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Joined: Oct 2004
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Location: Texas
|  | Re: Emma Patience Muston nee Nettles
« Reply #1 on Sept 8, 2009, 9:17am » | |
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EMMA PATIENCE (NETTLES) MUSTON
18 June 1882 ~ 7 September 1964
EMMA PATIENCE (DONNA) NETTLES was born 18 June 1882 in Lexington, Lee County, Texas, and died 07 September 1964 in Rockdale, Milam County, Texas. She married CHARLIE GLENN/GWINN MUSTON 28 June 1903 in Lexington, Lee County, Texas, son of WILLIAM MUSTON and MOLLIE OLIVE. He was born 04 February 1882 in Texas, and died 28 October 1915 in Wharton County, Texas. Children of EMMA NETTLES and CHARLIE MUSTON are ...
ERMA MUSTON (1904-1991)
IMA LOIS MUSTON (1906-1999)
MOLLIE GERTRUDE (SHORTY) MUSTON (1907-2002)
STELLA MAY MUSTON (1909-2001)
NONA AMY MUSTON (1911-2002)
GLADYS COREEN MUSTON (1913-2007)
PAULINE LUCILLE MUSTON (1915-2004)
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SEVEN SISTERS. Ima recalled that when someone once asked her mother, "Don't you wish you had at least one boy?" Emma answered with a resounding "No!" [Note: Wonder if Emma or any of her seven daughters ever had a "Seven Sisters Rose" in their yard?]
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LIFE IN PHEARS, LEE COUNTY, TEXAS. Charlie Muston and Emma Patience Nettles were married around the turn of the century (c. 1900). Between 1904 and 1913, six baby girls were born to this couple in Lee County (their seventh daughter was born in Wharton County in 1915). While living in the Phears Community, the family often attended church there. This is also where the older girls first attended school. Charlie and his family lived in a house near the Joe Rodgers place just before they left for Wharton County. That was the home place of Erma's first husband, Buell Rogers.
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...A TIME TO BE BORN, AND A TIME TO DIE....WHARTON COUNTY, TEXAS (c. 1915). As Emma made a final check through the rural Lee County cabin, Charlie was busy hitching up the team (Jack the mule and Bill the horse) for the trip south. Emma had been born in Lee County in 1882, and was not quite eight years old when her Father died there in 1890. This attempt at a new life was probably the first time Emma had traveled this far from her widowed Mother. Charlie was hoping to find gainful employment in the road construction business to help support his ever-expanding family.
Family friends* who had already made the trip, and were living and working in Wharton County, included Jim and Polly Hooper, Charlie and Carrie Jensen, and Delbert and Allie Rodgers and their daughter.
Emma and her girls set up housekeeping in a wood-frame house in the community of Taiton (on State Highway 71 eighteen miles northwest of Wharton in northwestern Wharton County). On the first day of September in 1915, Emma gave birth to her seventh baby girl.
Less than two months later, on 28 October 1915, Charlie died unexpectedly from complications? of ?. He was buried in the Nada community (on State Highway 71 in southern Colorado County, just north of Taiton). Charlie's final resting place was an unmarked grave just outside the grounds of a local church cemetery. Because he was not a member of said church, his burial was not allowed inside the "consecrated" grounds, hence, he was buried (in a pauper's grave?) somewhere in the perimeter outside the official cemetery grounds.
That must have been a hard winter for Emma and her seven orphaned little girls. Ima recalled that the lifelong friendship and support of Mr. Jim and Miss Polly (Hooper) were a great comfort to the sad little family.
*Note: These were the same families who would return to Lee County with the young widow shortly after the death of Charlie in the autumn of the year of 1915.
See page 297 in A History of Lee County, Texas for more information on J. T. (Jim) and Pauline Polly (Clemoms) Hooper.
See pages 257, 259, 297 and 299-300 in A History of Lee County, Texas for more information on Charlie Amos Jensen and Carrie (Clemons) Hooper Jensen. Charlie and Carrie were the parents of Myrtle (Jensen) Quinney, wife of ? Quinney.
In the early part of 1902, Allie (Minnie Alice Coffman) came near death when four of her siblings died in an epidemic of Typhoid-Pneumonia. See page 273 in A History of Lee County, Texas for more information on the Coffman family.
