VANOSS

NOTE: This document was provided by Clyde Walker, nephew of Uhlan Walker.  With the efforts of Mr. Walker and Ms. Patsy McClure, historical research on Old Midland / Vanoss and the Walker family continues. (2004)

The Walker Family

Written by

Debra Berger Shaw

Granddaughter of Stella Walker Jordan

Austin, Texas

March, 1995

********************************************

Dedicated to:

Uhlan Walker

In Memory of:

Etta Earl Walker McGallard

Edward Jackson Walker

Vonnie Clinton Walker

Sudia May Walker Hanks

Climmie Price Walker

Everett Cornileus Walker

Ora Victoria Walker

Stella Ellen Walker Jordan

Tollie Raymond Walker

Clyde Henry Walker

Anna Neoma Walker Bradley

Preface

This biography of Joseph Price Walker is a collection of biographical research and memoirs written by his son, Uhlan Walker. When I agreed to write about Grandpa Walker and started reading the writings Uncle Uhlan had completed, I realized that essentially Grandpa Walker’s story had already been written. So I decided to organize this information and include a family tree of both the Bohannons and Walkers. This should be helpful in tracing various members of the family. Without Uncle Uhlan’s encouragement, memories, research and previous writings, I would not have had the content necessary to compile this collection.

Everyone in the Walker family owes him a debt of gratitude for the foresight he exhibited, the expense he incurred, and the hard work he expended over the years as he pieced together the fabric that eventually has become a wonderful patchwork quilt of times past that otherwise could never be recalled.

In the early 1900’s, Joseph Price Walker and Nancy Isabell Walker were common people living in Indian Territory. It was only later that they would be called pioneers and early settlers. As time passed, they have become more and more appreciated for the contributions they made to Oklahoma and the westward movement. So it is with us, their descendants. Unless we record our everyday lives and appreciate the importance of these moments in the whole scope of history, the story of our generation will be unappreciated and lost to our children. The memory quilt of the Walkers is not finished. The family tree and history of the Walkers is not over. I encourage each family to take up the quilt that Uncle Uhlan has started and add pieces of your own. What is ordinary today, will be priceless and unique tomorrow.

THE WALKER FAMILY

Dr. John Wesley Walker was born in Georgia on March 14, 1823. His wife, Lucinda Clara Culpepper, was also born in Georgia on April 1, 1832. They were married in 1848. While living in Georgia, John Wesley and Lucinda had five children- Evgelina, John, Anna, Emma and Sarah Jane. Dr. Walker attended medical school in Atlanta, but he left Georgia in 1857 or 1858. For awhile they settled in Louisiana, where three boys were born- Edward, William, and Robert Lee.

They brought with them a Negro house servant named Delphina, who had been with the family for most, if not all, of her life. The 1858 census shows that she was twenty three years of age, and in 1864, gave birth to a baby girl named Olla. Mother and daughter were still with the family when the 1880 census was taken. Their whereabouts are unknown after this date.

After the Civil War, the Walker family moved from Louisiana to Texas by covered wagon, and lived in Lamar County for about seven years. It was here that Joseph Price Walker was born on March 3, 1870. In 1871, the family moved to Black Fork, Arkansas where Dr. Walker practiced medicine as a country doctor and farmed until about 1886. Two little girls were born in Arkansas- Lilla Mae and Leana. The Walkers then moved to Cowlington, Oklahoma, where John Wesley died on November 18, 1887. He is buried in Short Mountain Cemetery.

His wife, Lucinda survived him by nine years. She died on July 22, 1896 after a move to Old Brooken, Oklahoma. She is buried there.

Their ninth child, Joseph Price Walker married Mary Melissa Black in 1889, and there were four children from this union. In 1899, Mary died leaving four small children- Etta, Edward, Vonnie, and Sudia May- for her husband to raise. The youngest, Sudia May was only eighteen months old when her mother died. Mary Melissa is buried in the Brooken Cemetery.

Three months after her death, Nancy Isabell Henderson became the wife of Joe Walker, and the instant mother of the four children.  Nancy Isabell and Joe had nine children, seven of which lived to adulthood. Their children were born in the following order- Climmie, Everett, Ora Victoria, Stella, Tollie, Clyde, Neoma, Leona, and Uhlan. Ora and Clemmie died before they were a year old. It is believed that Ora just failed to thrive after she was born, and Climmie died of pneumonia. Uhlan remembers sitting at his father’s knee and listening to stories he and his brother, Robert Lee would tell.

