North Texas Star

February 2015

ALSO INSIDE:
H Chasing Our Tales into Young County
H Outdoors Along the Brazos
Lone Camp Memories Part II
H Grandmother Photos

JACOB RAPHAEL DE CORDOVA:

Texas Land Agent and Colonizer

February 2015 NORTH TEXAS STAR Page 2

North Texas Star

February 2015 NORTH TEXAS STAR Page 3

PUBLISHER
Jeff Smith
jjsmith@cnhi.com

OUTDOORS ALONG THE BRAZOS

Lone Camp Memories Part II
By Don Price

into Young County

By Sue Seibert

GENERAL MANAGER/EDITOR
David May
editor@mineralwellsindex.com
LAYOUT & DESIGN
Lindsay Burge
ads1@mineralwellsindex.com

8
10

CHASING OUR TALES

JACOB RAPHAEL DE CORDOVA:

Texas Land Agent and Colonizer
By Jim Dillard

CIRCULATION
circulation@mineralwellsindex.com
CALL
940-325-4465
ONLINE
www.mineralwellsindex.com

13

Grandmothers photos
By Wynelle Catlin

February 2015 NORTH TEXAS STAR Page 4

Outdoors Along the Brazos

Lone Camp Memories: Part II

everal months ago a landmark burned, the country store in

Lone Camp; it was quite a shock to the settlement and to the
surrounding trades area, a total loss.
Settled in the 1870s, the tiny community's growth was limited: the
Texas & Pacific Railroad chose to lay its right-of-way a few miles
south, through Brazos, Santo, Gordon, Strawn and points west, missing
Lone Camp.
The same thing happened with the major highway. There is none,
only a farm-to-market, albeit one of the more scenic FM roads in the
state. As far as public transportation is concerned, the getting in-andout of main arteries, Lone Camp found itself in the twilight zone. But
this made it quaint.
Located on Farm Road 4 south of Palo Pinto and north of Santo,
Lone Camp did have a post office at one time, from 1907 to 1920.
A Mr. Ward claimed every acre between Santo and Palo Pinto,
including Lone Camp; as soon as barbed wire became available, Mr.
Ward was the first rancher to fence his property. And the fence cutters
had a field day, hitting (or cutting) James Ward's barbed wire most
nights.
When the big ranch was broken up, about 1904, there were enough
settlers then to
warrant a post
office. The post
office didn't have
a name at first.
A Mr. Spencer
was selected to
give it a name.
Spencer was living in a tent all
alone, his family
having gone to
visit relatives for
several weeks,
and the tent was
in a forgotten,
very remote area.
Being very diligent, Mr. Spencer
looked high and
low, couldn't see
another person,
not even a human

By DON PRICE

footprint, only the footprints of cougars and wolves.

His family was gone, and he could see no human habitation from his
tent. All he could think of was how lonely he really was at that time,
and so he named the post office "Lone Camp," and the name was
accepted by the United States Post Office Department.
Gathering places in Lone Camp were none too plentiful. So it was
quite a shock to the settlement when the general store burned recently,
a total loss.
This is why 86-year-old Arlie Wharton sent us a five-page letter,
expressing his strong feelings memories of rolling terrain, the
remoteness surrounding the settlement as he lived it during the 1930s,
the social life of Lone Camp and the Great Depression. Can you imagine buying a hamburger for 5 cents?
The following narrative (Part II) concludes Arlie Wharton's five
pages as he lived it in the general store, starting in 1938:
Part II
Memories of the Lone Camp General Store
By Arlie L. Wharton

Photo by David Wharton

A skull of a longhorn displayed on the knotty-pine wall of the General Store, recently destroyed
by fire, a tragic loss for the small community.

One of the thrills

for us all was when
my Dad took us up
to the new dam; we
had never seen a
dam. The Possum
Kingdom Lake
filled in record time
and the water was
going over the spillway 6 feet deep.
The Great
Depression years
were very real to
everyone, the
Oklahoma Dust
Bowl; we also
received some of it.
I do not think most
of us boys were
mean, we were just
mischievous!!

