Streeter's Story: Growing up in Gonzales County

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Streeter Gilbert King wrote a series of letters to his three children, starting sometime in early 2003, documenting his early life’s story. The history that follows was adapted from those letters. Part 1 of 2.

My grandparents Frank and Polly King were sharecropping a small Salt Creek farm near Yoakum, when my father Henry was born in 1895. His sister Persia was already 2 years old, and his brother Jack would arrive two years later. Between carpentry jobs, 48-year-old Mississippi Confederate Army war veteran Frank King farmed a few acres with a yoke of oxen. He was a well-trained carpenter, had good tools and when sober, his work was more than satisfactory.

Yoakum had a cotton mill, three cotton gins, a cotton compress, several churches, a bank, one daily newspaper and two weekly newspapers that supported a population of more than 3,000. In 1897, the Kings moved to next-door Gonzales County where 29-year-old Polly Bullard King had grown up. The Bullard family still lived there.

Starting in Thompsonville

My father quit school in the fifth grade to do most of the farming on a Gonzales County poor sand farm near Thompsonville. At only 12, with Grandpa’s orders and a little help from Brother Jack, he managed to gather a few bales of cotton. He hired cotton pickers and loaded the picked cotton on a steel-rimmed wagon, pulled by a pair of mules to a Waelder cotton gin. Grandpa King, 60 years old with a drinking problem, drove the wagon and, after selling the cotton, would return home late at night with only the mules finding the way.

Sister Persia married Scott Vaughn in 1911. Not much else changed until 1920 when tragically, at only 23 and just a few months prior to insulin therapy, Brother Jack died of diabetes.

Love blossoms in Harwood

Seven miles West of Thompsonville, Harwood had a population of about 300 by the turn of the century. From its founding in 1874 until the 1940s, it was a rail center for the shipment of cotton, cattle and firewood. In the 1920s and ’30s, the town had two cotton gins that operated 24/7 during the peak cotton harvest.

With their six children, James and Emma Wright moved into Harwood’s Southern Pacific Railroad section house in 1918. Delphia was the Wright’s first born, followed by sibling girls Dicey and Jessie, and followed by boys Calvin, Martin and 1-year-old James. They previously lived in Liberty, where Delphia graduated from Vinton Louisiana High. A Sandy Fork Switch repair order brought Section Forman James Wright and family to Harwood.

The only activity for Harwood young people centered around church, that is, Sunday school, box suppers and revivals. Delphia, appearing somewhat older than her age 18, and Henry King, a handsome young man of 24 living on a Thompsonville farm, attended the same Sunday school classes. James Wright did not allow Delphia to have a boyfriend. However, one can imagine it didn’t take many Sunday’s before Delphia and Henry were meeting clandestinely. Very soon, letters and notes began to circulate between them.

As August 1920 approached, rendezvous and trysting places were becoming more difficult to locate. So, after church on Sunday night, Aug. 8, a decision was made. Marriage tomorrow. On Monday morning, Aug. 9, after arriving in Harwood by buggy, Henry caught the 7 a.m. “Calamity” train to Gonzales to get a marriage license. Returning to Harwood with the license, he met Delphia at Justice of the Peace W.A. Johnson’s office. They were married immediately.

After the brief ceremony, they took the buggy out to the tenant farm where Henry lived with his parents, 73-year-old Frank and 52-year-old Polly King. They would not be welcomed at the Wright’s section house. The small, rundown “Terrell Place” house they would live in was probably an old slave house: When the slaves were freed, the landowners, in order to work the land, engaged tenant sharecroppers. That was how the Kings made a living.

Grandpa Wright died on April 7, 1940. He was 72. Grandma Wright lived to be 99.

