During Wind and Rain: The Jones Family Farm in the Arkansas Delta 1848-2006

1. The Place They Came To

ILLUSTRATIONS Uriah Jones’s certificate for first land purchase. Frontispiece . Contemporary map of Desha County showing roads, railroads, towns, and rivers.  . Desha County with late-nineteenth-century towns and water features.  . Joseph Hubbard Jones.Wedding picture, .  . Mary Margaret Brown Jones.Wedding picture, .  . Joseph H. Jones family, circa .  . Grover Cleveland “Boss” Jones.Wedding picture, .  . Zena Cason Jones.Wedding picture, .  . Boss, seated at right, with his one-thousand-pound hammer for building bridges, sometime between  and .  . Farm houses built in  and .  . The family warriors home from World War II, .  . Grover standing in tall cotton, .  . Grover, Fayree, and Casey, circa .  . Casey in front of his farm office, .  . Casey’s house, .  . Middle buster.  . Double shovel.  . Cultivator.  . Casey’s implement shed, .  . Reunion of Boss and Zena’s descendants, . Courtesy of Dana Barger Jones.  viii 1BOLSTERLI_pages.qxd 2/6/08 3:51 PM Page viii INTRODUCTION Throughout my childhood, there were three trunks in our house on the farm in the Arkansas/Mississippi Delta. One was a small tin trunk brought by my grandmother, Mary Margaret Brown, when she came as a bride to the home of my grandfather,Joseph H.Jones, in about . In it were legal papers having to do with their generation as well as some concerning his father, Uriah, and scraps of information concerning her own family,the Ira E.Brown family of Maury County,Tennessee. Since the information in her trunk was seldom needed anymore,it was stored in a dark attic,out of the way but safe. In my Aunt Sallie’s bedroom there stood a large, rectangular , cloth-covered trunk in which she kept her treasures: an old fox neckpiece, odds and ends of jewelry, a hank of her hair cut when she was young,letters,photographs,the family Bible,and legal papers concerning her tenure as owner of the remnant of the farm my great-grandfather Uriah had started putting together in . In my parents’ bedroom there was an identical trunk containing my mother’s treasures and legal papers concerning my father’s tenure as the farmer while it wasAunt Sallie’s land and then when it belonged to him. When Aunt Sallie died in , her trunk was moved upstairs, contents undisturbed, except that the Jones family Bible was moved to the trunk belonging to my mother,who took charge of the family record of births, marriages, and deaths. In about , my sister Pauline Lloyd, who was living in the house, asked me to go through the trunks and sift out anything that ought to be saved. I think she was worried about fire and the possible loss of anything of value to the family.I put the things I thought might be useful or at least interesting someday in a large box and asked my brother Grover to keep it until called for, as I was about to go to Connecticut for a year and would be leaving strangers in my house. He put the box on a shelf in his laundry room,and I forgot about it. In about ,I happened to remember it while down there on a visit and brought it back to Fayetteville and put it on a shelf in my study. ix 1BOLSTERLI_pages.qxd 2/6/08 3:51 PM Page ix From there it was transferred to a shelf in my study on a farm in Madison County a friend and I had moved to in  and was forgotten again. And then—it must have been about —after my retirement from the University ofArkansas,I was sitting at my desk one day and noticed it staring me in the face from across the room.I opened the box and was stunned at the rich deposit of information about my family and the struggle they had made to hang onto the farm over the course of  years. I had always known things had been difficult , for I had, after all, grown up during the Great Depression and had heard stories about the CivilWar,Reconstruction,and the  Flood. But I had no idea of how hard it had really been from  to about  until I saw it documented there in black and white, time and again, on legal papers threatening foreclosures and on the mortgages taken out to pay the few dollars owed in taxes that stopped the forfeiture proceedings. Even sadder, of course, were the notices when the proceedings had not been stopped and land was lost. Those three trunks...