Dust and Cactus

Written by Susan Bean, 1975; included in The History of Palo Pinto County, c. 1978. Much of the research for this article, originally a piece for a magazine article writing class at the University of Missouri, was done in the Mineral Wells Library and by oral interviews, 1975. My father, Ray Bean, served as executive director of YMCA Camp Grady Spruce -- where the old homestead is now located -- from 1953 to 1992, where. he retired.

Susan Bean Aycock, July 1997

Dust and Cactus:

The Johnson Family, Pioneers on the Brazos River

Not much remains of the old Johnson place. There is a lump of earth where the chimney once stood, embedded with cracked red brick and overgrown with prickly p ar. The rusted shell of an old iron stove lies half under a cedar bush, and the sandy soil is littered with fragments of thick ceramic crockery.

Small clues point to the one-time presence of people: a weathered stand of fence posts, a snarl of barbed wire, a rusty bedspring, a covered cistern. Across the road, in the shadow of Johnson's Peak, the small family cemetery is fenced off from the mesquite and cactus that surround it. Iris still line the four graves there.

The old Johnson homestead lies on property now owned by YMCA Camp Grady Spruce, about 120 miles west of Dallas in Palo Pinto County. The nearest town is Graford, population 616.

Where the Brazos River once wound around the peninsula at Johnson Bend, the water that laps the shores now has been Possum Kingdom Lake for the last half-century. High stone bluffs, their top, thick with cedar, mesquite and post oak, bear testimony to the former power of the Brazos, long before the Johnsons ever settled here.

I lived on the lake for 20 summers; as a child I daydreamed about pioneers and Indians in this rough Texas country. I always wondered about the Johnsons: who they were, why they came here, what they were like.

I kicked around in the debris of their long-burned house, unearthing a rusty penknife, an iron hitching ring and once, a porcelain drawer pull. After 20 years of wondering, I decided to finally learn the story of the Johnson family.

This is pioneer country, and for this land of stark and unyielding beauty, the Johnsons were the last pioneers.

John Allison Johnson came to Texas with his parents and four sisters, settling a homestead near present-day McKinney in Collin County. He married Florence White on February 24, 1876, and the first four of their children were born there: Alben Sidney (Ben) in 1876; Roben Orlando (Or) in 18787; Alison William (Al) in 1881; and Clarissa (Cassie) in 1883.

John Johnson was a huge man with a powerful 6'3" frame, a stem, quiet man. People who knew him said that getting John Johnson's word was as good as getting the job done.

In 1888, Johnson moved his family to sparsely settled Palo Pinto County He paid $2,500 for a 436-acre farm on a bend in the Brazos River, backed up against a rocky peak that would later bear his name. On this land, he built a two-story, white plank house. The front porch faced west towards the landward base of the peak, the back porch east.

Johnson fed his family primarily by raising hogs, which he fattened with his own com. Each year, he planted about 300 acres of corn and 100 acres of grain to feed the other animals. He owned 35 stock horses and as many head of cattle, and kept Spanish goats for the family's meat supply. Near the house was a small orchard.

The four youngest Johnson children were born in the white house on the banks of the Brazos River: John W. (Jack) in 1889; Annie in 1891; lna Lou in 1893; and Bessie in 1895. (Two were still living and I interviewed them in 1975: Annie Johnson Dalton, wire lived in a rest heme in southwest Texas, and Ina Johnson Anderson, wire lived in Alpine. SBA)

"My father was a very good, reliable man," said lna Johnson Anderson, the next to youngest of the eight Johnson children. "Not too many people knew that; he kept to himself a lot. He was a quiet man, didn't talk much, but one of the most honest men you'd ever want to meet. He only went to school three months in his life, but he read extensively. He loved biographies and histories, and he was a great believer of the Bible. We had a very happy home life."

Johnson's wife, Florence, was a mild-mannered, devout woman in chronic poor health. "She never did like that place much," reflected Mrs. Anderson. "She wasn't happy there at all, but she didn't make a stir about it. She just didn't like the isolation."

At one time, the nearest supplies were in Mineral Wells, a good three-day ride from the Johnson fann. The founding of Graford 13 miles away made getting into town easier, but the roads were so bad that the wagons often stuck in the sand or turned over.

  Although there were a few neighbors scattered on nearby farms, Johnson refused his children friendship with but a few, saying that the others were loo "roughneck" for them. The Costellos (accent on the first syllable) lived on a bend of the river nearby. Connie Costello, who in 1975 still lived in a huge house near the Catholic Church with her sister, remembered visiting the Johnsons when she was a child.

"Mr. Johnson was a sort of queer old man," remembered Ms. Costello. "He was a good man, but just kind of funny. Even his grandkids thought so. There was an Old Man Tennyson who owned a farm nearby, and he raised sheep that used to get into Mr. Johnson's farm and eat his grain. Well, one time Mr. Johnson said to Al (his third son), 'AJ, I want you to shoot those sheep next time they come over here on our land.' So Al killed a couple of those sheep and went back to his father and said, 'Pa, I shot Mr. Tennyson's sheep.' Mr. Johnson said, 'Why, Al, you didn't shoot to kill, did you? I meant for you to shoot 'em with wads.' He was funny like that, said things he didn't really mean.''

