Troublesome Times

Not long after the death of his first wife and son, the twenty-two year old John F. Baxter was introduced to and married twenty-three year old Katie Jane Adams on October 13, 1912, at a small private ceremony in Success. John and his new bride kept his youngest brother, Mart (Martin Van Buren Baxter), and raised him as their own child while John worked the year year at sawmills near Success, Arkansas, and a few miles away near the Missouri line.

In the middle of the next summer their first child was born. Moving about the area with the lumbering work the new family continued to grow. At times when he was not working as head-sawyer at some sawmill John tended a small rented farm and was doing quite well. They accumulated horses, cows, hogs, farming tools, a wagon, and a nice car. Nothing was mortgaged: it was all theirs.

About ten years after their marriage it seemed as if it were the right time to purchase a farm of their own and settle down in one place to raise their family. They located a big farm a few miles west of Corning, Arkansas, made a down payment, and mortgaged everything they owned to buy the farm. They worked hard that year and made a good cotton crop. The agricultural depression hit hard that fall, however, and the cotton could not be sold even after it was havested. Their fourth surviving child (four others died as babies) was born in 1924.

Although they tried to prevent losing the farm, their efforts were in vain. The struggling family had bought the farm at a high price and farm produce was selling cheap, if it could be sold at all. At the same time, like a one, two knock out punch, the area was stuck by a great flood which damaged much of their household furnishings including a foot pumped pipe organ which John played. In 1925 they lost everything for which they had worked so hard, even the livestock they kept for meat to put on their table, was confiscated along with the farm itself by the bank holding their farm loan.

The family was forced to move to a rice farm and John and the oldest children, a son and a daughter just barely in their teens, hired themselves out as day laborers to provide the family with food and shelter. That year the mother was too sick even to do her own housework. Things were bad for John Baxter.

2012-04-20 17:31:20 RBaxter

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