“Robert was five years older than my father. When he was young, Uncle Bob always had a good pocket knife and enjoyed whittling all of his life. They said that Uncle Bob got mad at a neighbor and tore up his watermelon patch. In retaliation, the neighbor threw Uncle Bob into a briar patch. Uncle Bob just took out his pocket knife and whittled his way out. My grandfather told Pap and Uncle Bob to cut their own switches for punishment for fighting. Uncle Bob cut under the bark of his switch all the way around from end to end, so that when Grandpa hit him with it, the switch flew to pieces. The fur did fly after they waited for Grandpa to get his own switches. Since Grandpa called Uncle Bob “General”, each time Grandpa hit him, Uncle Bob would yell, ‘No, Pa! You’re going to kill your General!’

“Two sisters, whose names I’ve forgotten, lived across the corn field, and always came to Grandpa’s house, around the corn field, to get milk since they had no cow. Uncle Bob was sweet on one of the girls. There was a tree that leaned over the trail so Bob climbed up in the tree one evening. When the girls walked under the tree on their way home, he jumped out with the intention of grabbing the sister he was sweet on, and he expected the other girl to run off and leave them alone. However, his plan did not work. Both girls beat him up with the milk buckets, spilling all the milk!”

      After Joe Walker married Nancy Isabell, and they were living in Eastern Oklahoma, he met Sam and Bell Starr. Uhlan Walker tells the story like this, “Papa did a lot of hunting and would often meet Sam Starr in the woods where Sam was hiding out. Sam was an Indian and often had scrapes with the law. Sam would ask Papa if he had seen the ‘G. . . D.. .Marshal’. He said there was an old hollow tree that Sam Starr would get in if it was raining, and one time lightning struck the old tree and knocked Sam Starr out. Sam was carrying a pearl handled .45 pistol at the time. The force of the lightning knocked the handles off the pistol. Sam later gave Papa the gun. Papa said Sam also played the fiddle for dances, and Bell would dance with the boys, but Sam’s eyes never left her on the dance floor. Papa often told us that he had danced with Bell Starr. In 1959, my half brother, Vonnie C. Walker, and I went to see his mother’s grave and our Grandmother Walker’s grave. Old Brooken Cemetery is where they are both buried. It is just across the Canadian River from Younger Bend. Younger Bend was where Bell Starr and her outlaws, as well as other old Oklahoma bad men and lawmen lived. It was only a few miles from where Papa had lived, ‘as the crow flies’. We stopped in Porum, Oklahoma with the intention of finding her grave. We asked a barber who owned the land where Bell Starr was buried. His son took us on a half mile walk through a pasture to the grave. They had erected a fence around the grave and piled brush over it to keep people from destroying it. He then took us to their home and showed us what was left of her tombstone. They had put it in their house to keep vandals from further destroying it. The tombstone was made of native stone and even though it was broken, there was enough left to tell that it was hers. The barber had many old pictures of her, other outlaws, and some U.S. Marshals.

      “Some years back, I read a story in True West Magazine or Frontier Times about an Indian by the name of Simon Lewis. He had been convicted of a crime but was turned loose to gather his crop. I have heard my father tell that story many times. He said that he met Simon out on the trail the morning he was headed in to be shot. Papa said that he tried to get Simon to go west and escape into some other Indian nation. The sheriff wouldn’t come after him if he ran away. But Simon said, ‘No, no white boy. Me born here, me live here, me die here.”

In December, 1899, Joe Walker moved west to Midland, Oklahoma which was in the Chickasaw Nation of Indian Territory and bought a drug store there. At that time doctors officed in the drug stores and two of them, Dr. H. A. Kyle and Dr. J. W. Crews, took Joe Walker under their wings and instructed him about medicine so that he could become a druggist. He became one of the first licensed druggists in the Indian Territory on July 2, 1907. The Indian Territory became the State of Oklahoma in 1908. Joe also was a notary public.

Uhlan remembers, “In the early years Papa could hypnotize people. Once a man named WyIe Florance came to him in Midland. His wife had left him and taken their two little girls to Texas. He asked Papa to hypnotize him and send his mind to Texas to see his little girls. Mr. Florance told him how the girls were dressed and later, in checking with mother, he verified that he had been right in every detail. All this happened before I was born, but my older brothers and sisters remember hearing him tell these stories. Papa stopped hypnotizing people before I was born. He became concerned that something might happen to him while someone was under, and they might never wake up.”

