There was a well location being staked out on the very back side of my Grandfather Samples farm and there was some discussion by “old timers” about hoping that the well wouldn’t disturb that grave. Since few if any folks even knew about a grave out in the woods, several people were asked what they knew about it.
When I was traveling and visiting clients in West Texas, I made it point to visit Roxie Belle Samples Reynolds. She was also the go-to person for anything and everything I wanted to know about our family history. So, on my next trip I asked Roxie about this story.
I had heard that a condemned man in Denton had been executed by hanging. When no family member was there to claim his body, a good Samaritan said he thought he knew some relatives in North Texas who would take it, and he then placed the corpse in his wagon and headed home. Well, he reached Grandfather’s farm about dark and was fed dinner and a bed to sleep that night.
It was then he confessed he did not really know any of the deceased kin and didn’t know what to do with the body. Grandad was supposed to have told him, “ Go down there on the south side of my farm in amongst those woods and bury him, nothing will disturb the grave. All of this I related to Roxie.
She said “That’s not true”, and told me another story. She said a man and woman had met down by the creek, had a romantic intrerlude in the corn field. When the woman got home, she told her husband that the other man raped her. The irate husband, rather than confronting the individual, went around to all the neighbors and asked if they were willing to have a rapist living among them.
So a gathering was arranged again down on the creek bank. It was a kangaroo court and after a short meeting, the man was hung from one of the trees there. That is the body that was buried on Grandad’s farm.
Now being a pioneer is a relative term to me. If person were born in the city with all modern conveniences, this term would not apply to them. Roxie Bell was born in the late 1910’s and was and is tough as whet leather. She was the oldest of 6 children and worked like a man all her life. Possibly she worked harder than most men would.
She told me about living near Duncan, Oklahoma, where Uncle Joe was trying to farm. It was hard times and Joe went into town and told his banker, “Mr. Smith, if you will loan me the money, I want to move to Lubbock and farm cotton.” The banker told him, “Joe, I can’t lend you the money now, but the local bootlegger was caught last night and is in jail, from where he will not be coming home for a while. I have the still, you take that still and run off several batches, I will then lend you the difference in what you get from the moonshine and what you need to get to Lubbock.”
Joe took the banker up on the deal. He set up this still on the back of their farm, where there was a spring of water and some hills that they dug back into the hill and hid the equipment. Joe taught Roxie how to run off the liquid. He showed her how to turn on a valve and let the distillate run, and when it ran clear and would burn with a blue flame, that was the moonshine they were going to sell.
Now they had a hog pen that came up the side of that hillside and they would pour the used mash into the hogs’ trough. These porkers loved it so much, they would get drunk, fall down, and roll all the way downhill and would wind up back at the farmhouse.
Roxie caught the “good stuff” and put it in jars which she then put in holes she dug in the stream bed. Sand and water covered these jars, hiding them and keeping them cool and hidden until they were sold. I asked her how much they charged, or how much they made, and she said she did not know, that Uncle Joe took care of the finances.
Later in the fall, Roxie went with Uncle Joe to town and they visited the banker. When Joe greeted Mr. Smith, he said, “I want you to meet my alkie-hol daughter, Roxie Belle.” Roxie said the banker hugged her and said, “Roxie, next time you come to town, wear your long winter coat and bring me a jar of your best stuff!”
Uncle Joe was serious about moving to Lubbock. They had worked to both gather in all their crops, but also to prepare to move. Roxie went into detail about how they had built the bed of the wagon to fold out to accommodate a double mattress on either side of the wagon box. In this setup, they hauled all their household, farm implements, and everything they owned. And the kids had to walk. She said they took several weeks to get to Lubbock. All along the way they would pick up wood to cook a meal that evening.
When they arrived just east of Lubbock, a place call Acuff, Texas, Uncle Joe cut a deal to clear the mesquite, break the land, and plant cotton at 50%/50% split with the owner. The person who did the work was Roxie, herself. First to clear and then plant this new land with cotton using the help of some alien Mexicans. They cut down, grubbed up, and hauled to the house all the mesquite wood to use for fires to wash clothes. She then broke the land with the help of the Mexican workers and planted cotton.
When they harvested the cotton, they got a good crop and beside that the commodity prices for cotton and gone up to an unbelievable level. Joe made a windfall, enough that he bought the farm with the 50% he earned from that one crop. Now, that put Roxie in charge as the farmer, because Uncle Joe decided he was going into the real estate business.
Roxie said she had this enormous pile of mesquite to be used for firewood. She kept it by a shed that she had built to protect her when washing clothes. One Monday, she was washing the laundry the wind blew sparks from the fire out from under the edge of this shed and caught her wood supply on afire. It burned completely in just a few minutes. She was crushed.
When she and her husband, Vivien Reynolds, were married, Uncle Joe was reported to have cried and cried. One neighbor said, “Well, he is losing a daughter” but another said, “No, he is not losing a daughter, he is losing a slave”!
I visited her when she was in her late 80’s and she was out in the garden, which reminded me of Mom’s garden. I asked her what she needed to plant so much after she showed me what all she had canned. I said, Roxie what do you do with all these canned goods? Her answer was “I give it to some of the Old People at church”! She liked cotton farming so much that even in old age, when the farmers that worked her farm would be running cotton pickers in her fields, she would take them coffee and cookies.
During WW II she was home alone with twin baby girls. A banker came to see her and asked if she would get some hands to harvest the cotton because most of the able-bodied men were at war. She said there were not any people to work except high school kids and besides, she did not have any transportation. He said I will see that you have a pickup to use, we need this cotton harvested. She said the kids in high school were eager workers because that was way for them to make money in the early 1940’s. She kept her twin girls on a quilt under the cotton wagon while she pulled cotton sack along with the kids.
After the war, a field supervisor of an oil company came and asked her to decorate the lease houses that pumpers and other workers would live in. She replied she did not know what the various wives wanted in the way of curtains, wallpaper, and paint colors. He told her, “Roxie, you do it like you want and they will be happy!” She continued the decorating business years after that jump start.
For Roxie Belle’s 100th birthday, my wife and I flew to Lubbock and rented a car and attended her party in Acuff. She was the oldest of all my cousins and a child of the oldest sibling of my father. She was one tough lady and worked harder than most men all her life, still taking care of the “old folks at her church!” No one else I have ever known who blood-ken was like my cousin, Roxie Belle Samples Reynolds. A true blue pioneer! Just Say in…RJS
There was a well location being staked out on the ... (
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