Sims Family Tree & Branches

In 1943, my father bought a 47 acre ranch and farm east of the Central community, about 17 miles out of Texarkana. The house had burned, but there was a well and an old log barn. There was some open pasture land, two creeks ran through the property, and there were quite a few acres of timber. The land was not fenced, but in those days, most ranchers went by the "open range" philosophy and let the cattle graze on any unfenced land. Our cattle grazed in the timbered land behind our property, which was owned by the Sturgis Lumber company. This land had been logged over, and there was quite a lot of open space and grass among the timber.

Since there was no house, we lived in a tent, which was set up near the well. We lived in the tent for several months while Dad built a house. I was six and my brother Kenny was two. Four people in a one-room dirt-floor tent must have been quite a situation, but Arkansas weather is warm in the Spring and Summer and I don‘t remember any real difficulties. It was probably an adventure for me since it was so different from living in town. The house was built from scrap lumber as much as possible. Dad tore down old buildings for people in exchange for the lumber. Other lumber came from cutting trees on the property. The local sawmill would cut the logs into boards for a percentage of the boards. The house was a square bungalow, with four rooms, each 10 by 12; a living room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms; with porches front and back. There were no closets and no bathroom. Doors connected all the rooms so one could make a circle through the house. Although only 480 square feet, it was typical of houses in the area and newer and better than many of the houses of our neighbors. The roof was covered with roll roofing, and the outside of the house was unfinished lumber. Later, the outside was sided with tarpaper and asphalt roll material like the roof, except that the siding was textured and colored to look like brick.

Life in rural Arkansas in the 1940s was not much different than life had been in the late 1800s or early 1900s. There was no electricity, no telephones, and no plumbing. The roads were dirt and gravel. Heating and cooking was done on wood stoves. Water was drawn from the well in a bucket. Dad rigged a frame and pulley over the well and the bucket was lowered on a rope. I was afraid of falling into the well, but after a few months Dad built wooden sides around the well, about three feet high, and hung a pulley to lower and raise the bucket. When we first lived there, Mom and Dad would use the well as a sort of cooler, hanging jugs of milk so that they were suspended in the cool water. Later on, they bought an ice box, and blocks of ice were purchased from an ice truck that served the rural families. It was a treat when the ice truck came, because the ice man would give us kids a small chunk of ice to eat.

There was a lot of pine timber on the land, so one of my early chores was to split firewood for the cook stove. This was a cast-iron stove with a firebox between the oven and the reservoir for hot water. The wood had to be split into sticks roughly 2 by 2 inches to burn efficiently. I would split the wood with a hatchet and haul it on my little wagon. Wood for the heating stoves was much larger, the rounds of wood were just split into quarters. The outhouse was a distance from the house and from the well, out near the cattle pens, but us kids were allowed to pee off the back porch at night because we were afraid to go to the outhouse in the dark. Some families used a chamber pot, but I don’t remember us having one. Lighting was by kerosene lamps. Mother washed clothes in galvanized wash tubs with a scrub board. For clothes that were really dirty, she would boil the clothes in a large cast iron wash pot that hung over a wood fire. The ashes from the wood were leached with water which was then mixed with lard and boiled to make lye soap. We used the same galvanized wash tubs to take baths, heating the water on the wood stove. The iron wash pot was also used as a cooking pot when there was a big family fish fry.

Transportation was mostly by horse and wagon. Most rural people were in the same situation. I remember going to Texarkana to buy groceries and supplies. There was a vacant lot on East Broad Street set aside for the horses and wagons. They were not allowed in the true downtown area. This was near Delaughter’s grocery store which is where all the poor farmers shopped. Delaughter’s store was probably typical of the times. Except for canned goods, most everything was sold in bulk, by the pound. I remember big barrels of flour and meal. Even crackers were sold in bulk. Pickles were in large jars or crocks sitting on the counters. Cured meats, such as ham and bacon, hung from the ceiling.

