Rocky Branch, Texas

I grew up in Rocky Branch, Texas, living about a mile north on U.S. Highway 259 from age 9 until I joined the Army at age 18.

The Texas State Historical Association says of Rocky Branch:

“Rocky Branch is on U.S. Highway 259 five miles northeast of Daingerfield in east central Morris County. It was named for the site of a sawmill and gristmill established in the late 1870s. A post office opened in 1890 and remained in operation until 1904. In 1896 the community had a population of fifty. By 1915 it had a population of 100, the sawmill operated by Nat Wright, and a general store operated by J. P. Forsyth. By the 1930s the population had declined to fifty and the businesses to two. From 1974 through 1986 the population of Rocky Branch was reported as 120. The community had two churches and a community center but no businesses. Nearby was the Primitive Baptist Church of Christ, which was organized in April 1854. The church obtained a building that year that was used as a meetinghouse and school and was still in use as a church in 1989. In 1990 the population of Rocky Branch was 135. The population remained the same in 2000.”

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hlr35

Anybody who lived in Rocky Branch back then would not give its location in relation to Daingerfield, but from Omaha (to the northwest) or Naples (to the northeast.)

Here is a link to a satellite image of the Rocky Branch area:

https://www.google.com/maps/@33.1115115,-94.7154932,5080m/data=!3m1!1e3

Those long rectangular silver structures are chicken houses, each with a few thousand chickens. My family had a chicken house. My father and I built the chicken house from scrap lumber he scrounged somewhere. Daddy and I dug post holes and put in posts and strung chicken wire to keep our 20 chickens where they belonged, in the chicken yard and away from the people yard. Chickens are nasty birds. If you have 20 with access to your yard, you will have chicken droppings all over the yard.

Our chickens laid enough eggs for two adults and five kids. Each hen had her own nest, built from scrap lumber or apple boxes taken apart and then rebuilt and filled with grass or hay.

The place we lived was a bit north of the second grouping of chicken houses, the four at an angle to Highway 259. The house that sits there now is about three times larger than the house we lived in. Ours was a two-bedroom, one bath. All five of us kids slept in one room – my three sisters in one bed and my brother and me on a couch that let down into an uncomfortable bed. Around my 14th birthday, my parents moved the dining room pieces into the kitchen, giving Bill and me our own one-bed bedroom.

The house was the first we lived in with indoor plumbing.

A little farther north on Highway 259 is County Road 4212, Spring Hill Road, which leads through Spring Hill Cemetery. That’s where my parents are buried.

Grits and bootleg whiskey

I was born and raised in Northeast Texas, but I never had grits until in the Army. I guess my father didn’t like grits. That’s the only reason I can figure for my mother never serving grits. She was from a farm family, sharecroppers for a time until her father saved enough and bought his own place northwest of Maud, Texas. Her family raised most of their own food – vegetables and a hog a year. They had a smokehouse, too.

Before joining the Army at age 18, I had been out of Texas one time, and that not by much. One Saturday while visiting my father’s parents in New Boston, Daddy asked me if I wanted to go to Texarkana with him and Grandpa. You bet, I said, and got in the back seat of the car. Texarkana was a city, must have had 25,000 people then. I was about 12 at the time and had never been to a town bigger than New Boston, so a 15-mile trip to Texarkana was a big deal.

Here is what I remember from the trip: Daddy drove, Grandpa was in the passenger seat. We got in Texarkana, and Daddy drove to a liquor store on the Arkansas-side of State Line Avenue. Grandpa went into the store and returned a couple minutes later with a bottle in a brown paper bag. Daddy drove back to New Boston.

From later conversation by my father, I decided the Texarkana trip was unusual for Grandpa’s whiskey buying. Most of the time, he got his whiskey from local bootleggers. All of Texas was dry then – no alcohol sold legally – which gave additional income to legal sales in Arkansas and illegal whiskey in Texas and Oklahoma. What some people did, other than operate stills in the woods, was go to Texarkana, Arkansas, and buy many bottles and sell the whiskey from home.

Daddy said he did that one time. He got a couple dozen pints of whiskey in Arkansas, then drove home to Maud. He said he was exceptionally nervous and wondering when he would be stopped by the highway patrol or alcohol bureau. Had that happened, it is quite possible he would have spent time in jail, lost his job, and Momma and us kids living on handouts from relatives, none of whom had anything to spare.

Before September 1964, that whiskey run to Texarkana, Arkansas, was my one and only trip outside Texas, a few hundred feet. When enlisting in the Army, I went from Rocky Branch to Texarkana and then by bus to Shreveport to Fort Polk, Louisiana. A long way beyond a short trip for Grandpa’s whiskey, a bus ride that eventually led to Korea, Maryland, Vietnam and Maryland again.