Charlie was born in Burnet, in the northeast corner of the town, right across Daugherty Branch from the school shop where the buses are kept. The family lived in a rented house then. That house stayed in the Cotton family for a long time. Mr. Cotton was Melvin Kincheloe's grandfather; Melvin's mother was a Cotton before she married. In high school I was in school with Sylvia Cotton, whose married name I don't remember [Sylvia Symons].
Charlie and his parents moved quite a bit. He and his father, William Alfred Ross, worked in construction. They also worked with cedar. Back then a cedar chopper wasn't thought of a trashy. Anyone who needed money and did not have steady employment would go into the woods and cut cedar and haul it in to get some cash. Charlie's dad and granddad chopped cedar and Charlie started going with them when he was about 14. They'd fill the truck and bring it to the cedar yard in Burnet. There were 2 or 3 large cedar yards in the city limits then. The biggest was the King cedar yard and they shipped posts by railroad, all over the country. After Charlie's dad, Will, had worked with the cedar enough to learn how to grade it he did that. To grade the posts depends on the size: if you have one with a 2 inch post at the top, and it's larger at the bottom, and it's 6 feet tall, it might bring 10 cents. Then it was probably 5 cents and now it might be 25 cents. Mr. Ross was the manager of the King Cedar yard for 2 or 3 years and he graded the cedar. So Charlie and his dad got to know the country people that way, probably a lot of folks they ordinarily wouldn't have met. In the fall one year after my father-in-law quit working for Mr. King (and I think Mr. King closed the yard because the trucking industry had improved and were carrying the posts and the margin of profit was smaller) Mr. Ross began working at the Burnet cotton gin. There was a lot of cotton grown around Burnet then, east and west of town. Marble Falls, Bertram, Lake Victor and Burnet all had gins then. Mr. Marcus Brooks worked at the gin and Charlie started working there when he was 15. It was near the railroad tracks where Dick Kelly's place is (Silver St. at E. League). There were scales there and everything was kept neat and clean. The wagons would get in line and wait their turn to be weighed. When the cotton all was ready at one time [not legible].
The men would sit in the shade of a tree or the scalehouse and visit. One of Charlie's jobs was to keep the steam built up by throwing wood into the fire. He also ran the suction pipe that was about 15 inches around. He moved it over the top of the wagon and it would literally suck up the cotton and it came down into the building and went through things that pulled the lint out and separated the lint from the seed. The seed went in one direction and the lint went in another direction and as baled. Hemp, or what we'd call towsacking now, was wrapped around the bales and then metal bands went around them. Then they were weighed on the platform outside on these huge scales that were hung down.
After the bales were weighed, they were lowered down into the man's wagon if he wasn't going to sell it then. Sometimes they'd sell it to the gin, or sometimes they'd take it home and keep it until the price was higher, then come back to town to sell the cotton. From Burnet the cotton was loaded onto the train, and later on trucks, and sent to the large compresses, in Austin or on the coast so the ships could take it overseas. As far as I know the remains of the Burnet gin are on property owned by Mr. E. E. Greathouse. Charlie worked there from the time he was 15 until he was about 21. It was approximately a 3 month job, but sometimes the job would start earlier and Charlie would go out with Mr. Brooks and the other men to cut wood to keep the gin fueled. 8 or 9 men would go out into someone's pasture where they had bought "on the stump" as they'd call it, a certain amount of wood to be cut up into lengths, and loaded and stacked real carefully right by the door of the furnace.
Before Charlie and his dad worked with the gin, Mr. Ross (Will) worked at the graphite mine. The first time he worked there everyone lived in tents. Charlie was 5 yrs. Old then. Mr. Raymond Gentle was a young man who had a crippled foot and he taught school to the children out there. Charlie's sister Nellie was bout 8 then. For the school they put up a floor and a wall about 3 feet tall, then the tent over that. A wood burning stove was [not legible] think they were only there for one school season, then moved to Burnet.