There were chores for everybody, but life on the farm was good. Us kids had freedom to roam, play with the animals, fish in the creeks, and play and explore in the woods. Across the road from our house was a timbered area also owned by the Sturgis Lumber Company. It had been logged earlier and now the timber was being allowed to grow back up. The abandoned logging roads were great trails to explore. Sometimes, we would find flint arrowheads in the woods and particularly near the creeks. It was easy to imagine that there were Indians lurking in the woods, ready to be repelled by us cowboys, with our toy pistols and stick horses.

For Christmas we generally got one toy each, a few clothes and a little fruit and candy. So we made our own toys. We rode stick horses made from old broom sticks or tree branches. We pushed old auto tires and made car noises. We made crude cars and trucks from blocks of wood. Kenny and I invented things to play with. We made bow and arrow sets from hickory limbs. We also made whistles from hickory limbs. We made swings from burlap feed bags partly filled with corn or cottonseed. We also made tire swings. The old log barn was a favorite place to play. It had a loft and we spent many hours using the barn as a fort, fighting off the Indians or the Germans, depending on which movie we had seen most recently. Dad stored hay there for the cattle and horses to eat in the winter. We would rearrange the hay bales to make tunnels and caves.

Around 1944, mother got a job assembling artillery shells at the Lone Star munitions plant in Texarkana. We finally got a car. A Ford Model A sedan was bought for her to drive to work. This was called ‘Leaping Lena’ because of the way the four cylinder engine ran. Later, mother was able to buy a black 1939 Ford Standard two-door sedan, which was much more reliable. When World War II ended, we drove into Texarkana to be a part of the celebrations. I don’t remember much of a celebration except for people driving up and down Broad Street blowing the horns of their cars.

Regular family get-togethers and pot-lucks were held during the summer months. These were mostly Sims relatives (including Beaufords and Chandlers), but Ted and Lois Shelton and other Shelton and Smith relatives were often included. Many of these family gatherings were held at our house as we had a large yard and large shade trees. We would also go to Old River Lake for Sims family outings. These usually included a fish fry if fishing luck had been good. My father was often the cook and he would cook the fish in a cast iron wash pot that was otherwise used for washing clothes.

By 1946, we had upgraded to using butane to heat and cook. We still used kerosene lamps and an outhouse. We got a wind-up Victrola and a few 78 rpm records. We had a battery powered radio, but radio listening was restricted because of the cost of batteries. Favorite radio shows were Inner Sanctum, Jack Benny, Amos and Andy, and Let’s Pretend. The radio had to have an antenna that was a long wire stretched between masts at each end of the house roof. Since this was something that might attract lightning, it had to be grounded with a lightning rod that was taller than the antenna masts. Games with cards, checkers, dominoes and chinese checkers were other favorite pastimes.

The school and the churches were the focus of most community activities. Church was an opportunity to see other families and friends. Sometimes I was allowed to go to "vacation bible school" with my cousins. This was at the Baptist Church. My mother was a member of the Church of Christ which was very fundamentalist and did not offer any activities for children except for Sunday School. The Baptists were much more liberal and even had a piano accompanying the singing of hymns. The Church of Christ was very strict, and since a piano was not specifically mentioned in the bible, they thought it was wrong to have one in church.

The school year was oriented toward farming. School started in mid-September and ended by May 10 or earlier. Most rural kids worked in the fields, starting at about eight years of age, sometimes younger. Pay was generally one dollar per day, and the days could be pretty long in the Summer. Most farmers still used horses and mules to plow the fields. By the time I was ten or eleven, I was big enough to handle a horse or mule pulling a plow, and so I worked in the fields. Planting corn and cotton was done by hand. First you would plow a furrow, then you would walk along the furrow with the seed in a bag supported by a strap over your shoulder. You would drop the seeds into the furrow, spacing them the correct distance for the plants. Finally, you would come back with the horse or mule and plow, and plow so that the furrow was covered and became a ridge where the plants would grow. The young plants had to be tended; mostly cutting or pulling the weeds that would take soil nutrients from the plants and may shade the plants.