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EMMA'S LIFE IN COLE SPRINGS, LEE COUNTY, TEXAS. "...On the site of the Will Nettles' house now sits a huge metal barn belonging to the Otto family who are wonderful neighbors. Standing on that hill, I can yet visualize the old log house down the slope and the house across the swale where the widowed Aunt Emma Muston resided with her daughters." [Observations from a letter from Herbert Cook to his cousin, Ruby (Nettles) Vance, in which he is reminiscing about his childhood? in the Cole Springs area in Lee County, Texas. The letter is dated 29 May 1996.]
Following the untimely death of her young husband in Wharton County, Texas in October of the year 1915 (see Marriage Notes), Emma and her seven young daughters returned to Lee County, Texas. They traveled by wagon with a small group of friends, including Mr. Jim and Miss Polly Hooper, the Jensens and the Rodgers. A grey mule named "Jack" and a grey horse named "Bill" pulled their wagon packed with their few earthly belongings. This sad little group would stop at the end of the long day and sleep beside the trail at night.
Upon their arrival in Lee County, Emma and her daughters moved into a house belonging to Emma's widowed mother, Mollie Nettles. [Was this the log house or the other house? Which one was up the hill and which one was down the hill? Which one did Mollie live in?]
At one point, Emma and her girls moved south of Lexington and lived with the Hoopers for a period of about two years. The girls went to school south of town at the Biehle school, which was located five miles south of Lexington on the Fedor road in what was a beautiful patch of peanuts on the August Winkler farm in 1974 (p. 101, 115, 121 Lee County History).
They later moved back to (which?) house on hill near Cole Springs?
Uncle Joe and his family lived in the house on the hill for a while -- where Ruby was born?
[Their first week back in Lee County, Emma and her little girls stayed with her brother-in-law, Jack and Fannie Muston in the Pleasant Hill area?]
Emma's widowed mother was living with her oldest son, Will, "up on the gable" (west of Lexington)?
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THE HOMEPLACE. The house (which one?) faced south, and had a wood plank floor. There was a fireplace, but after the chimney fell down they boxed in the area and replaced the fireplace with a cast-iron wood-burning heater. The windows had glass panes, but no screens. There were window shades and curtains. One night when a storm blew a window out, they tacked a quilt over it to keep out the weather.
On the property were chicken houses and a smokehouse. There were cedar trees, flowers, and a wire fence around the swept yard. The pasture surrounding the house was fenced.
The girls had to haul water on a sled from Uncle Will's place (stored where?). The grey mule named Jack was used to pull the sled. Cistern? Pauline delighted in using the precious load to water the flowers growing in the yard.
How did they wash their hair? Make soap? Make clothes?
[Ima remembered this home as having a parlor in the front room on the right as you entered?] Sewing machine?
There were two bedrooms with a hall in between. Ima and Stella usually slept in the room on the left, and Emma's room on the right had two beds in it. Ima recalled that she sometimes slept in the room with her Mother when she was especially fearful of something.
They all slept in iron beds with cotton mattresses (stuffed with cotton?) and white sheets. The quilts on the beds were the creations of Emma. There was a washtub in the left front bedroom, where they all took their Saturday-night baths.
There were two shed rooms on the back of the house. The one on the left was a bedroom, and the room on the right was the kitchen.
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SUNDAY DINNER. On Sundays while the girls were in church, Emma would work in this kitchen preparing Sunday dinner. She had a wood-burning cook stove with four burners and a large oven. The noon spread would often include an assortment of vegetables, cornbread which had been baked in the oven, sweet potato pies, and other bounty of the land.
Brother Oscar J. Morgan (15 June 1885-13 September 1964) was the Baptist preacher, and he was like home folks. He [and his wife? Alice (27 December 1888-17 November 1972)] often joined the group for Sunday dinner after church. After their meal, the kids would scatter while the grownups sat on the porch or in the dog run and visited. The chairs were wood with a rope bottom.
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THE REST OF THE WEEK. This little group of widowed and orphaned women and girls led a hard life during the next decade. They raised most of what they ate. At one time, Emma and her daughters were the caretakers for the community switchboard (details?). Emma also sold cows, hogs, eggs and cream to raise money for necessities. To raise money for school clothes, the older girls would pick cotton, even travelling to South Texas, following the cotton crops. Ima remembers chasing cows and wild turkeys? Coyote problems? Snake problems?
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A PATH THROUGH THE WOODS. There were two? roads/paths through the woods leading from the country homes where these two households lived. If the girls walked south from their home, they would eventually come to a winding dirt road. At the curve where their path from home met the road, the girls would pass their old rusty mailbox -- their direct connection to the outside world. If they then turned to their right (west), they would follow the dirt road about ? miles to the little wooden building which served as their school house.