February 2015 NORTH TEXAS STAR Page 5

February 2015 NORTH TEXAS STAR Page 6

Photo by David Wharton

Arlie Wharton in front of the General Store before it burned,
filling Arlie with nostalgia, feelings for carefree boyhood days.
So he wrote a letter.

An agriculture rep called a meeting to bring the community up to date; they all
met one night at the school. "Some boys" found this dog and tin canned it. The dog
made one big run and went right into the school building and into the crowd. The
second part of the story is we were all going to the Texas State Fair of 1941 the next
Saturday. We were told due to this incident we could not go. But later they relented,
I heard the agriculture man got a laugh over it and we were allowed to go to the
Texas State Fair of 1941!! It seemed the theme of the fair was military; we got to go
into the Cotton Bowl (what a thrill that was!) They put on a tank demonstration and
display. When I walked out of the Cotton Bowl there was a flatbed trailer with a
ME-109 German fighter plane on it. It had the German cross and also was on the
wings and sides. Very little damage, a bent prop and three bullet holes in the left of
the cockpit. The story is it went down over England and crash landed with a wounded pilot. Somehow the storm clouds of war made the fair rather somber and little
did we know that two months later the Japanese would bomb Pearl Harbor and
America would be going into WWII. (No more state fairs until 1946).
My Mother's sister Denny Beavers and family moved to Belen, N.M. Their oldest
son Harvey was drafted and was stationed at Brownwood. When he brought his car
to base he came to Lone Camp every weekend that he was off. He really liked Lone
Camp and all of us boys heard many army stories.
Some more memories that I have are I remember when a game warden came to
Lone Camp to our store. He said he was researching screech owls but we figured he
was after moonshiners and after about two weeks he was gone. I never knew what
he found.
Some of the names and events that I can recall are the store owners. Mr. and Mrs.
Sam Smart, who were very supportive of our family. They had a son named Vol, he
was about 20. He drove up one day in a 41 yellow Pontiac convertible. All us boys
could do is stare, what a car!! The store was heated with a long wood burning stove.
It heated the whole store and we spent many cold night around it. Vol would visit us
and keep us entertained with his stories. Charlie and I carried many ricks of wood in
to keep the store warm. I remember when we visited the Lone Camp store in 2013 I
told Mr. Marsden about the long stove. He said there it is and so it was, still sitting
where it always had!
The Smarts son-in-law owned a roller skating rink and moved to Santo. They
moved in next door (the Smarts house) and in the afternoon we (twins) would ride
down to Santo and skate. What a deal that was. We helped clean up at closing time.
It was very kind of them when there was not a lot to do.
Now for some names I can remember, many close friends that we had. One was a
boy name Whitley, his dad was a professional trapper. He had 1/2 of one lung from
TB but he did quite well as a trapper. A German family named Holub, two sons, and
they plowed all day and all night on a Ford tractor. The Marsdens I knew were
Travis (my age) and Robert Marcus (had a shoe store in Mineral Wells) also Nellie
and Audrey Hutson. Nellie and Travis Marsden married. (I saw Nellie in 2013 at a
birthday party at the Mineral Wells Senior Center). The Parsons lived on a ranch,
the Beatty family, the Thornton family also.
The store had a front drive way and two gas pumps, motor oil and "coal oil." The
gas pumps each had a handle-operated pump on the side by swinging the handle
pump back and forth; the gas filled a 5-gallon glass container at the top. It was
marked 12, 34, 5 gallons, most people only bought 2 or 3 gallons at, I believe, 15
cents a gallon. Oil I believe was 10 cents a quart.
The Motley family (Hermans parents); I believe Herman was at Tarleton College
when we moved to Lone Camp in 1938. Another family was named Castleman. Mr.
and Mrs. Lee were an elderly couple that invited all of us boys over on occasions
and they were like grandparents to us. A cedar cutter named Ed Mitchell and his
family had a son my age and also another family named Joe Chenault.
In early 1942 we inventoried out of the store to Mr. and Mrs. Jones. We moved
back to our farm near Lipan. In July 1942, my twin brother Charlie, at age 13, came
down with a brain infection and died four days later. There are no closer two people
than twins. I and my family were shocked at this loss.
So this is it, not near all but these are the vivid memories. We "twins" moved to
Lone Camp as boys and came home to the farm as teenagers. It was quite an experience. My parents retired in 1948, sold the farm and moved to Mineral Wells and
lived their lives there.