Cotton was the major cash crop, even for small farms. The cotton was planted in the early Spring. As soon as the plants came up, it was time to "chop cotton." Chopping cotton actually meant using a hoe to cut the weeds and to thin the cotton plants to leave only the healthiest ones. Farm labor generally paid a dollar a day for the kids. Adults were only paid three dollars a day. By the end of Summer, the cotton plants were three to four feet high, the cotton bolls had dried and burst open, and the fields turned white. The cotton was ready for picking. Older kids could pick cotton, but most farmers didn’t want kids under about ten years old as pickers because they couldn’t pick enough to keep up. Picking cotton was paid by the pounds picked. It took a fast person to pick over a hundred pounds a day at 3 cents a pound, to make three dollars a day. Cotton was picked into a cotton sack, a heavy canvas sack with tar-coated bottom to keep the cotton clean. The sack had a strap to go over your shoulder, and you drug the sack along behind you as you picked. Kids picked into a six-foot sack; grown-ups into a nine-foot sack. When the sack was full, you carried it to the wagon, where it was weighed and the cotton dumped into the wagon. Picking was back-breaking, exhausting work. Also, the shells of the dried bolls were hard and sharp, and you always got cuts and punctures on your hands. Most people used knee pads and picked on their knees rather than stooping over which really hurt your back. Good farm land was any land that produced a bale of cotton per acre or more.

In 1946-47, Dad bought another 40 acres down near the McKinney Bayou. This was "bottom" land that was much richer and more productive than the hill land where we lived and raised cattle. This land was un-cleared. It had been logged for the good timber, but all the scrub timber and underbrush was left, along with some cactus and palmettos which had wicked points that could really spear you if you were not careful. Dad cleared the land by hand, using axes and crosscut saws. My cousin, Buddy Sims, (who was about 15 years older than me) worked for Dad during a lot of this work. The waste brush was burned and the stumps burned and dug out with shovels. Eventually, Dad was able to plow this land and plant the allotted amount in cotton and the rest in alfalfa and maize for cattle feed.

In cotton picking season, I was delegated to weigh and record the cotton picked by the day laborers. This was quite a responsibility for a 12-year old, since the workers’ pay depended upon the weight of cotton picked. When Dad began to grow enough cotton to have to hire day laborers to pick, he put in a water well at the McKinney Bayou farm. Buddy Sims helped Dad with the well, as he did with a lot of the farm work during this time. Buddy and his wife Margie lived in a rental house just a short distance down the road from our house. The well pipe was topped with a cast iron hand pump. The pump had to be ’primed’ to get enough suction to raise the water so a jug of water had to be kept handy at all times. Having drinking water that could be pumped there on the farm was a lot better than previously when all drinking water had to be brought to the farm in glass jugs. Also, the water fresh from the pump was cooler than water that had sat under a bush in a glass jug all day.

In late1948, the REA (Rural Electrification Association) finally brought electricity down the Genoa-Garland City Road from Central to our house. We finally had good lights and a radio. There was no running water and no indoor plumbing, so we still used an outhouse. Also in 1948, Dad bought a 1941 Chevy pickup truck. There were beginning to be some restrictions on running cattle in ‘open range’ and Dad decided to fence in the 47 acre ranch. I learned to drive the truck in the pasture, hauling fence posts and barbed wire as we built the fence. I was also allowed to drive on the gravel roads although I was only twelve. In the rural area, the police paid little attention to farm and ranch kids driving so long as they caused no problems

In 1950, we moved to Houston, Texas and the ranch was sold to the Rich family, parents of Margaret Rich, the wife of Charles ‘Mutt’ Chandler, Dad’s nephew. Although we only lived there just eight years, the ranch always seemed to be "home" for me for many years afterward. It always seemed that we lived there much longer than we actually did.