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CHURCH. On Sundays and special meeting days, the girls would walk about a mile across the pasture in front of their home to attend church services. This church was located southeast of their mailbox on the dirt road which went back into Tanglewood. Many of the gatherings were held in the adjacent "brush arbor" under the Texas stars.
["The men of the community built "brush arbors" for the summer revivals. These furnished shade for the daytime services, but were not a great deal of protection in case of rain. People came to the meetings from miles around in buggies, wagons, and even on horseback." ("A History of Lee County, Texas, p. 118.)]
Their singing of hymns was accompanied by an organ which was played by ?. Adjacent to the little Baptist church in Cole Springs was a small country cemetery. Ima said she never knew it at the time, but two of the people buried in that small cemetery are cousins who came from Mississippi in 1869 -- Britton and Mathilda (West) Valentine.
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EMMA'S QUILTS. Another of Emma's money-making enterprises was making quilts and/or quilting for the public. Ima inherited two quilt tops from her mother -- a multi-colored "Honeymoon Cottage" which Ima had quilted by a Mrs. Talbert, and a pink and green quilt (pattern unknown) which Ima had quilted by a Mrs. Polk Frost.
Gladys (Muston) Taylor (1913-2007) of Lexington also has a number of quilts which were jointly made by her mother and John Taylor's mother. All of these quilts were part of the exhibit at the Sesquicentennial Quilt Show held in Rockdale during the Texas Sesquicentennial in 1986.
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EMMA MOVES TO TOWN. With six of her daughters married and gone, Emma and Gladys moved into Lexington about 1938? Emma worked in a cafe there which was run by Audrey and Mac Nettles?
Emma earned enough money to buy herself a small wood-frame house. She had an iron bedstead in the bedroom on the left as you entered her parlor/living room. Her rocking chair sat in that room, and numerous family photos sat on a nearby bureau. Emma also had a treadle sewing machine. There was a wood-burning cook stove in the kitchen (the same one from the Cole Springs home?) and a two-hole outhouse in the side yard. One of Emma's grandsons (Don Quinney) reputedly inherited the wood-burning stove. This house was directly across the street from the future home of Gladys and her husband, John Taylor (who lived there then?).
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EMMA'S FLOWERS. Emma loved pink flowers and roses, and there was usually an assortment of fragrant blossoms growing in her fenced yard. On a trellis beside her front porch was an red climbing/running rosebush. There are numerous photos of Emma and her friends, family and/or pets standing in front of that exuberant rose.
Roberta (Henry) Pounders states that the first time she ever saw a forsythia shrub (aka "Golden Bells") in bloom was when she was visiting Emma (after she married Forrest Lee?). As of January 1999, the brilliant yellow flowers (which appear before leaves emerge) of a "descendant" of one of Emma's plants are blooming in Ima's yard.
Over the years, Emma had various pets, including cats and a favorite dog named "Teddy."
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THE END OF HER DAYS. Emma lived in this house until failing health forced her into a nursing home in Rockdale. [Note: This would have been early in 1962, before her youngest great-grandchildren, Robert Forrest Pounders and Kim Elaine Pounders, were born in November 1962.]
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OBITUARY. September 1964 -- Funeral services for Mrs. Emma Patience Muston, 82, were held Tuesday at the Phillips & Luckey chapel in Rockdale. Burial was in the Tanglewood cemetery, with Rev. James M. Frazier, of the Methodist Church, Lexington, officiating.
Mrs. Muston died Monday (7 September 1964) at the Richards hospital in Rockdale. For the past two and one-half years she had been in a Rockdale rest home.
Most of her life was spent in the Cole Springs/Tanglewood community and in Lexington. She was born June 18, 1882, in Lee County, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph H. Nettles. She was married to Charlie G. Muston, who preceded her in death when the children were young.
Surviving are seven daughters, Mrs. Joe Tomkins, Mrs. Alvin Jones, Mrs. Ben Reynolds, and Mrs. B. R. Taylor, all of Houston; Mrs. Dean Quinney of Lexington, Mrs. John Taylor of Lexington, and Mrs. J. E. Pounders of Rockdale; and one sister, Mrs. Oscar Peebles of Houston; also 18 grandchildren and 38 great grandchildren.
Pall bearers were [grandsons] F. L. Pounders, K. D. Quinney, E. P. Lerche, A. D. Quinney, A. D. Pounders, and S. D. Quinney.
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