tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3576716365575919550.post5222011599989659405..comments2023-10-03T18:30:42.773-05:00Comments on Meta Watershed: REQUIEM FOR A TINY TOWNMaggie Jochildhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07577090500862823864noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3576716365575919550.post-47236601074009579972013-03-25T07:49:41.986-05:002013-03-25T07:49:41.986-05:00yowell rd named after the yowell family,, lots of ...yowell rd named after the yowell family,, lots of survivors including monte yowell of bowie texas and john yowell of hollis, ok. good peopleAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3576716365575919550.post-86553993576660178472009-04-12T10:21:00.000-05:002009-04-12T10:21:00.000-05:00Dinah-this is Lydia.The human looked at a map and ...Dinah-this is Lydia.<BR/><BR/>The human looked at a map and says there's a Yowell Rd near Stoneburg. It must've been named by a cat.<BR/><BR/>I yowell when I want foods.little gatorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12359345204074482888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3576716365575919550.post-28296150269060797672009-04-12T03:10:00.000-05:002009-04-12T03:10:00.000-05:00Yeah, I figured it was Tarpley. Although I did no...Yeah, I figured it was Tarpley. Although I did not know it when I lived there, Tarpleys and Camps in the vicinity are/were likely cousins of mine (via the Atkins connection) with a common ancestor back somewhere around the time of the American Revolution. Here's the scoop:<BR/><BR/>One Thomas Camp, b. 1716 in Virginia, married twice and had a total of 26 known children. With his first wife, Winifred Starling, he had 14 children, including my __ grandfather, Benjamin Camp. He married again when he was around 45 to a young Irish immigrant, Margaret Carney, and had a dozen more children. Of the 26 Camps he fathered, almost all of whome survived to adulthood, and only 5 were girls. He was also an active Patriot of the Revolution, with his house burned by the Tories and five of his sons (including my ancestor) fighting at the Battle of King's Mountain (which may well be the battle that won the American Revolution). Because of his history and the kajillion Camp ancstors, this line is extremely well-researched and there's an annual Camp ancestors reunion, newsletter, etc.<BR/><BR/>Thomas Camp's great-aunt Mary Camp married James Tarpley. Their Tarpley children, cousins to Thomas's offspring, married at least four of Thomas's children, collapsing the lineage several times. (Low population, small county in Virginia, plus who knows what else going on.) The Camps and Tarpleys often appear in the same vicinity ever since.<BR/><BR/>Winifred Starling's maiden name, often corrupted to Sterling, is also handed down through the Camp ancestry as a first name. This is where it gets really interesting to me: One of the distant descendants, Sterling Van Buren Camp, lived near Stoneburg at the same time as my Atkins grandparents and great-grandparents, but apparently did not know they were cousins from way back when. Sterling used he middle initial V. and told everyone it "didn't stand for anything" which was a fairly common practice; I guess he didn't like the President he was named for. Anyhow, my great-grandmother Sarah Lee Armstrong married Samuel Mordecai Turner, and the young couple were close friends to Sterling V. Camp. They had three children before dying young. Their oldest, Hettie, married Bill Atkins and had my mother. But their second child was a boy, and in honor of their friend they named him Roy V. (initial only) Turner. He died as a child from TB. Their youngest child, Effie, is the only one who lived into old age, and when I told her about the kinship between the various lines, she was astonished and thrilled. <BR/><BR/>This kind of "finding your kin" thing happens very often when you study genealogy. I think family culture makes you predisposed to like certain folks, who "feel like home", and of course the math of descendancy also plays a role -- we are ALL much more closely related than we realize.<BR/><BR/>Still, it was an enormous shock to me when, years after I'd broken up with the high school history teacher I co-mothered a daughter with, a Yankee from Illinois, I discovered she and I were 11th cousins, having a common ancestor in the late 1790's. And her line had also been in Montague County at one point, unknown to her. Passing strange.Maggie Jochildhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07577090500862823864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3576716365575919550.post-90390178918460832312009-04-11T20:41:00.000-05:002009-04-11T20:41:00.000-05:00pS; Rick Tarpley, not Tapley.pS; Rick Tarpley, not Tapley.little gatorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12359345204074482888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3576716365575919550.post-9288205421860500052009-04-11T19:49:00.000-05:002009-04-11T19:49:00.000-05:00Wow, little gator, your research was extremely hel...Wow, little gator, your research was extremely helpful. In particular, the photo slide show from KDFA-TV was revelatory (and yeah, it sounds like they exaggerated a little, though the loss there is still enormous). In that slideshow, photo # 1 shows the Baptist Church still standing (with scaffold in front) and behind it, to the right, is the intact high school and gymnasium -- the same school four generations of women in my family attended (though it looked very different back then, it's been bricked over). Photo #2 shows the sign as you come into town from the south. The crossroads visible ahead leads R to the school and church, L to the corner where we lived. At that insertion of the two-lane and dirt road, on the left, was the gas station/grocery, which is later identified in these photos as a 'general store'. A better shot of the gym is seen in photo #11. In photo #24 is the gym and to its right the original high school, now in red brick. Photos #29, 27, 23, and 21 show the remains of the gas station/grocery, which is now apparently owned by someone other than who had when we were there. When big city cousins came to visit and asked what we did for fun, I used to joke "Let's walk down to the gas station, maybe somebody needs a tire changed!" with excitement in my voice. Used to crack my mother up. I actually did hang out there a lot, sitting on top of an chest-style Coke machine (where you