     Mary Angell, a relative of the family, was raised in Maxwell, Oklahoma with the older Walker boys and Stella. She and Stella were good friends and corresponded until Stella’s death in 1994. Mary remembered that Joe Walker was a Justice of the Peace in Maxwell. When she was a little girl, her parents told her that a case was being tried in Joe Walker’s court. He also performed the wedding ceremony for her sister Rachel in 1912. Mary recalled that Mr. Walker would pay her sister and her for discarded medicine bottles they found in trash dumps around town. He would clean them and use the bottles again. She remembered buying several ribbons for her hair and the best gum she ever found in her life, California Fruit, with the money they received when they sold the bottles back to Mr. Walker.

     The rail road bypassed Midland by one and a half miles in 1907, so Joe bought 160 acres of land at Maxwell, Oklahoma. He moved the family and the drugstore about eighteen miles north. They stayed there until 1920. When Maxwell started declining, Joe visited Stratford and Vanoss, trying to determine which one would be the best location for him to move his store and family.

He decided to move to Vanoss because it appeared that Vanoss had a more prosperous future than Stratford. He built a brick store there for about $500.00. In 1926, a smallpox epidemic hit Vanoss. Three or four members of the Walker family contracted the disease. Joe Walker doctored them himself. The family lived just one block from the railroad, and there were always hobos coming to houses looking for food. One happened along while the Walker house was quarantined. Vonnie went to the door with white salve all over him, and told the hobo that there was pox in the house. The hobo backed off the three foot high porch, fell over backwards, got up, and ran down the street. There were no more hobos at the door for a while.

     Uhlan Walker recalls, “My father was a pretty fair country doctor, and a lot of people came to him with their ailments. One time a woman who was having bouts of hysteria came to my father for help. Papa mixed up baking soda and other harmless ingredients into capsules and gave them to the woman. He told her to take one whenever she felt a fit coming on. She swore she never had another fit of hysteria again.

     “In the winter of 1924, a family traveling through the country in an old touring car with quilts hung up on the sides to keep out the cold, came to our door in the middle of the night. Their three children were sleeping the back of the car under heavy quilts and were very sick. We all got up and built a fire, but one of the children was already dead. They had carbon monoxide poisoning. We were up the rest of the night doctoring the other two children. The next morning, after burying their child, the family continued on their journey.

     “When I was seven or eight years old, my friend, Earl Baker and I were always out roaming around. We found a washout behind a lady’s house that was full of discarded medicine bottles. She was a habitual user of paregoric and apparently was addicted to the drug. Earl and I took two tow sacks and my little red wagon, filled them with bottles from the washout, cleaned them, and sold them back to Papa. There were a lot more bottles left in the washout, but the lady ran us off when we went back for another load. That ended our bottle project.

     “About this same time, I was playing outside in our front yard, and I saw Mrs. Walter Black run out of her back door in flames. She had started to cook supper on the wood stove and spilled kerosene on her dress. She caught fire and was running for help. She ran across the street and fell in front of her barn. I called my mother, and she and several neighbors tried to help Mrs. Black, but she died of the severe burns.

     “Since Papa was not a good driver, my brothers taught me to drive at an early age. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I would take Papa to the homes of people who owed him money. He would take chickens, cured meat, hay- almost anything they could give to pay on the debt. Most of the time, they paid nothing. He never would turn them away when they came to his store later for more medicine, even if their bills were never paid. Several of his ledgers have survived and are full of unpaid bills. His Poison Record Book lists the drugs signed for by his customers, with notes beside them indicating their use. Some were for headaches, some were for habitual use. One lady signed for 2 oz. of paregoric almost every day for a long time. The government didn’t regulate how much or what drugs Papa dispensed. The only requirement was that Papa record the sale of the drugs.

     “Tom Cushman is a barber at Sherwood Shores, Texas. He knew my father all of his life. He told me that he went to Papa years ago with a sinus problem. Papa gave him something that stopped it, and he never had it again. Papa made a sure-fire rat poison in his drugstore and concocted his own cough syrup in three strengths. They were labeled ‘child’, ‘mild’, and ‘the one that will stop your cough’. In the 1940’s, the government changed its’ policy concerning the dispensing of drugs. It became a requirement that druggists write a formal prescription before treating customers for their ailments.

     “Papa always carried an old .45 Colt to and from the store and slept with it under his pillow. He didn’t leave money in the store at night. My older brothers and sister said that he always had the gun with him for as long as they could remember.

     “In the late 1920’s, three stores and the bank on the west side of the street burned in the middle of the night. Papa’s store as on the east side, but we could not tell if our store was part of the fire from our house. I was too young to go with Papa and my older brothers to check on our store. There was no fire equipment, so all the townspeople could do was watch one side of the street burn to the ground.”

