Ben Carr
Special to the Journal
Synopsis by Donna K. White from an interview with Ben Carr 1979.
I had two visits with Ben Carr at his home at 618 Riley Street in Mt. Pleasant, Texas,. Ben has lived on this same place for 30-40 years. There wasn’t nothing up in there but a wagon road. When he first came to Mt. Pleasant he bought the place but all it had on it was a little 2-room house.
Ben Carr was born January 20, 1884 at Gray Rock -Winfield on the old Carr Place. Louis Black owns this place now. Ben stayed there until he was 21 years old and he left and went to Sulphur Springs ’til he married in 1918 and then he moved back to Mt. Pleasant.
Ben married Carrie Ainsworth with $60 in his pocket and owing for everything that he had. She was raised up in Titus County out on the Mitchell Place and was a good girl. They got along fine and Ben thought a lot of her. They had one daughter, Elizabeth who comes to visit Ben every day. While I was visiting with Mr. Carr, his grandson-in-law, Mr. Robert Nance came by to visit. He was elected the first black man to the Mt. Pleasant City Council.
Ben grew up on the farm. He never got to go to school, he didn’t even know a school was at Winfield until he was grown. Somewhere between 14 and 20 people lived there in separate houses. It was rough! He plowed, picked cotton, cleared land and did all that kinda stuff every day. He’d get to go to Mt. Pleasant sometimes (maybe once a year). They’d leave home at 5:00 in the morning and get to Mt. Pleasant about 9:00 that morning and back home about 9:00 that evening.
The roads were so bad that you would have 4 horses to a wagon. Ben came to buy his winter clothes, didn’t get a chance to come to town ’til fall. Old man Lide and Tingle had their store and it burned one year and Ben remembers buying stuff from there. He didn’t have much money but he did pretty good. You could get a whole lots of things for a quarter. Like the blue work shirts for 50 cents. His pants were home-made. You’d buy a bolt of jeans material and make straight-leg jeans, shirts and everything.
They grew peas, cotton, corn and sugar cane, made syrup at their own mills on the farm and had a woman there who could sure cook it, too. They carried their cotton to Winfield to have it ginned. Ed Holmes ran it. He had a feller named Grant who headed the gin. To pay for getting your cotton ginned, the gin man kept your seed. He had a place to keep them and trucks would haul nothing but cottonseed. Ben remembers that old man Joe Beck used to come up there and buy. 100 bales of cotton off of the old Carr Place.
Ben has seen some tough times and some good times. You couldn’t sell peanuts, cottonseed, peas, potatoes or nothing. Nobody would buy them. Everybody raised their own. They worked 100 acres in cotton and 50 acres in com. Great big cribs of corn would be scattered everywhere.
When Ben first came to Mt. Pleasant he farmed 20 acres of cotton and a little corn and raised 2 bales of cotton weighing over 600 pounds a piece. He cleared $18 that year and had a fertilize bill and after he got through paying that he figured that he made 40 cents. Ben would work out his cotton and then work at the Hoffman Heading Factory. Ben worked at the factory for 20 years and for 15 years at the house and had to leave, they wouldn’t pay enough. He then went to work for the railroad for 3 years. Ben messed around and cut yards for people, worked for Mrs. Dean Lide for 30 years and worked in old man Lide’s store. He had a Dry Good’s Store. Ben had to clean and polish all the copper in the store, change the windows, clean them out and wash ’em.
Ben, Tom McElroy and Miller Hayes unloaded lumber, tiling, bricks and all that kinda stuff out of the train and into a wagon and hauled it to the lumber yards. One day Ben was walking up the street. He didn’t have a dime or anything to eat. A lady hollered at him and wanted him to rake leaves for her for a dollar, so he did and she also brought-him a plate of grub which he was prouder of than the dollar.
The next day a woman wanted him to work her flower beds for her for $2 and he did. The next day for $2 he got another job and made 6 or 7 dollars that week. He then got a steady job for $2 and a half a week working for a doctor for 9 months and he saved $60. He then got a job for $15 a month that lasted for 11 years.
Ben remembered quite a bit about Mt. Pleasant. He remembered when the Morris Hotel was built where George Lilienstern’s store was on the southwest corner of 3RD Street and Jefferson Street. There was a boarding house which was run by the Peterman’s on the northwest corner of 3RD Street and Washington Street.
When Ben was a little boy, where Proctor’s Drug Store was, there was an old wagon yard. They traded and sold horses there. Ben remembers George Baker trading horses there.
He remembers every saloon that was in town. Ben Parrish had a saloon on the southwest corner of East 3RD and Washington Streets and Perkins and Dilllard operated one on the corner of West 2ND and the square. There was another store-saloon located somewhere in town, also. They all sold whiskey. One time, Ben bought a pint of whiskey for 25 cents and took one drink of it on the way back home to Winfleld and that was enough for him, he didn’t like it. That corn whiskey that was made by the bootleggers was terrible, too. They made it and sold it in quart jars out of their houses. Used to be a feller here named Bob Dale. He was bad about sellin’ whiskey. Ben used to work for a feller that drank quite a bit of whiskey. He’d buy it and put it in charred kegs and let it age. When you’d put it in there it would be white and you’d take it out and it would be red.
Ben remembered a little bit about Red Springs. There used to be a crooked feller here who used to put that colored water up in half-pints and pints and meet the train with it and sell it as whiskey. He remembers the street car down there as being nothing but a mule car.
