Eight Miles From Nowhere

By Frances Thomas

Imagine the isolation of a place where, within several miles of home, there were no people other than immediate family-no modern conveniences, telephones, television, internet, newspaper or mail delivery, supermarkets or shopping malls. Imagine a terrain sometimes more hospitable to mesquite trees, rattlesnakes, and jackrabbits than to human inhabitants. Imagine hot, dry weather that could change abruptly as a blue norther rolled in across the plains, dropping temperatures thirty or forty degrees before nightfall. Could you thrive in such an environment? The author did, and she reflects on these vicissitudes with both nostalgia and humor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781643001661

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From Tennessee to Texas

To explain how my father came to settle at Anarene, Texas, requires that I share some family history. When I adopted genealogy as a hobby about thirty years ago, I anticipated that everyone else would be as excited about it as I am. With time, I’ve come to understand that is not always the case. So while relating here some necessary background information about my ancestors, I shall try to stifle myself as Archie Bunker so often admonished Edith to do on the television sitcom All in the Family .

My paternal grandparents were Rebecca and George Findley Martin. He was born in 1834 (one hundred years before my birth), and he died about three months before reaching the ripe old age of ninety-six. Rebecca (Rushing) Martin was born in 1839 and lived until 1925. I never had the privilege of knowing either of them. I can only try to imagine what they were like by searching those faces captured in ancient photographs, which now hang on my bedroom wall.

George and Rebecca Martin were parents of eleven children: Alice Eudora (1861–1937), James Milton (1862–1946), William Fielding (1864–1965), John Wesley (1866–1922), Mary Belle (1868–1968), Robert Lee (1871–1878), Pinkney Austin (1873–1925), Eliza Ann (1875–1908), Millard Franklin, my father (1877–1946), Ella May (1880–1968), and Fannie Othella (1882–1975). All the children except the two youngest were born in Decatur County, Tennessee.

My aunt Belle said that the family lived near a wide but fairly shallow river. I’ve learned since that it was the Beech River that flows into the Tennessee River. About 1877, the year of my father’s birth, there was a terrible flood that inundated the Martin place. As a result, the whole family came down with the fever.

As soon as most of the family had recovered sufficiently and as soon as the necessary arrangements could be made, the Martins, accompanied by other family members, began a journey that would span about four years from departure to destination. The saga of that period in their lives sounds as if it could have been part of the movie How the West Was Won, beginning with the loading of their covered wagons onto a steamboat on the Tennessee River.

Many years later, Aunt Belle related part of the story of their trip to a newspaper reporter who was interviewing her prior to her ninety-ninth birthday.¹ She recalled how the captain shouted All aboard! and the children almost scattered in terror because they thought they were going to have to float down the river on a board. Discovering bales of peanuts on deck where they could pick at them provided a calming distraction.

The steamer took them up the Tennessee River to Paducah, Kentucky. From there, they followed the Ohio River to Cairo, Illinois, and the convergence of the Ohio with the Mississippi. Heading south on the Mississippi, they came to the vicinity of New Madrid, Missouri, where their wagons and personal belongings were unloaded. The remainder of their trek would be overland.

They tarried in Missouri with relatives for about a year, during which time little seven-year-old Robert Lee died from lingering effects of the devastating fever that had afflicted his entire family. He was buried in, or near, Doniphan in Ripley County. With heavy hearts, the family pressed on toward Texas via covered wagons with Uncle Sam Westbrook, husband of my grandmother’s sister, acting as wagon master.

Arriving in Texas, they spent a short while in Denton County but were in Clay County in time to be listed on the 1880 federal census. My aunt Ella was born there in a log cabin near Henrietta. Apparently, Sam Westbrook decided to remain in Clay County at least for the next ten years, because that’s where he was enumerated on the 1900 federal census.

Finally, for the Martins, the journey ended at a place in Lamar County located about five miles southwest of the county seat of Paris. This is where the baby of the family, Fannie Othella, was born in 1882. Why that specific site was selected is a mystery to me, but maybe the land looked good to my grandfather, who had always earned a living by tilling the soil. A small community was established there in 1886 and given the unusual name of Ambia because of the amber-colored streams of tobacco juice spat by chewers gathered at the local store.² Old-timers referred to it as Amby. In 1890, the population was reported to be twenty-three. Surely more than half of those had to be Martins or Martin kin.

The family’s first home in Lamar County was a farm rented from Sheriff John Goss. The sheriff apparently took a liking to my grandfather, telling him to use the property as he pleased and granting permission for him to cut timber on the place for construction of any additional outbuildings that he might need. Later, my grandfather purchased the Rollins farm at Ambia, which had previously been owned by Billy Campbell, father-in-law of the Martins’ oldest daughter, Alice. The rich dark soil in northeast Texas was good for farming. With a large family to help with the labor, a comfortable living and pleasant memories were made.

