Another rainy Saturday night and another OU win so it must be time for Redneck Chapter 15.... Last week I described my Dad picking me up at the bus station in Westville and the route we took to the Rose Ranch. It was the roughest road I had ever been over that was actually considered a county road and according to Dad was the best of the various ways to get there. I later saw that he was probably correct.. This time of the year it gets dark very early in the Holler so after supper and a quick domino game they were ready for bed, me not so much. If you have ever been to my folks house, you know you couldnt get by without a domino game or two.. It was the only game they ever played and the only one I was ever allowed to play, NO cards. They had a TV in the form of an old B & W 21 inch RCA that would only pick up one very snowy channel and that was 5 out of Ft. Smith...It was a good thing that Mom got to watch her CBS soaps, as 5 showed the best of 2 or 3 different networks.. The CBS soaps were her favorite. I remember listening to them on the radio with her in the early 50s, before I was school age. The image she got on that old snowy TV wasnt good but I think she just used it as a radio and listened more than watched.. She did not drive and never left the place unless Dad took her, so in reality she never liked being isolated here in the Holler..The TV was her only companion on most days as dad was always out doing something with horses. The house they were living in was built sometime in the early 1950s by one of Jess Stephens sons I believe.It was built in 3 stages; first 3 rooms and then 2 more rooms and last a third bedroom and a bathroom. The room assigned as my room was the last one, in that third addition across the hall from the bath. Since I wasnt actually living there it was also their storage room, so I had to work myself into the room and into the bed.. Morning always came early if J.K. Rose was in the house..lol....Madge only cooks once and it was ALWAYS worth getting up early for. That next morning , as usual Mom fixed eggs, homemade biscuits , homemade gravy, bacon, sausage, homemade jelly and oatmeal for breakfast desert.. No wonder I am fat, every day was like that... [ The morning in 1979 when she had her major stroke, she insisted on fixing breakfast for Dad before she would go to the Hospital. ]...After breakfast while Mom made the beds and washed the dishes, dad and I went out to feed the two horses and check on the cow, yearling and calf...These were the same ones we had moved from Watson to G F back in the spring. The barn had been built in the 40s by the Stephens family, after they bought the Veaseys out, and had been used as a grade C dairy barn at one time.. It had a long concrete feed trough and wooden stantions to hold the cows heads.. Most of the stantions are still in there . It had no loft as it was designed for loose hay and the Jackson Fork and its track are still in the barn. Probably a whole wagon load could be moved into the barn each time the big fork was pulled into the barn. Dad would add a loft for storing square bales later and that is also now outdated with the big round ones now used.. The Stephens, during their years , had also added a small chicken house which dad would turn into a work shop and a very nice concrete cellar for storms and storage of canned food. To continue the tour of the place , we walked over to what dad called the old house and over the years has also been called the rent house and is now Johns House. It was built in the early teens by Mr. Veasey who had put the farm together. [ I will explain this term in a bit ] It was built out of rough sawn oak from trees cut on the place and I think built without a level or a square..lol..When I first saw it here in the Fall of 1964 it was in decrepid shape.. You could tell it had been a fairly nice home in its day, but now with all the windows knocked out and the roof with holes you could throw a cat thru, it was sad....It had 3 bedrooms upstairs and two down, a large dining room, living room and a small kitchen, but it was never made modern so no bathroom or running water for that matter. It did have a nice screened in back porch with a drilled well on the porch that once contained a picher pump for water Im sure... This was all by dads description as he was using it for a barn and had hay, seed , lumber and coal for his forge stored in it... The upstairs was reached by climbing a ladder on the wall, which I climbed.. It was full of dirt dauber and wasp nests and broken fruit jars every where... [ in 1970 I would remodel this old heap and Grandson Seth lives there as we speak ] I asked dad about the odd number of acres that was in the place, it being 228 acres. Most farms are made up of 40s , as in 80, 120 or 160 or some variation of that... He said he asked the same question when he purchased it in October.. The Ranch was in two parcels; with 178 acres being almost a square and another 50 being a long skinny panhandle .. It was shaped very much like the state of Oklahoma... Mr . Veasey had purchased the Ranch 10 acres at a time, when the Indians were first allowed to sell their lands.. I had always assumed when an Indian got his 120 acre allotment it was all in one spot... That was not the case, maybe 100 or 110 in one spot and 10 or 20 somewhere else... Well, the land that is now the Rose Ranch was originally allotted to 15 different individuals with the largest being 30 acres. Most of it had belonged to people with the last name of Crittenden. My next question was ,where did the two acres go?? Well he knew that also. Sometime in the early 20s the state or federal govt. decided that all cattle needed to be dipped for ticks.. West Branch creek flows from N to S thru the whole place and they needed a small acreage near a creek to build a dipping vat ....Water would be handy to fill it that way... [ there is one still in place on Piney Road just to the south of Williams Creek ] So we walked down to the creek and showed me the old dipping vat that had been filled with dirt over the years, it was still there til the flood of 86 took it out. Guess Mr. Veasey had sold them the 2 acres for the vat and then declined to buy it back after they quit using it...Anyway that spot is on the land owned by Congressman Markwayne Mullin today and in 1964 was owned by his Grandfather Kenneth Morris.. Kenneth was a Rodeo stock producer and he and dad would become good friends over the years, cowboy to cowboy...So Kenneth was our neighbor to the north, a man named Darb Fultz joined the place on the east and he and dad would be friends for the rest of their lives also.. The place to the south was owned by John Small, a very nice older man . I never met Mrs. Small and when they offered their place for sale in 68 , Dad bought it. After Dad passed in 90, my brother sold that part to Mr. Smalls grandson David who is a good neighbor and friend today.. The land to the west had absentee land owners and was not fenced or used for livestock in any fashion.. Dad said the first of the neighbors to come welcome them to the community was Les and Grace Faddis who lived just to the southwest of us and just across the Piney Bridge.. Les was a green bean farmer as were many in the area in 1964 and he was from Arkansas and had lots of family both here and there. Les told dad he was glad he was here , but that dad had paid way too much for the place and the place would not pay for itself as it was too small to farm.. Dad told him it was paid for and he didnt buy it to farm, just to play.[ after paying for the place dad was broke]....Later that day dad took me to meet Les and Grace, Hance and Rene, Uncle Milt and Aunt Junea [ all Faddiss] Ruth Wilkie and Fred England and son David Wilkie. who coon hunted with dad... Later in the day I would meet Don Williams who dad had met in a trade of some sort.. All good people and all good neighbors... But at the end of the day I was still missing college and the bright lights of town and I could never imagine me living here.... I would have to ponder on that one....A nice ranch with great neighbors and only 6 miles of rough road from town, no phone, and basically no TV......I dont think so.....to be continued..
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 00:16:00 +0000