Sturdivant, Leslie W., Mrs.

Description

Coll. by Talk by Mrs. L.W. Sturdivant M.C . Parler McCrory, Ark. Oct. 24, 1953 Reel 159 Item 7 Homesteading in Arkansas, 1917 (Mrs. Sturdivant was telling me how it happened to come from her home in North Carolina to Arkansas. I turned on the recorder when she said that she had come . . .) "to visit an aunt of mine. I was recuperating from an appendicitis operation. Met Leslie. And at that time Leslie's people owned a - big farm down here. And there was a little sixty acre tract that someway the railroad had never relin-quished the title to. And some lawyer in Little Rock was going through the papers and found out that it was open for home-steading. He came and squatted on it. He put up a little shack and moved in there. Well, in the law suit, of course they gave Leslie the right to live on it. So he could take it six months out of the year to homestead it, or eighteen months straight. So Leslie got him a wife! "It's way down on the bayou. And that's where we moved. We moved in a little cotton sha- - in a little house, moved over in the middle of that cotton, and there we lived...... That was in 1917. Didn't have any roads. And they don't allow Negroes in a radius of ten or twelve miles down there. So it meant bringing your washing back to town and all of that. But...

From Collection

Ozark Folksong Collection

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University of Arkansas