In Aunt Belle’s 1967 interview with the newspaper reporter, she reminisced about the parties and social life in the little community of Amby. She fondly recalled that back then, she drove a buggy pulled by her favorite horse, Steve, and that she had to train him to accept the newfangled autos.³ Aunt Belle was a very forward-looking little lady. I suspect that she would have enjoyed driving around in a Model A Ford (or possibly even a red convertible) if only she’d had the opportunity.

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From Ambia to Anarene

A little more than twenty years after settling in Ambia, the Martin family moved west to Archer County, possibly to be near their oldest daughter, Alice Campbell, who was in frail health. George Findley Martin purchased 1280 acres of grassland adjoining property belonging to his son-in-law, Richard Campbell. I do not know the exact reason why this move did not become a permanent one for my grandparents, but they only stayed for a year or two. Maybe they missed other family members who had remained in Lamar County, or perhaps their intention from the beginning was to stay just long enough to help their ailing daughter and to see their two unmarried sons become established with places of their own.

In my possession is a yellowed warranty deed dated September 20, 1907, by which G. F. Martin of the county of Lamar, state of Texas, sold to M. F. Martin of the county of Archer, state of Texas, a 320-acre tract of land, being part of the 1,280-acre survey. The purchase price was $1,600. When I studied it closely, I was astonished at the legal description of the tract.

The land hereby conveyed being more particularly described by metes and bounds as follows: Beginning at the N.E. corner of the original Grooms survey, on the S. line of the Jefferson County School land…

Jefferson County School land! I wonder if my dad even knew where Jefferson County was. By a strange twist of fate, some forty-three years later, his widow would teach in Jefferson County schools, and eventually, both of his daughters would make our homes here as well.

After Pinkney Austin Martin purchased the other half section of land from his father, he began to develop a plan to build a house on it. How he chose to do that seems unusual enough in today’s world that I think it warrants inclusion in this writing. Some of this information I learned a few years ago from my cousin Robert Martin; some of it is the result of my own research.

By 1908, Sears, Roebuck and Company was offering their Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans, which listed and pictured a total of forty-four building designs in prices ranging from $360 to $2,890.⁴ The catalog itself was free, but full blueprints and a list of building materials for a house would cost a person one dollar. When the customer followed through with an order, the dollar was credited to his account.

Uncle Pink selected one of those designs and placed his order. The kit he bought included precut framing timbers, millwork, nails, paint and varnish, shingles, clapboard siding, windows, screens, doors, and hardware. Also included was a seventy-five-page leather-bound manual with specific instructions for assembly. When all these materials arrived at Anarene by train, they had to be hauled to his place by wagon. I’m sure my father helped with that, as well as with construction.

I do not know the total cost of the home, which Uncle Pink finished building about 1909 and into which he moved his wife and baby son. I remember it as an attractive, two-storied frame house, painted white, with a modest amount of gingerbread trim. The front door had an oval glass with a design etched around it.

My father, without a mail order kit, took a bit longer to build his ranch house. The 1910 census of Archer County shows him living with Pink A. and Maude Martin and their two young sons, Robert and Raymond. During that time, he was paying court to a young woman from one of the pioneer families in the area. Plans for his house had been made, and large stacks of building materials were just waiting for construction to begin. Various members of the Martin family and the family of the young lady gathered at the site for a picnic lunch, possibly for the purpose of announcing an engagement.

My cousin Robert, who was a young child at that time, remembered that the women of both families had placed tablecloths on stacks of lumber and that there was a bountiful spread of food. On that day, something happened that caused cancellation of any plans there might have been for a wedding. My cousin didn’t know what had caused the rift. Construction of the M. F. Martin house continued to completion, but it would be more than twenty years before he would share it with a wife.

My grandfather retained ownership of one section of Archer County land, but in 1907, he gathered his wife and three daughters and returned to northeast Texas. The 1910 federal census enumerated the family at Ambia and gave the following information: George F. Martin, white male, head of the household, seventy-five years old, born in Tennessee, married for fifty years; wife, Beckie Martin, white female, seventy years old, born in Tennessee, married for fifty years, mother of eleven children, nine of whom were living at that time; single daughters, Belle, Ella, and Fannie, ages forty-two, thirty, and twenty-eight respectively.

When my grandparents and aunts went into town to shop or attend church, they rode in a surrey. The route from Ambia to Paris took them by a recently built, two-story white house, set back an ample distance from the street. Clearly visible across the rolling farmland, the whole place captured my grandfather’s fancy. He discovered that he could purchase it, and sometime