February 2015 NORTH TEXAS STAR Page 7

www.mineralwellsindex.com

February 2015 NORTH TEXAS STAR Page 8

Chasing Our Tales

into Young County

By SUE SEIBERT

oung County, Texas, has an extremely interesting and varied history. Today I am going
to talk about one of the families of Young County and its impact on the county today.
John Edward Morrison was born in Lafayette County, Miss., on Oct. 18, 1848. He
died in Graham, Young County, Texas, on April 5, 1926. He was the son of John Pinkney
Morrison and Martha Anna Kimmons. He married Annie Mary Edwards in 1870. She was
born on Nov. 7, 1848, in Tocopola, Lafayette County, Miss. The couple moved to Tarrant
County, Texas, in 1874, and Morrison bought land on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River in
Young County. He opened a blacksmith shop on the Graham town square in 1877. He
clerked for Beckham and Son Mercantile in Graham before joining with Spencer Boyd
Street Sr. in 1884 to create a new firm, Morrison and Street Family Grocery. He incorporated in 1885 becoming the J. E. Morrison Company, and dissolving the association
with Street in 1895, Morrison took his sons into partnership with him.
The company dealt in dry goods as well as groceries, furniture, hardware, and
farming implements. In addition to the store in Graham, there were branches in
Loving, Newcastle, Throckmorton and Olney.
In 1888 Morrison took on selling undertaking supplies, and the Morrison Funeral
Home was begun and, following his death, Adger A., his son, became the head of
the undertaking business. He expanded the company and built a new building in
1938. Today the funeral home is still operated by descendants of John Edward
Morrison.
Dorman Holub described Morrison: In the realm of domestic commerce in
Young County the name of John E. Morrison stands conspicuously prominent as a
leader and in synonymous with progress, energy, thrift and success. As a farmer
and merchant he has exercised that intense zeal and enthusiasm, which marks the
thrifty man of business and, as a citizen, his townsmen recognize in him a highminded, thorough-going, versatile and Christian gentleman. The first seven years
of his life in Young County, Mr. Morrison spent with stock and as a tiller of the
soil. Having been trained in youth and early manhood as a merchant the longing
for his first love possessed him and forced his return to the counter.
The firm of John E. Morrison and Company has been a growth from a modest
single enterprise to a vast establishment whose capital represents a modest fortune
and is the creature of an ambition which business limits alone can curb. Its directing
force has been a trained, methodical and sagacious mind and its sustaining power
has been a confiding and loyal public patronage.
John Edwards father, John Pinkney Morrison, came to Texas from Alabama and
Mississippi. He was born in Alabama on June 29, 1821, and died in Tarrant County,
Texas, on Jan. 4, 1877, and is buried in the Pioneers Rest Cemetery in Fort Worth. His
wife, Martha Anna Kimmons, was born in Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, North
Carolina, in 1823, and died in Graham, Young County, Texas, in 1879. She is buried in
the Oak Grove Cemetery in Graham. She was the daughter of John Kimmons, 1785-1848,
and Margaret Peggy Morrison, 1790-1868.
John Pinkney was the son of Robert Morrison of Dallas County, Ala. Robert was born in
1768 and went from South Carolina to Alabama, where he became a planter. He raised his
children in Fayette County, Ala., and they included Edwin, Harvey, William, Robert, Polly
Gilmer, Cynthia Orr, Elizabeth Gilmer, Jennie Waugh and John Pinkney. They were a ScotsIrish family.
John Pinkney was raised on his fathers Alabama plantation. He was educated privately and well.
He first married a Miss Underwood who died in Alabama. They had one daughter, Mary, who married a
Colonel Roane and died in Grenada, Miss.