Life in Elm Grove

In 1921 or ’22, the Kings moved to a tenant farm near Elm Grove in next-door Fayette County. Henry had a pair of mules, a buggy and “old Bern” to pull it. He bought another horse and scraped together a few farm implements. These were good years, 1922, ’23 and ’24. Each year, the Fayette County farm produced 10-12 bales of cotton. Uncle Lloyd, Henry’s half-brother, moved into a rent house on the property, and Lloyd’s sons, Ted and Archie, picked cotton. Daughter Mattie helped Delphia around the house after I was born on Oct. 12, 1923. Henry is now Daddy, and Delphia is now Mama.

Daddy bought a Model-T touring car, showcase mules Kate and Jake (that cost more than the Model-T), a Sears Silver Tone phonograph and several Jimmy Rogers records, including “The Death of Floyd Collins.”

Farming near Waelder

But the good times wouldn’t last. The rain never came in 1925. Cotton planted never peeped out of the ground. A few stalks of corn reached the air and immediately died. I don’t know how, but Daddy got a job in Galveston, more than 200 miles from home, scraping and painting oil tanks for three or four months. By then, 78-year-old Grandpa King was getting an $18 per month State of Texas Confederate pension.

Good crops returned in 1926 and ’27, and in 1929, we moved to an excellent blackland farm north of Waelder, but the house was nothing more than a shack. In 1930, we moved again, across the road to a larger farm and a better house. Tom Alexander came to work for Daddy, and with Tom’s help, Daddy was able to plant more cotton. In addition to more fertile soil, the farm had a large pasture that supported a few cows. Daddy milked the cows, sold a few calves, and Mama churned and sold butter. Chickens provided eggs and fried chicken. Butchered hogs made smoked bacon and sausage. A vegetable garden planted in the spring gave us fresh summer vegetables as well as onions and potatoes stored for the year. While the nation was experiencing more than 25 percent unemployment, we fared well. We had shelter and plenty to eat.

In 1927, Mama’s sisters Dicey and Jessie were teaching Waelder first and second grades.

Plowing up the cotton crop

I was 9 years old in August 1933. Awakened by a loud motor noise, I crawled out of the pullout bed next to the kitchen table, pulled on my pants and ran out the back door. I saw Daddy talking to two men standing at the back of a flatbed Model-A Ford truck with “Gonzales County Commissioner Precinct Four” painted on the cab door. A red metal beam, slightly larger than a 2x4 and 12- or 14-feet long, with four “single trees” attached, lay on the truck bed. Daddy helped the men lift the red apparatus off the truck and place it alongside the cow pen fence. Daddy thanked the men as they drove away.

“What is that Daddy”? I asked, looking at the red beam.

“That,” Daddy said, “is a four-horse evener. Bill Jones uses it to hook-up four mules to the county’s road grader, but I’m going to plow up the cotton with it.” Just passed, President Roosevelt’s Federal Agricultural Adjustment Act, authorized, among other things, the federal government to pay farmers to destroy certain commodities.

The next day, Kate, Jake, Mack and Slim were harnessed and hooked-up to the evener single trees. With a middlebuster plow chained behind the evener, Daddy plowed up the cotton. With the cotton crop destroyed, the landlord decided he wanted cash rent for the coming year instead of the current year tenant arrangement. Daddy said that was unacceptable and moved us to a 100-acre blackland farm on a steep hill two miles west of Waelder, not far off the Southern Pacific Railroad mainline tracks.

There were many Saturday night shootouts on Wild West Waelder Main Street.

Highway 90 is built

1934 was a good year. Thirty-five bales of cotton were sold at a good price. Hired hand Tom Alexander had the cotton picked, ginned and sold while Daddy helped build state Highway 90 from Waelder to Harwood. For 42 cents per hour, he drug a fire hose behind a cement mixer wetting down burlap-covered green concrete. Mama fed the “hobos” that came to the house after getting kicked off Southern Pacific freight cars stalled on the Waelder Hill.

A few of the acres were sublet to a Mexican family: Sharecroppers, they used Daddy’s equipment and paid the rent with half of their crop. Money rent, that is cash per acre cultivated, was out of the question during the Great Depression.

