The Hawkins Ranch in Texas: From Plantation Times to the Present

Chapter 14. Lizzie

Chapter 14 Lizzie knew Lizzie in her twenties and thirties, before her troubles began, remembered a beautiful young woman with gloriously golden hair and an air of confident sociability. During the s and early s she loved giving parties for young people—for my brother Frank and his high school friends and for my cousin, Jane Doubek. She played the piano and had collected stacks of sheet music of the popular songs of the day that she kept in a special walnut cabinet with shelves cut to the size of the sheets. A birthday, a graduation, or any national holiday could set her to arranging a card party, dance, hayride, or luncheon. Like Sister she had a feminine willfulness in the way she insisted on giving hospitality. “Have just one more cup of cocoa! You really must!” The downturn in this charming person’s life began on March , , when she and Mike had been married only six years. The date was just four years after the young Hawkinses had taken over their ranch from their Uncle Henry’s trusteeship, a time when all five were in partnership and fully in charge. On that date Lizzie went to her sisters and asked to have her own undivided interest in the Hawkins Ranch land partitioned to her as her separate property so that she and Mike could operate it themselves . To Lizzie’s sisters it was an unexpected and unwelcome move; they expected to be in partnership for the rest of their lives. The circumstance of their childhood had made their safety seem to depend on their staying together. It is possible that Mike put Lizzie up to asking for her property division . Given Esker McDonald’s indication that Mike was not overly “fond of work,” perhaps he needed to be occupied with some ranch property to look after. But Lizzie was headstrong, and it is not likely that he could have persuaded her to do something she did not freely choose herself. In 98 young lady ranchers any case, contemporary family members never made a villain of Mike, nor did they ever mention any explanation for the divorce. Lizzie’s sisters felt they had to agree to the land separation she asked for, and they even allowed her to make her own selection of the property to assign to herself. She chose a big belt of land out of the middle of the ranch, with farm land on its eastern boundary at Liveoak Creek and grazing land on its western end. Its northern boundary was the south fence of the Sheppard Mott. At the time Farm Road , which now approximates that division, did not exist. Lizzie’s portion amounted to ,. acres of land surface and  percent of the mineral interest beneath those acres. She designed a cattle brand that she called the Wine Glass, which was a modification of the Hawkins Ranch H-Crook. Elizabeth Hawkins’s Wine Glass brand. Hawkins Ranch H-Crook. Although they went along with her wishes, to Lizzie’s sisters the partition came as a shocking breach of a kind of unspoken vow they had jointly made long before: they would always stay together and support one another . In the Hawkins Ranch the children of Frank Hawkins had in common the significant place that united them. Now Lizzie had split into two pieces their commonly held land, so cherished because it came to them as a whole from their common past. Even though in the beginning Lizzie’s sisters felt no personal hostility in the property division, their regret would deepen into profound sadness in the next decades of Lizzie’s life. In  when Lizzie’s sisters and their brother Harry began discussing the condition of the Hawkins Ranch House, Lizzie was not a participant because her ranch property was now separate from theirs and had been for many years. The long-term consequences of this partition were terrible. Year by year, from the s to the s, the fact of the partition slowly built a wall between Lizzie and her family. In the end this dazzling young woman became distrustful and reclusive. Willfully and with destructive pride, she began withdrawing from her sisters’ affection, so that finally lizzie 99 in self-imposed isolation, she lapsed into mental illness and financial collapse . Then her sisters had to find a means of rescue. This ruinous decline was slow and at first...