On Mom and Dad’s Bois ‘darc Bend Ranch! They had the tank dug in the early ‘50’s. It was located at the end of Clepper Street where the entrance gate was located. When gathering cattle, we would ride through town, down Clepper and ride northeast to bring the cattle across the pastures to cross Town Creek and to the corrals on the northside of the creek. Town Creek bottom was fertile farm land where either corn or hay was grown and harvested. My job was to ride point, open the gate and cross the creek ahead of the herds and hands, open the corral gates and disappear behind the barn adjacent to the cattle pens. Once the cattle were penned, I would walk the cat walk, poke the cattle through the pens, sometimes branding but generally staying out of the way. Mother often rode with us, but she generally oversaw the picnic meal near the pens in the shade trees on Atkins Creek. Red checked table clothes were spread across plank tables, BBQ, potato salad, beans, bread and beer and water! Guests were invited to celebrate with the cowhands, family and helpers.
Dad inherited the property south of Town Creek. He and Mom purchased the property north of the creek, across FM 1097 (the Heifer Pasture)-all toll approximately 900 acres. They purchased 80 adjacent acres in 1969 and deeded that to me as well as another 15 acres joining the Heifer Pasture.
Mother was really the better farmer. She had grown up hands on watching Grandpa Stovall. She just had a better sense of planting, fertilizing, harvesting. Dad, he knew cattle, but Mother had both the intuitive and scientific intelligence to know and recognize problems in calving…her final words on this earth were, as she looked out the window, “Mike, how do the cows look?”
As my cousin Jerry Stovall told me about Grandpa and Grandma Stovall providing breakfast for the Black men from Richards who would help them bring in cotton and peanut crops in northwest Montgomery County, I thought of what Dad always said, “A man can’t work on air.” Grandpa Stovall was not only wise but a good man. He was the only white farmer in the Taliaferro-Welch Road neighborhood who the Black people would help. He fed them paid them and respected them. Knowing they would not walk past the Black cemetery on Taliaferro Road. on their journey back to Richards, he always let them leave well before dark. My Grandmother Stovall was the “kin keeper” of her large Williams family and knew it took food to gather friends, family and folk no matter the color of skin. Her kitchen was a true “cattle call,” huge delicious biscuits, ham from the smokehouse, eggs from the hen house…Grandpa Stovall would make a wagon trip into Richards for the basics. She would make the list. He would pencil out nonessentials but never her stamps. A faithful letter writer, Ada wrote to kith and kin far and wide. Her funeral in October 1957 at the old Union Grove Baptist Church could not hold the mourners. It was always said to be the largest ever with flowers above the grade. Her oldest granddaughter’s FIL, Pastor Williams, no relation, delivered the sermon, and true to her heart, an enormous dinner on the ground was served near the grounds of Pool Cemetery. Ada Ann Miranda Missouri Williams Stovall! Mother of eight of the happiest children I’ve ever known!