During WWI, Charlie would have been about 10 or so then, or closer to 12 I guess, they went back out to Graphite. Meanwhile the company had built 4 room bungalow houses, really 3 rooms with a porch, that were square. Each family had the right to live in one of these houses for a very small amount of rent. The company also had a commissary with staples for the employees to buy. They had dried beans, potatoes, canned foods, just common things, nothing fancy. But they always had stick candy. Lynn Noble, his wife and daughter ran the store for several years. Mr. Noble wanted to become a minister in the Church of Christ so he studied between waiting on customers, and when he became a preacher every [one] out there knew him as Brother Noble. His daughter Gertrude was a teacher later and then when she retired she moved to a family place in Llano County. When she was a teenager she kept the store for her father while he ran errands. Mr. Noble had a Model T Ford, and one day Charlie rode into town with him to get groceries. One [On] the way back Mr. Noble asked Charlie if he had ever driven, and he said no but he sure did want to. He was about 12 then. So one [on] the way home Charlie got to drive that Model T and he just worshipped the ground it drove on. Charlie's sister Nellie Irvin; he had twin sisters Ruby, who married Herman Crawford and Flossie, who married Franklin Ellett. The Elletts are also pioneers in Burnet. Their home place is Mt. Zion and Mt. Blanc. The Crawfords came here when Buchanan Dam was first under construction. When it had to close down because of the Depression, the Crawfords were one of the families that stayed on, mainly because they had no money. They had to use Red Cross flour just like the rest of us. They had dried beans, dried peas, potatoes, sugar, and meal. There was an office on the square where you'd go get your rations of government issued foods. If your neighbor didn't have enough of something and you needed another thing, you just exchanged.
Flossie's father-in-law worked for the state highway dept. They rented a house in town. Franklin graduated from Burnet High School and played football. [Not legible] was Charlie's father, Will, and they always lived together. They learned there was going to be a railroad (narrow gauge) built from Lometa to Bend on the Colorado River. This was in between times that Mr. Ross (Will) was working for the graphite mine. They just loaded their household goods into a wagon and went to investigate the building of this railroad. It developed that a big cedar company felt it would be worthwhile to build this railroad over to the bend in the river where they could buy the cedar that was cut over there and ship it out. They moved over there and lived on a farm that was irrigated from the river, and they raised onions. At that time state law required that you be seven years old to start school, and I don't believe the twins were quite old enough. Anyway when the onion crop was finished, they moved into Lometa. They did quite a lot of moving around from job to job and never stayed anywhere very long. Ruby and Flossie were three when Jay was born and they were living in Burnet then. I can think of about 5 or 6 houses they live in, in Burnet or in the country.
They lived in Lometa one ginning season and Mr. Ross worked there. Nellie went to school, but there were too many in school so Charlie couldn't go. When ginning season was over they moved back to Burnet. Mr. Ross had bought a Model T sedan and he had a small taxi service for a time. People just called him on the crank type phone and he would go get them. It was mostly widows or aged people. They had rented this house on E Pecan &endash; it's the 1100 block. In 1926 Mr. Ross traded his taxi to Aunt Middie Jennings (?) for that house. There were 8 lots and a four room house. It had been a two story house but it was cut down to one. It had a porch all the way across the front and a wide hallway. That was the Ross home from 1926 until a tornado in 1969 took the roof off it. Mr. Ross had died in 1961 at age 81, but Mrs. Ross was still living. She had lost her eyesight and had to have a companion live with her. Since she couldn't see she didn't know they were wading in water ankle deep in her house and she didn't know why she had to leave. But she lived with her daughter Mary Ervie for about a year and then in the nursing home until her death in Dec. of 1969.
To go back to the origin of the house: Aunt Middie Jennings was grandmother of Iva Lee Gibbs and all her family. Mrs. Mud Gibbs was a Jennings. The Jennings family came here with the early settlers, to Oatmeal I think.