February 2015 NORTH TEXAS STAR Page 9

Morrison with Studebaker

Berkshire, during the reign of King William 1, known as The Conqueror,
1066-1087. Surnames became necessary when governments introduced personal taxation. In England this was known as a poll tax. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to develop often leading
to astonishing variants of the original spelling.
Now back to the Morrison family. John Edward and Mary Annie had seven
children, Horace Lee (1868-1927), Edward Hall (1870-1932), Mary Myrtle
Hudson (1873-1950), Adger Adren (1875-1941), Martha Pearl Kay (18791969), Annie Fredonia Gilmer (1886-1979) and Elena Mayzelle McKinley
(1890-1957).
Among other activities, John Edward Morrison founded the Graham First
Presbyterian Church and was prominent socially as well as in business. He
was a progressive, energetic, thrifty and successful community leader. As a
farmer and merchant, he exercised zeal and enthusiasm as a high-minded,
thorough-going, versatile Christian gentleman.
John and his wife supported missionary work in Africa where, after
her death, he donated funds to build and equip a hospital in Africa in
her memory.
As I said, descendants of Morrison still operate the funeral home in
Graham. This family has helped Graham and Young County progress.

John Pinkneys second marriage was to Martha Annie, and their children
included Anna, who married Henry Davidson of Sugdon, Indian Territory;
Cordelia who died at age 9; Emma who died in Graham in 1900 as the wife of E.
B. Norman, and John Edward.
John Pinkney became a farmer and when the Civil War came he joined the
Confederate Army under cavalry leader Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Following the Civil War he worked in merchandising in Toccopola, Miss., for
eight years and then took his family to Texas, locating near Fort Worth, where
he went back to farming. In later years he moved on to Fort Worth where he
died in 1877. He was a Democrat and a staunch Presbyterian (Scots roots). He
was an elder in his church until his death. At that time Martha Annie moved to
Young County, where she died two years later.
I have to note an aside here regarding the Christian and surname Pinkney, as
stated in the Internet Surname Database: This unusual name is of old Norman
locational origin and is the anglicized version of the Norman French name
Picquigny in the Somme district. The placename is so called from a
Germanic personal name Pincino, of obscure derivation with the local suffix
acum, meaning settlement, village or town. The surname thus denotes someone from Pincinos village. The modern surname has two forms, Pinckney and
Pinkney. One Alice Pinckney was christened at St. Botolphs, Bishopsgate in
London on the 29th of September 1572 and the marriage of Charles Pinckney
and Ursulay Channon was recorded on the 29th of March 1654 at St. Benet,
Pauls Wharf, London. Also the London church registers record the christening
of Isabella, daughter of Theophilis Pinkey at Knights bridge in 1668, while at
St. Sepulchre, John, son of James and Ann Pinckney was christened on March
25th 1705. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that
of Ansculfus de Pinchergi, which was dated 1086, in the Domesday Book,

Morrison Company

February 2015 NORTH TEXAS STAR Page 10

JACOB RAPHAEL DE CORDOVA:

Texas Land Agent and Colonizer

BY JIM DILLARD

he picturesque bends and fertile valleys of the Brazos

River in Texas have attracted man for eons. Native
Americans camped along its banks and traveled its length
like a highway from the Llano Estacado to the Gulf of Mexico. It
is not surprising that many of the earliest settlers in Texas established their farms and ranches in the bottomlands of the lower
Brazos and set in motion the period of colonization of Texas during
the early part of the 19th century. Moses and Stephen F. Austin and
Sterling C. Robertson obtained large Spanish empresario land
grants from the government in Mexico to bring settlers to unoccupied lands drained by the lower Brazos which opened the floodgates for other land speculators and entrepreneurs including Jacob
De Cordova.
Jacob Raphael De Cordova (1808-1868) was born in Spanish
Town (near Kingston), Jamaica, on June 6, 1808, to Judith and
Raphael De Cordova. After his mother died at his birth, he was
sent to England where he was raised by an aunt. Jacob received a
good education and became fluent in English, Spanish, French,
German, and Hebrew. When his Jewish father, a Jamaican coffee
grower and exporter, moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and
became president of Congregation Mikveh Israel (Hope of Israel),
an American Jewish Institution founded in 1740) in 1820, Jacob
moved there. In 1826 he married Rebecca Sterling and took up the
trade of a printer, a trade his ancestors had been involved in since
the 16th century. A De Cordova in Spain printed de Vaca's report
on his exploration of Texas in 1527.
In 1834 Jacob moved to Jamaica where he and his brother Joshua
started the Kingston Daily Gleaner, a newspaper that still exists
today as The Gleaner. By 1836 he lived in New Orleans where he
worked as a shipper of commodities to Texas during its struggles
for independence from Mexico. He also served as Grand Master of
the Odd Fellows, a fraternal organization, and visited Texas after
the Battle of San Jacinto and installed members into the Odd
Fellows lodges, the first Odd Fellows lodges established outside the
United States at that time.
De Cordova settled in Galveston in 1839 and later Houston
where he was elected a state representative in the Second Texas
Legislature in 1847. After failing in his bid for reelection to a second term in 1849, he began traveling throughout Texas and found
his calling as a land speculator. At one time he owned script or title
to over one million acres of land. To promote his land sales in
Texas, De Cordova made speeches and lectures in New York,
Philadelphia, in other northern cities, and to cotton spinner associations in Manchester, England who he hoped to entice to invest in
Texas. His land agency, which was co-owned by his half-brother
Phineas De Cordova, was the largest land agency to ever operate in
the Southwest.
In 1848 when General Thomas J. Chambers sold two leagues of