slide the bottles along a metal rack, suspended by their necks, to the end of the row which is released by a coin drop). I'd listen to the stories the gassy old men told over and over. <BR/><BR/>One day I was there, with my friend Dale (whose mother Margie had been my Mama's best friend her entire life, and whose grandfather Tobe had been my grandfather Bill's best friend his entire life), when an elderly couple from out of state drove up, looking for help locating a cemetery where the woman's ancestors were buried. Interestingly, I was the only one in the place who knew exactly where the cemetery was, because of my incessant hiking around on private property -- it was not accessible by road at that point. Known as the Adora Cemetery, it was at the hub of a community that was eventually destroyed by Comanche raids, but it holds the gravestone of Stoneburg's founder, Col. I.M. Stone. Dale and I got in their fancy car with this couple, directed them through bobwire gates and across pastures to as close as we could get, and helped more or less carry the old lady to the cemetery, which was enormously overgrown and snaky. Still, we managed to find the graves shew as looking for. She broke down and wept. The old man told us she had terminal cancer, only a few months to live, and we'd given her closure. He took our photo and later mailed it to me; I still have it somewhere. <BR/><BR/>Not far, if you travel by foot, from that location is a cattle tank which is fed by a natural spring, icy cold and delicious. I was always trying to get my friends out on the land, because I was in love with it, the scrubby woods, the cottonmouthy-creeks, the rolling hills. One summer day I persuaded four girls to hike out across ranchland with me, slipping through fences and avoiding belligerent cows, until they were bitterly complaining of the heat. We stumbled across this spring, and drank gratefully. We sat in the shade a while, trying to get up enough nerve to brave taking a dip in the cattle tank (water moccasins in there or not, that was the question), when a girl at the edge yelled "Hey, there's something down in here!" We all began backing away, but she plunged her arm in and came out with an old bottle full of Coke, the small size that were common when I was little. The lid was a little rusty but it was otherwise intact. She kept diving and came up with four more. I remember it raising the hair on the back of my neck, this miraculous appearance of Co-Cola in the middle of nowhere. One of us had a pocketknife and we got the lids off, and it was like nectar, sweet and frigid. We told the story around, and eventually found out that the father of a friend of mine who was frequently in trouble with the law had hid out by that tank one spring for a few weeks, avoiding arrest. We theorized he'd put the sodas into the tank to cool off and either forgot about them or got nabbed before he could drink them.<BR/><BR/>I'm sorry about the map issue. My version of the JPEG is quite large, but it doesn't blow up as much when I click on it from the website. You can try dumping it into Paintbrush or any other graphics file and zooming in on it that way. <BR/><BR/>I recognized Fred Blackwell's house. It belonged to someone else when I lived there, who is now long dead, I'm sure. I know that family history well, and Blackwell is not one of their names, although he could have married in. Some of the other names are familiar, but they are newer folks. I actually use the old family names from this region quite a bit in my novel for surnames, they have such a lovely sound to me.Maggie Jochildhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07577090500862823864noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3576716365575919550.post-76117518683583787852009-04-11T09:31:00.000-05:002009-04-11T09:31:00.000-05:00One last comment: even enlarged, I couldn't read y...One last comment: even enlarged, I couldn't read your map well enough to find the places you named.little gatorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12359345204074482888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3576716365575919550.post-66169880053495495452009-04-11T09:29:00.001-05:002009-04-11T09:29:00.001-05:00This comment has been removed by the author.little gatorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12359345204074482888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3576716365575919550.post-30426863429171916712009-04-11T09:29:00.000-05:002009-04-11T09:29:00.000-05:00I just searched Google News for "Stoneburg" and fo...I just searched Google News for "Stoneburg" and foudn 89 articles. BY the time I was done it has jumped to nearly 2000.<BR/><BR/>Here's what I foudn:<BR/><BR/>3 known deaths:<BR/>an unknown woman and former TV reporter Matt Quinn amd his wife Cathy. Their son Chris is in fair condition with burns. Apparently the unknown woman and the Quinns were trying to save their pets.<BR/><BR/>Some buildings survived, including the school, the Baptist church/community center, and a few homes.<BR/><BR/>Former high school teacher Carl Bullinger and his wife Anna lost their store but still have their home.<BR/><BR/>Laura Reno and her father lost their feed store.<BR/><BR/>Rick Tapley's house survived.<BR/><BR/>Other known survivors: Shirley and Wayne Porter, Jack Beasley.little gatorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12359345204074482888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3576716365575919550.post-6366669696404563872009-04-11T09:01:00.000-05:002009-04-11T09:01:00.000-05:00http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles...http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/SS/hns90.html<BR/><BR/>Article below mentions Fred Blackwell who had a 1920's brick home.<BR/><BR/>http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6369075.htmllittle gatorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12359345204074482888noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3576716365575919550.post-88461398232883233422009-04-11T08:52:00.000-05:002009-04-11T08:52:00.000-05:00They may have exaggerated. This links shows a big ...They may have exaggerated. This links shows a big tan nuilding appartenlty untouched, and a white church with scaffolding in front and a small shed nearly.<BR/><BR/>http://www.the33tv.com/pages/photo_gallery_landing/?galleryID=18605#157577little gatorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12359345204074482888noreply@blogger.com