Ben remembers when “the mob” would get out. This happened in Sulphur Springs and Gainesville. Ben was real close to it one time. He was in town when the mob broke out and was the only one on the street. A white lady told him to go home and stay. There were two others on the street, one was dead and the other was as near dead as he could be. And then they would burn them. This was done on Sunday. Ben went home and looked out and saw ’em traveling with guns and met right at 200 of them. But they didn’t bother Ben. He was lucky.
About Winfield, Ben remembered that Bill and Jim Emerson ran a Dry Goods Store and a Grocery Store together in town. Dr. Beck was their doctor and they paid him off in corn.
When Ben lived in Sulphur Springs he used to order his whiskey from Winnsboro. Every train that came through would bring 1-2 quarts of it, according to how much money he had.
Ben told quite a funny incident that happened to him one day. The lady that raised him up tore him up about steal in’ a black snake wagon whip. One day he had it out poppin’ it and she asked him where he got it. He said that he just got it, it was layin’ out on the sidewalk and he just went and got him one of them. So she whipped him good and made him take it back and tell the man what he had done. They were all laid out on the sidewalk and he thought you could just take ’em, so he did, and he really got whipped bad for it.
The first telephone he ever used was one that you crank up. And when the line broke, you’d take it and tie it to a barbed wire fence and use the phone right on.
The first automobile he ever saw was an old Saxon. When Ben moved here, Mr. Praytor (a photographer) had the first one he ever saw. The front end came to a sharp point. One time, Ben went to Sulphur Springs by car and passed Mr. Praytor on the way up there in his Saxon. When Ben was on his way back home, he passed Mr. Praytor still going to Sulphur Springs. (I did some research on the Saxon and all I could find was a 1915 Saxon, so it was probably around then.) Then Fords came in and you could buy one for $500. Ben remembers one Juneteenth, a boy had a new ford and people paid all day 50 cents each way just to ride in that thing. And they tore that boy’s car up, too!
He remembered some of the “characters” from back when. One of them, probably the most well known was “Turkey Jim”. “Turkey Jim” was one of those men that feared no person and he was known as a killer. He was mean! “Turkey Jim” was raised up by the Carrs. He lived at Talco at Tom McClean’s place. Tom Copeland was a mail clerk for the Cotton Belt and one night on his run he was shot and killed. A small piece of torn coat was found near the premises and it was said to match that of “Turkey Jim’s” jumper that he was wearing that night. He was tried and found not guilty of the crime.
Everybody knew him. He’d walk around with guns and stuff on. One night his mother gave a church supper and he went in there and shot up everything in the house. Ben went to Dallas one night and ran up on him over there. Ben was talking with the landlady where he was staying and “Turkey Jim” walked in. He peeped in at her and she asked him why he was peeping in on her and he told her that’s what his eyes were made for, to look. She told him she had a sight on her automatic and she said that the faster she used it, the better he liked it. So Ben got him out of there and later on heard that “Turkey Jim” liked to beat that woman to death! He did go to the pen once but Ben didn’t know why. Turkey Jim died here in Mt. Pleasant.
Ben remembered old man Johnny Carr. He helped to raise Ben. And he remembered Pat Carr. All of them drank except for Pat. He went to British Columbia after killing a feller who cheated him in a poker game. Pat Carr stayed there a number of years returning with a half-Indian boy named Casey. Casey got drunk one day and rode his horse into Ben Parrish’s saloon. They put him in jail and old man Johnny Carr got him out. Old lady Jane Carr was rough, too. But she was a good woman. Ben’s grandfather was her “cab driver” long years ago. She named Ben after his grandfather. As long as she lived she wouldn’t let any of them whip Ben.
Ben also talked of another character Lindsey Scott. He was a big bootlegger. He stayed on the east side of town. He was always evading the cops with a load of whiskey and always gave them chases and caused problems. He’d shoot at cop cars, too! Aubrey Redfearn was Sheriff from 1943-46 and shot up Lindsey’s car one time and Ben doesn’t know how it kept from killing him.
Ben remembers Hettie Dillahunty, a schoolteacher who lived where the ice house 1s now. They said she was a “spirit caller” and could call up “spirits or ghosts.”
Ben was a bad little boy, He’d cuss ’em out and run! One day, at Christmas time, the lady he stayed with and her husband left Ben at home for the day alone. There was a half-pint of whiskey there, so Ben took sugar and water and mixed it all up. When they got home evidently Ben was drunk. They found the empty bottle and Ben told ’em Santa Claus drank it. So she whipped “Santa Claus” good. He was only about 7 years old.
I asked Ben how he had survived to live 95 years. He said he didn’t run around and has taken care of himself. Ben says as a young boy they didn’t play like they do now, they worked. He says now you can wake up anytime of night and hear nothing but kids go by. When he got to bed after working, he was lucky to get to go when he did. They’d go to sleep around 10:00 or 11:00 at night and get up at 3:00 or 4:00 every morning including Sundays. Sometimes they’d walk 3 or 4 miles to go to work. It would be dark when you got there and then you’d have to stand there and wait ’til daylight so you could go to work. Couldn’t see how to hoe, plow, or chop. This 8 hour business today, there wasn’t any of that back then. They went from dark to ’til it got to where you couldn’t see the stuff then you’d walk home. You’d get home and eat supper, sit around there a while, get up and go to bed, get up the next morning at 3:00 or 4:00. Nobody knows what they went through.