Jacob De Cordova
Jacob De Cordova

February 2015 NORTH TEXAS STAR Page 11

land located at the site of the old Waco Indian village on the Brazos
River to John S. Sydnor of Galveston, Sydnor made a deal with De
Cordova to divide the property and sell it for one dollar per acre.
De Cordova employed George B. Erath to survey the land and lay
out a town that was named Waco Village. Town lots of an acre sold
for five dollars and nearby farm land for two to three dollars per
acre. Small acreages were set aside for schools, churches and commons. Shapley P. Ross was one of the early settlers on land offered
by De Cordova and operated a ferry across the Brazos River and
the town's first hotel. In 1856 the village was incorporated as the
town of Waco and a new courthouse was built.
De Cordova and Robert Creuzbaur compiled a topographic map
called the Map of the State of Texas in 1849 which served as the
benchmark for future maps of Texas. In 1850 a British settlement
was proposed in the area now known as Kimball Bend on the west
side of the Brazos in present Bosque County, three miles north of
Kopperl. It was a colonization project of the Universal Emigration
and Colonization Company of London for English colonists to settle there and produce grain to sell to nearby Fort Graham (Hill
County.) It was to be named Kent and developed as a manufacturing center with a navigation system via the Brazos River to the
Gulf of Mexico and world markets. In November 1850, De
Cordova accepted a down payment from Sir Edward Belcher on
27,000 acres of bottomland belonging to Richard B. Kimball, one
of De Cardova's partners. Belcher had also inspected a 60,000 acre
tract of land along Cow House Creek in Coryell County, with De
Cordova as his agent, to look at land previously purchased in
London by James Reilly. He found the land to be unsuitable for
settlement of a colony which was to be named New Britain. The
English settlers that eventually made their way from Galveston to
establish Kent were ill-equipped to survive along the Texas frontier
and within a year abandoned the colonization effort.
In 1850 De Cordova moved from Austin to five miles out of
Seguin on the old New Braunfels-Seguin Road in northwestern
Guadalupe County where he built a fine home he named Wander's
Retreat for his wife and five children. He surveyed the elevenleague grant of Antonio Esnaurrizar which he cut into several hundred farms and served as agent for their sale. To further entice emigrants to come to Texas and purchase land from his agency, De
Cordova wrote The Texas Emigrant and Travelers Guide Book in
1856. In 1858 he wrote the book Texas, Her Resources and Public
Men, the first attempt to write an encyclopedia of Texas. He and
his brother Phineas also published two early Texas newspapers, the
Texas Herald (a.k.a. De Cordova's Herald and Emigrant's Guide) at
Houston and the Southwestern American at Austin.
His attempt to build a power project on the Brazos River in
Bosque County in 1860 for textile mills to spin Texas grown cotton
failed. With the onset of the Civil War, De Cordova fell on hard
times as his real estate business and other enterprises floundered.
Jacob R. De Cordova died on January 26, 1868 and was buried in
the small town of Kimball, Texas, located twenty miles north of
Meridian in Bosque County. This once thriving community, which
was situated at a crossing on the Brazos River, was established in
1853-1854 and named for Richard B. Kimball of New York, who

