the woods on to me,
or a little of it: how to spot a squirrel in a distant oak, how to
scale a perch or skin a cat, how to dress a deer. I understood that
during the hard times these had been skills from which a family had to subsist. But Russell was no quail hunter.