Grandma King lived with us, but Grandpa King had passed away in 1931. He was 84.

The family moves to Dilworth

With all the cotton picked and sold, and the hay for the animals gathered and stacked, Daddy began looking for a farm to buy. The 1935 Federal Land Bank of Houston was holding paper on thousands of foreclosed Texas farms, one of which was near the Dilworth community, about 20 miles south of Waelder and sandwiched between Gonzales and Shiner.

Daddy bought the 183-acre Dilworth farm for $2,973, with $700 down and a five percent 20-year mortgage to be paid in semiannual January and June installments of $120 each. There was a substantial barn, three houses and a sulfur-polluted water well pumped by a Pacific Aeromotor windmill. There was no electricity or indoor plumbing for any of the houses — an “outhouse” was universal. Wood stoves were used for cooking and heating and kerosene (“coal oil”) lamps for lighting. The limestone hilltop house overlooked a red brick school house and the Dilworth Gin. Daddy was happy, he could farm his own land now.

On a freezing cold day in early January 1935, Daddy, Mama, Grandma King, nephew Ted King, hired hand Tom Alexander and I moved into the Dilworth hilltop house. Riding in a springless wagon with steel-rimmed wheels, pulled by a pair of mules over 20 miles of frozen rutted dirt roads was a bone-crushing experience. Moved in, there were things that needed attention. First, to remedy the drinking-water problem, Daddy built a mostly underground concrete cistern connected to gutters surrounding the hilltop house to catch rainwater.

In 1936 or ’37, Daddy demolished the small house down the hill for lumber to enclose part of the hilltop house back porch for a bedroom (“the shed room”). By 1944, he had added a bedroom and porch on the front of the lately painted white house. The third house, about one-quarter mile down the hill, served as a rental house until it was torn down in 1950.

Of the 183 acres, only 50 or so were cultivated for a cash crop of cotton, corn for the hogs and mules, and hay for the mules and a few cows. To make the twice-yearly mortgage payments, Daddy rented Phil Goodwin’s Peach Creek cotton farm; sharing the crop paid the rent.

The schooling years

I was 11 years old and would attend the Dilworth School, a substantial building housing four classrooms and a small auditorium. At one time there was a “teacherage” next door, that is, housing for the always-young single female teachers. That building had burned, with only the basement remaining.

Hanzalik, Kremlin, Kridler and Kuntschik kids were among my fifth grade classmates. By 1938, the Dilworth School only taught to the eighth grade. For my ninth, 10th and 11th grades, I rode a bus to Gonzales High School, a one-hour ride each way.

Something else happened in 1938. My brother, Henry Wayne, was born on Oct. 19.

Uncle Sam wants you

I graduated in the 11th grade from Gonzales High in 1941. I rented a room and got a gas station job in Gonzales. Then I got a job, which a station customer told me about, driving a dump truck hauling dirt for an Army Air Corps airport runway project west of San Antonio near Kerrville. When the job finished, I moved to Austin. But being classified 1A for the selective service draft, I was unable to find work.

Months before, I had attempted to enlist in the Marine Corps (my best friends, Harland Posey, J.C. Sullivan and Jack Leinweber, had joined the Marine Corps). I learned that one could not volunteer under age 21 without parental consent (Daddy and Mama would not consent), whereas one could be drafted into the “dog face army.”

I moved back to Dilworth to wait for the draft notice. I didn’t have to wait long. The Draft Board invited me to appear at 7 a.m. March 18, 1943, in the Gonzales County Courthouse Square to catch a Greyhound bus waiting there to transport me to San Antonio’s Fort Sam Houston for induction into the United States Army.

Next week: Streeter leaves Gonzales County for military service in World War II. Life in the military was an experience for Streeter, meeting men from all across the country, doing things the way only done in the military and finding that boot camp wasn’t as hard as working sun up to sun down on the farm. Streeter gets a new best friend and meets the love of his life, but the homestead is rocked with somber news.

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