February 2015 NORTH TEXAS STAR Page 12

Jacob De Cordova

settled there as part of De Cordova colonization scheme in the area. The Chisholm
Cattle Trail also crossed there and a ferry was operated on the Brazos River. The
town eventually declined and disappeared following construction and completion of
Lake Whitney in 1951.
In 1935, the body of Jacob De Cordova and his wife were moved to the State
Cemetery in Austin. De Cordova Bend on the Brazos River, located six miles southeast of Granbury in southern Hood and eastern Johnson counties, is named for him
as is De Cordova Dam which impounds Lake Granbury. De Cordova, Texas, a
gated residential community located on Lake Granbury also bears his name. Pecan
Plantation, a residential community located in De Cordova Bend, was established in
the late 1940s by Obadiah Paul Leonard of Leonard Brothers Department Store who
purchased 4,000 acres there to establish a pecan orchard known as Leonard Bend
Farm. After construction of the dam for Lake Granbury, the
Leonard family formed the Republic Land Company and
developed a residential community called Pecan Plantation.
Jacob De Cordova did not live to see the full development
and settlement of land along the middle Brazos and the hundreds of thousands of people who now live throughout the
region he once promoted for emigrants. One can only imagine his awe and amazement at the changes that have taken
place on the landscape. Like so many other land speculators
and promoters of emigration to Texas during the 19th century, De Cordova helped pave the way for people who came
for new beginnings to carve out their own lasting legacies.
(Sources: Texas State Historical Association Online (De
Cordova, Jacob Raphael; De Cordova, Texas; Wander's
Retreat; Lake Granbury; Colony of Kent; De Cordova Bend;
Emigrants Guide to Texas; Waco, Texas; Pecan Plantation;
Chambers, Thomas Jefferson; Cruezbaur, Robert; Kimball,
Texas; Lake Whitney Dam and Reservoir); Mikveh Israel and
Christ Church; and other internet sources.

De Cordova Map of Texas

February 2015 NORTH TEXAS STAR Page 13

Grandmother photos

By WYNELLE CAITLIN

n the early 1900s when the photograph accompanying this story was
taken, visiting photographers came through the countryside.
The family with their most valuable possessions posed for a
picture. The photographer would set the camera up on a tripod, get
behind it with a black cloth over his head, peer through it, adjust the
settings, caution everyone not to move and snap the shutter to capture
the image on a glass plate. The photo was processed in a dark-room,
a print was made and mailed to the family.
In the photo, my grandmother, Melissa Jane Powell, is holding her
horse. Next to her is Ola Powell, my mother's twin brother. Aunt
Bertie Lockhart has her hand on the shoulder of my mother, Dovie
Powell, who is holding her guitar. The family dog, who was guard
dog keeping varmints away, stands beside Uncle Robert Powell.
The family is standing in front of the log cabin where my mother
was born. My grandparents purchased it in the Squaw Mountain
community in the 1890s. The cabin had a lean-to kitchen.
The half-walled upstairs room, bedroom for the girls, was reached
by a steep narrow staircase.
Grandfather closed in half the front porch to make a room for the
boys. The schoolteacher boarded with them one year, sharing the
boys' 7x7 room.
The main room of the cabin served as my grandparents bedroom as
well as parlor if visitors came during cold weather. In warmer weather, the front porch served as parlor. Visible under the horse's belly is
the box where ashes from the fireplace or wood cookstove were
dumped. Water was poured over the ashes, then strained off to make
lye. Soap was made by heating the lye water with fat saved from
cooking meat.
The storm cellar can be seen behind the house. Canned fruits, vegetables and
meat were stored there on shelves. Root vegetables were stored in sand for winter use.
A rain barrel stands at the corner of the house. The only other source of water
the family had came from a flowing well half a mile distant. The boys

