Always for the Underdog: Leather Britches Smith and the Grabow War

Chapter 6: The Grabow War

94 Chapter Six the฀GraBow฀war when my wife, Grand, and I drove up to Mrs. Townsley’s home, her dogs sniffed my car’s tires and hounded my shoes and the legs of my pants. Mrs. Townsley raised up a little off her swing that sat on her front porch, a cement slab running along the front of her house. “Quit,” she said. The dogs moved on. A wire fence enclosed a yard that once could have held flowers or shrubs, but some time ago those flowers and shrubs and even certain patches of grass decided that something greener and better waited somewhere else. But Gussie Townsley hadn’t left. Eighty-one at the time, Mrs. Townsley began painting at sixty-one after her daughter gave her a Christmas gift of paints. “I never had a lesson in my life,” Mrs. Townsley once said, “and it just come on me and wouldn’t let go.” Her determination to capture the images in her head on the canvas parallels her family’s determination to settle No Man’s Land. She grew up as the twelfth of Annie Hickman and Soloman Loftin’s fourteen children. She and her siblings remained from the line of Aaron Cherry, who received a land grant in Louisiana’s Neutral Strip. One day a visiting California art dealer saw one of her paintings in her son’s law firm. The dealer bought the painting on the spot. Soon Gussie Townsley would travel to Santa Barbara for her first gallery opening, and then to the฀GraBow฀war฀฀฀|฀฀฀95 Washington, D.C., to display her works. “I didn’t know nobody to ask how to mix my paints or nothing,” she said, “but it just wouldn’t let go until I done it.” Velmer Smith centers her book The Best of Yesterday, . . . . Today: A History of the Sabine River and “No Man’s Land” around the life and work of Gussie Townsley. The book begins with Smith’s discussion of history, before filling most of its pages with images of Townsley’s paintings. When we made it to the porch that day, Miss Gussie, as most locals know her, welcomed us inside. She began immediately discussing the past and pulling her works of art out from behind her front-room couch. In one work, soldiers—wearing dark navy shirts and sky blue trousers, their horses turned loose and rummaging through a family’s greens and carrots—chase chickens through a garden patch. Occupying the canvas of When the Yankees Came Through, these soldiers also climb onto the family’s porch and, still holding their rifles, ask the mother, her children huddled under each arm, about food and supplies . The Neches-Belles, another work, displays the grand majesty of one of the last steam-powered waterwheel merchant boats to navigate the Sabine River. One after another, paintings appeared from behind the sofa. An ice wagon, a country dance, a syrup mill, and a turpentine camp within other frames remind viewers of a bygone time. Then, Miss Gussie pulled out The Grabow Riot. “I remember the little sawmill town quite well, going to the country commissary, selling vegetables with my pa to the people living in the town,” Miss Gussie explained.1 As I looked at the picture, I saw the story that she heard time and time again. She said, “This took place July 7, 1912, in the little sawmill town of Grabow, Louisiana. That was five years before I was born, I have heard it talked about so often as a child, in my mind’s eye I was there.” To the far left, the stacks of the planing mill plume smoke. Various other brown wooden buildings, and a few men wearing dark pants and hats and white shirts, fill up the background. The action in Grabow dominates the painting’s right, and the Galloway Lumber office building solidly sits right of center. The white building with a four-columned porch boasts double front doors and two porch windows. Rifle barrels with small red flames painted on their ends extend from 96฀฀฀|฀฀฀aLways฀For฀the฀underdoG the windows. A man peeks out the front doors; another man fires from the doorway of a wooden addition. Miss Gussie explained, “Officials at Carson called the Galloways’ office in Grabow on the only telephone in the country, telling them that Emerson and his men were coming and were armed...