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Records Contributed by Vicki Bell-Reynolds rreynolds@pdq.net

fired back at her in the window and hit the window facing by her side. They buried the leader of the gang right there at this ranch house in the front yard.

A few years later Mrs. Thompson died leaving one small boy and a small girl, Myrtle was the girl's name and the boy's name was Harry. There was an old man traveling around over the country and he stopped by this ranch house one day and saw the conditions of things and the two small children and he took a liking to them and remained there at the place and raised the two children. He would take the two to the garden field with him, spread a quilt on the ground and stretched a parasol over them so that they wouldn't be in the sun with some food & water, so if they would get thirsty or even hungry, he would feed and water them. He stayed on with the family until he died. The girl grew up and became Mrs. Claud Howard. The boy grew up to be a man married to Dee Taylor and he at one time was the biggest cattle man in that part of the country.

In those days every man carried a 45 buckled around his waist and a 30-30 rifle on his horse saddlebag. When you attended Church the men would come in the church with their rifles and stand them up in one corner of the church house and leave them there until the preacher would close the services and then they would go and get their guns or rifles, go out the side and get on their horses and wait until the people would come out that came there in wagons and buggies and get in to start home, then the men on the horses would start down the row of wagons and buggies, one on each side of the wagon row shooting their guns under the horses feet that was hitched to the wagons, they would shoot their guns until emptied then stop and re-load their guns again then take off shooting under the horses feet into the ground, they would keep this up until all wagons and buggies got almost home before they would stop. The men would get a big kick out of doing that.

The graveyard there in Woodville was a short distance from town, nearly all the graves would have a small house built over the grave. There was a grave in there that had a dog bush growing up at the front corner of the house over the grave, about dark one evening a group of white men offered a young Negro boy to go to this house on the grave where the bush was and break off a limb off the bush and bring it back to them there in town that they would give him a ten dollar bill. So, the Negro started and while on his way, there was a white man that cut across the country a near way beating the Negro there. The white man crawled into this house over the grave and waited for the Negro to come, when the Negro got there and started to break the limb off the bush, this white man that was in the house reached out and caught the Negro by his arm. The Negro just fainted away and the white man had a terrible time getting this Negro to come too.

The Washita River was east of Woodville and there was a bottom to the river between the river and a very nice place for a picnic with tall bushy trees that furnished ample shade. The Negro's of the neighborhood put on a 4-day picnic and it was in the month of august and very hot and dry. ON the last night of this picnic, my brother Ben and 3 other boys from the town went out to see what was going on. The picnic had been going on for 4 days and all the Negro's were very tired and worn out. There were two brothers-in-law Negro's that got into a fight. One of the Negro's lived in back of our place and my mother and me were sitting on the front porch and we heard the Negro's up the road in a buggy that passed out house, was gone

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