This house that Mr. Ross traded for was Dr. Jennings' house, or his widow's. They lived across the street in another house that was built at the same time. The one the Rosses lived in was called the commissary, which we would now call a hospital. They had the two story part for four rooms downstairs and four rooms up, so they could have beds for several patients at one time. The doctor and his family lived across the street from the clinic. It's between Pecan and East Live Oak. Those houses were built very soon after the Civil War.
There was a lead mine near Beaver Creek Bridge on the Burnet County side at one of the highest points. It's farther up than Silver Creek. About half a mile up that creek is an old lead mine, and Charlie's dad worked there, when Charlie was 6 &endash; 8 yrs. Old.
There was also a saltpeter mine or quarry, and the saltpeter was bought for medical purposes.
Mr. Frank _________ who was a Frenchman built a mill and a building gout at the lead mine. He ran out of money before he could finish what he wanted to do. I rode over there horseback in 1928 from Council Creek where my family lived, in a log cabin that was built by Uncle Johnny Fry's father. At the entrance to Silver Creek village there is a field of bluebonnets on your right as you go toward Morgan Creek. Council Creek itself goes through the valley right below that field, which was an Indian encampment ground. People used to get arrow heads and other artifacts there. And there's 100 acres of cultivated land there. This house we lived in had been built with pegs, not with nails. It was a two room house with a dog trot that had been enclosed, and my sister and I had that for our room. There was a fireplace at one end of the house and at the other end I think there must have been a fireplace, but it was torn out, and we had a wood stove. At one end was the kitchen and dining room and the other end was the living/bedroom. In 1927 very few people had just a living room, like we think of today. Generally someone slept in what was used for the living room. We came here in February 1927 and stayed until the first day of January 1929 when we moved to Pebble mound, north of Burnet. While we were there we rode Morgan Creek. One Sunday afternoon we rode over to the lead mine.
They had some crushing equipment &endash; big steel wheels powered I guess by gasoline. The ore was picked out by hand with picks and chisels, and then it was crushed. Sometimes they shot dynamite. You could walk into the tunnel, and there was a [not legible] or rails down the middle with a sort of buggy on it. The ore wagons were not much bigger than my coffee table. The men had those lights that they strap around their heads. Charlie's dad worked in the mine itself. There was a cook tent where everybody ate, and they slept out there too. When we rode over there, I was real interested in it. The lead looked like coal chunks, but after it went through the crusher it went on a floatation table that was elevated. It was about as high as my head, and the engines made it shake. The coal got finer as it went down and the bigger pieces went one way. That's how they separated it for grading purposes [not legible] was so far from Burnet and the rode was so bad that they just left the coal in a big pile for a long time before they transported it to the train. Mr. [not legible] had made some contacts but I don't think he had gotten any guarantee market for his ore. There is in Burnet County a little bit of almost any kind of ore you can think of. The tunnel for the lead mine is enclosed but it's still there I think on the Goodrich Ranch. That field out there was really beautiful, full of bluebonnets, niggerheads, Indian Paintbrush, and other wild flowers. The mine was not in operation when we went to see it, but there were still some of the cars there and one employee of Mr. Plezette (?) was doing a little work for him there (1927). He was Jack Pabst. They had lived on Council Creek. Actually, there were two Council Creeks, a south branch and a north branch. They come together just shortly before the creek runs under the highway.
Her mother was a Taylor and her father traveled a lot. He was always looking for the pot at the foot of the rainbow. He bought and sold more homes than any one person I've ever known. Everywhere he went he bought a farm. If it was 8 or 10 miles from town he's [he'd] stock a room with groceries and petition for a post office. One of the post offices that's still marked on some of the maps in on Hwy 281 N, named [not legible]. Another one is near Chalk Mountain, named Oden's Chapel. I was born on a farm between Oden's Chapel and Chalk Mountain. I was born near there in 1911.
My first memories are of riding in a wagon to Chalk Mountain to go to the store and post office. I went to school at Oden and my father cut a path out over the mountain so we could walk without the brush bothering. It was about 2 miles to the school.