     When the highway from Ada to Stratford was built, it bypassed Vanoss by two and a half miles, so Joe Walker moved his family and house to Garr Corner and built a concrete block store there. It took three days to move the house the two and a half miles. They pulled the house with a bulldozer, and the wheels under the house were wooden. Whenever the bulldozer and the house came to a bridge, the house would be too wide for the bridge, so the railings on the bridge would have to be removed. In order to protect their possessions and also have a place to stay, the older Walker brothers slept in the house at night while they were in the process of moving it.

Joe Walker retired in 1944 and moved to Ada, Oklahoma. He passed away in 1955, and Nancy Isabell lived two years after his death. They are both buried at Old Midland Cemetery. Their deaths marked the end of a lifetime of hard work, sacrifice, and dedication to God and family. They were a part of the fabric of Oklahoma history as it changed from Indian Territory to a modern state.

Stella Walker’s Stories

as told to Debra Berger Shaw

Stella Walker liked to tell the story of the night she was born. Her father, J.P. Walker, was at a local saloon and had been there most of the night. Her mother knew she was about to have her baby. She took a stick of firewood, marched angrily over to the saloon and demanded that he come home

immediately! Of course, he did and was there when Stella was born.

When Stella and her younger sister, Neoma were still in grammar school, their father told them to take a feed sack, put the newborn kittens in it and drown them in a nearby creek. Stella and Neoma didn’t want to kill the kittens for they had grown fond of them and liked having them around the house. But they were too frightened of the father to disobey him. So the girls sat beside the creek and threw them into the water, The kittens kept swimming to the surface. The sisters finally took the kittens one by one and smashed their heads on rocks. The girls were so heartbroken, they cried a afternoon and the next day!

Stella was left handed and her teachers, parents, and it seemed like the whole town tried in vain to make her right handed! Another “handicap” that Stella had was the fact that she walked with her toes pointed out. Every day as she walked to school, she had to pass her father’s drug store. She dreaded this part of the walk, because he always stood outside his store and reminded her to walk with her toes pointed straight.

When Stella was about sixteen, she fell in love with a young oil field hand that she had known all her life. Her father wouldn’t let her marry him, because he said that Marion Renshaw drank and gambled too much. At this time, it was very common for field workers to pass their idle time in this manner; however, both Stella and Marion denied that he did any of this in excess. But her father didn’t want Stella getting involved with a man of that reputation. Marion begged Stella to run away with him and get married. She and Neoma met Marion in a field near her home to say goodbye the last time. All three of the young people were crying. Neoma pleaded with Stella to reconsider and run away with Marion, but Stella was so afraid of making her father angry that she refused. Stella later married Ollie Huddleston. Her father approved of the match, reasoning that Ollie was stable and had a good job with the railroad. Ollie was much older than Stella and had a daughter named Byrd who was Stella’s age. The two girls became good friends, and Byrd was a great comfort to the new bride when Ollie was away working for the railroad. A postscript to this love story is that years later when they were in their fifties, Stella and Marion finally married and lived happily until his death in 1965. Both Stella and Marion always regretted that they didn’t run away and get married that day so long ago. They were sorry that they didn’t get to spend their whole lives together.

An epidemic of scarlet fever occurred when Stella was a young woman. Her house was quarantined and food and supplies were passed into the house through a window. Her fever was so high that the heat from her wrist singed the leather watch band she was wearing. A Negro woman helped care for the sick family and never contracted the fever.

Grandma told me a recipe for birth control. She said you take cocoa butter and melt it on the stove. Add boric acid and she said there might have been another ingredient that she couldn’t remember. You pour the liquid into a flat pan with sides and let it cool. Then you cut the hardened substance into slivers about the size of your little finger. You then insert them. She only had two kids so maybe it really worked!

One of the happiest and most touching stories that Stella loved to tell was about the night her brother, Tollie and his wife Ruth gave birth to twins. The little girl and a boy weighed only 2 pounds each and could fit in the palm of one hand. Joe Walker prescribed, supervised and helped with the care of these very high risk babies. Most babies died at this time if they were so premature, especially if they were delivered at home. J.P. made a box that had a pillow in the bottom and family members made sure that hot water bottles lined the box twenty-four hours a day. The twins’ skin was so delicate that they could not be handled the way full-term babies can. They were placed on a pillow and their diapers were pinned to the pillow to prevent the babies from falling off. The pillow allowed the babies to be carried without touching their skin and causing damage. The babies had no sucking instinct and were fed by eyedropper until they matured enough to develop one. Stella always said that had it not been for her father’s knowledge of medicine and determination, the twins would not have survived.