In late 1908, Breathless' maternal grandparents, Tandy Clayton and Nancy Flora "Nannie" Jones Moore, moved from a 20-acre farm near Azle, northwest of Fort Worth, to an 80-acre plot a few miles south in Tarrant County, near its western border with Parker County, sometime after the death of oldest daughter Velma E. Moore (1903-1908) from diphtheria.
The land the Moores rented had a log cabin located near Silver Creek, which ran through the property. The cabin had served as slave quarters on a former cotton plantation owned by Rufus B. Hagood, who was leasing out the plots. Mabel, Audie, and Jewel were all born in the log cabin. Here's what Breathless' mother Jewel Moore remembers about the cabin:
The family lived near enough to the Live Oak School that the children could walk to it. So that they would not have to walk the long way around a fenced pasture to get there, Tandy asked and received permission from Hagood to build a trestle over the barbed wire fence.
The photo at the top of the page is of children who were attending the one-room Live Oak School (which opened in November 1912) around 1918. Identified in the photo are Breathless' aunts Ivis Moore Mew (1905-2004), Ruby Clayton Moore Albillar (1908-1967), Beulah Mabel "Mabel" Moore (1910-1932), and Audie Ruth Moore Cook (1911-1969); Jewel Moore Gresham (1914-1994), his mother, is not in the photo because she was too young to go to school. Oldest child and son Thomas Gurth Moore (1902-1935) had probably finished his schooling by this time. The family moved to Oklahoma the following year.
I wondered if the Live Oak School building might still be standing. Alas, it is not. I found the front-page article at left via the Portal to Texas History. A Sweetwater, Texas, newspaper picked up a Fort Worth story about the school building being sold at auction for lumber in 1938. Another article indicated it sold for $78 (a lot of money in 1938).
The school had been built in 1895. It was located at the northwest corner of Silver Creek Road and Western Oaks Road.
No comments:
Post a Comment