February 2015 NORTH TEXAS STAR Page 14

hitched a horse to a sledge holding a water barrel and drove to the well to get water for the family.
A stock tank had been dug and dammed up a quarter mile from the cabin for the horses and cattle. It was also where
the family laundry was done.
The room added to the front porch was torn away many years ago. The cabin, minus the lean-to kitchen, has been
moved to the grounds of the Jack County Museum in Jacksboro and restored. Visitors can even climb the narrow stairs
to see the bedroom which my mother shared with sisters until she married and left home.
My grandson, Brian Laliberte, is the great great grandson of Melissa Powell.
The other picture was taken recently in front of a barn nearing completion on the 4-acre farm Brian and his wife
acquired in Mansfield when he and his family moved there from Korea after he completed his third tour of duty as a
helicopter pilot.
The picture was made by placing the camera on a tripod, and setting the timer allowing the participants to pose
before the shutter clicked. Several attempts were made before all remained in place long enough to take the picture.
Shown with Brian are his most valued possessions. Princess Fiona is the burro. Next to her is their dog, Prissy. Tex,
the pup, jumping up on Brian, is now their 80-pound watchdog. Standing beside Brian are son Brandon, daughter
Reese and wife, Carri. In front of Carri are their chickens. Barely visible behind the rooster, is the dog, Suede.
Carri, Brandon, Prissy and Suede all went to Korea with Brian. Reese was born there.
Since the picture was taken, they have gotten a Jersey milk cow and three baby calves. Their flock of chickens has
increased. The chickens, raised from babies, are special pets of Brandon and Reese, who cuddle them and carry them
about. They made gifts of their
first eggs to their grandmother,
Karen Laliberte, and to me, their
great grandmother. When one the
hens became broody and wanted
to hatch the eggs, she was allowed
to do. The children got to watch as
the baby chicks pecked through
their shells to emerge.
Today, when Brandon or Reese
walks outside and calls, Hey
guys, the flock comes running.

February 2015 NORTH TEXAS STAR Page 15

Star Classifieds

14,500 copies distributed monthly in Parker, Palo Pinto, Hood, Johnson, Jack & Young counties. Get your ad seen call (940) 327-0838, (817) 645-8093, (817) 598-0857

215 Drivers

Bridgeport Tank Trucks LLC.

We Need Class A CDL
Drivers
for the following
locations in Texas:
* Sign On Bonus!!!
* Competitive pay
* Quarterly bonus
* Night differential & night
shift bonus
* Drive locally
* Paid vacation, paid holidays
* Safety Bucks
* 401K Match
* Medical, dental, life
insurance

455 Misc. Merchandise

CONSTRUCTION PIPE
Pipe & Sucker Rods
~~DELIVERY A VAILABLE~~
Varner Pipe, LLC.
3290 Ranger Hwy,
Weatherford, TX 76088
817-599-9590

MOVE

YOUR HOUSE
WITH THE CLASSIFIEDS

868

Cement &
Asphalt
Paving Repairs
Replacement Sealers

Yard Clean-up &

Hauling
Tree Trimming

REAL ESTATE
SPECIAL
Need to sell your home quickly?
Run a 30 word ad with a picture in the

Mineral Wells Index

for 3 months

Call Jim
If you want to make a
change, call the location you
are interested in:
Justin,Texas
(940)-577-3553
Bridgeport, Texas
(940) 626-9968
Jacksboro, Texas
(940) 577-7231
Cleburne, Texas
(817) 925-5154
Mertzon, Texas
(325) 242-5045

817-371-3991
REAL ESTATE SPECIAL

only

3 Months In The
Mineral Wells Index
With A Picture Of Your House
For Only *$200
(Based On 20 word Minimum)
Call Teresa or April
940-327-0838
A Value Of $498
Non-Refundable

200.00

No Realtors Allowed!

Call us today at

940-327-0838

Want to Downsize
Your Gas Guzzler?
Find your answer in the Classifieds!

To Place Your Ad Please Call 940-327-0838

AUTOCONX SPE
C

IAL

Place your au

to ad for ...

$45 for 1 m
onth
or $85 for 2
months
in print and
on our Nat

website. Incl

ional Autoco
nx
s. Call for det
ails!

udes picture

February 2015 NORTH TEXAS STAR Page 16