Contributed by Mike Bonner
The following from "The Teague Chronicle" in 1948 concerns Nancy Theodosia Jones, daughter of Lewis Calloway Jones and Clara Ann Reynolds. Everyone called her by her nickname of "Puss." She was born in AL in 1855 and died in Teague in 1951. She married John Strother; he died. She married DeWitt Kimble Compton in 1879 in Freestone Co. Her great-grandson, Michael Edd Bonner, is the contributor.
Teague History Involved In Story of Progress Told By Pioneer Woman
It was her 93rd birthday that petite Mrs. D. K. Compton celebrated quietly in her son's home, 221 South Eighth, recently, but so far as the white-haired Teague pioneer is concerned, it was but another day in her busy life that holds forth many more years of placid enjoyment.
"I'll live to be at least 100," she says with a twinkle in her blue eye. She lost her other eye at the age of four on the Alabama farm, where she was born in 1855, when she was struck by a piece of tin her sister had tossed playfully into the air.
Mrs. Compton recalls the chivalry, the gallantry of the colorful Old South, and the day her father L. C. Jones marched off with the Confederate forces from Fayettsville remains vividly stamped in her mind.
The Southern belle was 10 years old then, old enough to taste the bitter fruit of Northern plunder, to anxiously await the return of her father, who was to rebuild their home, which had been burned to the ground during his absence by one of their Negro slaves.
It was 78 years ago that she came with her father to Teague, then known as Brewer, to farm 100 acres of land where the railroad sections houses now stand.
"There were only a few families here then," she recalls. "I never realized that there would be a community."
Mrs. Compton was a smiling girl of 18 when she married John Strother and went with him to her home in her beloved Alabama. But four years later Strother died of tuberculosis, and she heeded her father's pleas to return here.
She married D. K. Compton, a real estate man, when she was 23, and they became the parents of five children, all of whom are still living.
They are Mrs. Ed. M. Watson, Streetman; L. B. Compton, Teague; Mrs. Betty Starck, Burbank, Calif.; J. W. Compton, Palestine; and Mrs. Harry LeGro, Bath, N.Y.
For a while, Mr. and Mrs. Compton lived in Dew. They returned here in 1906 when the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railroad was put through Teague.
She opened a boarding house for the railroadmen, and continued to operate it after the death of her husband in 1929.
In the early days, Mrs. Compton reminisces, Cotton Gin was the nearest community to Brewer. It was there that she received her mail.
For four years she walked two and a half miles to go to school at Hopewell, where she finished the fifth reader.
She remembers that Dr. W. P. Harrison became the railroad physician, and that John Guggolz was the first automobile owner here.
Mrs. Compton expresses deep pride over her four grandsons who saw active duty during World War II.
She's sentimental, but practical, too;---she's able to take into her stride the marvels of modern times.
Mrs. Compton, who has been to New York twice---"I think it's nice"---attributes her long life to wholesome living and plenty of "sound sleeping."