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258 Reflections on the Neches Part Two Day 5 GORE LANDING River Mile 61 9:48 A.M. Just above Pearl River Bend was Gore Landing. I got out of the boat here and looked around, but found no evidence that it had once been an active and busy place. It was probably a summer port as the access road is across the multiple drainage pattern from Deserters Baygall and must have been a booger to traverse during wet weather. Gore Landing Road follows hummocks through the bottom and joins the Old Maids Road near Gore Cemetery at the edge of the terrace. It then proceeds west along the ridge dividing Deserters Baygall from Round Pond Baygall to the Gore house on the Old Wagon Road where the terrace rises to the upland. The Old Maids Road was named for two sisters, Tina and Lisha Gore. Never having married, they lived in the family home after their parents died. I used to stop by and visit them—oh, it must have been in the late 1960s. They lived exactly as their forebears did and in the same house. The Gore house was set back behind two big live oak trees and a handsplit rail fence, and several big mulberry trees grew along the fence row. There was a kitchen garden with the usual vegetables and several bushes of old-fashioned roses: big, white cabbage roses, pink moss roses, and others which have long since been replaced by hybrid varieties. I loved the oldtime roses. They had such a rich fragrance you could smell them all over the yard. I have had for about thirty years, with no spraying, pruning, or fertilizing, a 259 Part Two, Day 5 rose bush that I grew from a cutting off a rose bush brought over from the East before the Civil War. It grows underneath my son David’s window. Once, a tendril found its way through a tiny crack between the screen and window frame and, one day, he awoke to find a full-blown rose right over his head. How I wish I had taken cuttings from the Old Maids’ bushes and thus perpetuated them! The Old Maids’ house was right out of the last century. A covered well at the end of the back porch permitted them to draw water without going out into the weather. A wood cookstove in the kitchen, a fireplace, and coal oil lamps provided heat and light. The house was plain but very neat and was furnished as country houses were a few years back. There was no parlor nor settees—just beds, a couple of tables, and a few chairs—just the necessities. The Gore sisters liked the old-fashioned way, wearing dresses down to their ankles and high-buttoned shoes. They chose to remain in the last century and let the world go by. Until shortly before they died, they had never ridden in a car, seen a doctor, nor listened to radio or watched television. I wonder if they lived in fear and dread of a world on the other side of that fence that had changed around them. Tina died in l969 at the age of 84 and Lisha was taken to a nursing home in Silsbee where she died in 1972, also at the age of 84. What a culture shock! I wonder if she lived out her days wallowing in the luxury of bathtubs, indoor toilets, air conditioning, and served meals, and marveling at television showing her a world she never dreamed existed. After they left, the house deteriorated rapidly, assisted by vandalism. The rough-sawn one-by-twelve-inch boards which covered the log walls lay on the ground half buried by leaf mould. I got permission from a family member and dug some of them up and took them home. After a good hosing and sanding, the beautiful rosy-gold of rose pine, an extinct species, shone and I made a Spanish chest, a cabinet, and hutch, and front doors for my house at Hyatt from them. The rail fence is gone, as are the mulberry trees and a new modern brick house stands under the live oaks. What a giant cultural leap from the last family who lived on this site to the present one. Only one decade and it could well be centuries! The Gore family is well represented in Southeast Texas by four main branches. In the 1850s, James (Jim) Gore and wife, Betsy, brother...

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