John Johnson bought a store on the road to Graford to supplement the farm's failing income, but when it didn't tum a profit either, turned the building into a church and school. Called High Bluff Baptist Church and Sch(101, it stood roughly where the Possum Kingdom Jail is today. Johnson was president of the school board, and his wife taught Sunday School. The family attended church regularly, and the children went to school in Graford during the week, with Ina and Bessie riding on the family's grey donkey.

Sometime in the first decade of the 1900's, a Mr. Potter and his retarded son, Bill, came to work for the Johnsons. One morning, Mr. Potter left before the family was awake and never returned, leaving his teenage son with the Johnsons. Bill stayed on with the family for three or four more years, tending to simple chores such as hauling wood, hoeing the garden and bringing in the cows.

Bill sent to church with the Johnsons every Sunday, and when the invitation was sung, made his way 10 the altar each Sunday as well. Finally, the sympathetic Mrs. Johnson asked the pastor to baptize Bill and make him a church member so that he'd stop his weekly altar call. So Bill was baptized, but each Sunday, he continued to answer the invitation. Mrs. Johnson explained to Bill that he didn't have to go up there any more since he was a church member, but Bill replied, "Shucks, I’m a goin' to keep on joinin' the church until I get to heaven!"

  Meanwhile, the Johnson children were growing up. The family raised 10 10 15 horses each season to sell, and Ina Johnson Anderson remembered helping her father out in the corral, which remained on the property until the Ray Bean Camp was built.

"I worked out there with him and the horses," she said. "I never cooked or kept house until I married. I guess I'm more like my father in disposition than any of the other kids were. I don't have 100 many good friends. If Dad liked someone, he liked them. If he didn't, you sure knew it. He never threatened us children, but we always did what he said."

In 1909, Or and Al (the second and third sons) died of tuberculosis a month apart, at the ages of 21 and 19. They are buried in the small family graveyard at Johnson Bend with a single stone bearing the inscription "There are no partings in Heaven." A five­ year-old niece, Laura V. Craig, died in the month between their deaths and is also buried there. The fourth grave is that of a baby boy born to John Johnson's sister Cassie and her husband, Andrew Boyce. The baby was born in August, 1911, and died that December.

In the spring of 1913, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, along with oldest son Ben and his family, went to visit Ina Lou, who had married and was living in Alpine. Mrs. Johnson, who had always been in poor health, decided 10 remain in west Texas with her daughter. She never returned to Palo Pinto County.

John and Ben Johnson came back to the farm on the Brazos River that summer, leased out the land and moved the rest of the Johnson family to Brewster County, where they bought a ranch 75 miles south of Alpine. Florence Johnson died in 1917, and Ben's wife in 1918, both in the influenza epidemic of that time.

After their wives' deaths, father and son returned to the farm in Johnson's Bend. There, Ben's four children -- Cassie, Bessie Lou, Ruby and Walter -- were raised. (Only Ruby Johnson DeLong was still living when this account was first written in 1975; she had moved to Wizard Wells, near Jacksboro. SBA.)

Old Mr. Johnson lived with his son and his family, and as he aged became even more eccentric. "We were all just a little bit afraid of him," remembers Ben's third daughter, Ruby Johnson DeLong. "But for some reason, he always favored us. He'd bribe us to do little odd jobs for fruit and candy that he bought in town, " she remembered. "Well, he'd hide all the goodies and bring them out secretly. 'Course, we always tried to find where he'd hidden them. One time, I found the key to an old trunk in one of his overshoes, and when I opened the trunk, I found all the candy. We all sure had a feast, but afterwards I was terrified that he'd find out who did it. Luck was with me, though, and he just found all the candy gone.

"His favorite word was 'dod bum,' she said, laughing. Just that: 'dod dum.' We kids used to sneak up behind him as he walked from the house to the barn, slow like an old man and always talking to himself. We'd slip up on him and listen to him, and then tum tail before he got to the barn. He didn't catch us much, but when he did, mercy, he whipped us. 'Dod dum!' he'd say. 'You little devils.'

"We were always doing things like that to aggravate him, and then we'd turn and run 'fore he could catch us. I don't remember Miz Johnson much. She didn't have the disposition Old Man Johnson did. I remember I always thought she was real pretty.''

One day in 1924, Ben's daughter Cassie, who had just married, was sewing upstairs when the chimney flue suddenly caught fire from the woodburning stove downstairs. She grabbed the cuptowel she was working on and ran outside, her thimble still on her finger. When the house burned to the ground, she had saved only the cuptowel and the thimble.

Old Mr. Johnson and his son's new son-in-law, though, managed to move the huge old piano down the stairs and outside, along with one other piece of furniture. By the time the Johnsons' closest neighbors, the McMillans, arrived, there was nothing anyone could do. The site has remained basically the same since that day in 1924.

John Johnson sold the land and moved back to Alpine, where he died three years later. Ben moved his family into Graford, where his children continued their schooling.

Eugene Constantin later bought the whole peninsula behind Johnson's Peak, and in the l940's (after the dam created Possum Kingdom Lake in 1941) gave half of the land to the Boy Scouts and half to the YMCA to build Camp Grady Spruce.

Much of what else happened in Johnson Bend is lost, gone with the memories of family members long since dead.

The camp around the homestead is quite in winter. Coon, rabbit and deer tracks imprint the mud around the old cistern, past the few creaking fence boards and towards the lake beyond. There is only the rustle of the wind in the mesquites and the screaming of a hawk overhead.

Once, it was the Indians' land. At the end of the settlers' era, it was the Johnsons' land. And for a brief 20 summers more than 20 years ago, it was my land too.