THE PENTECOSTS
By
John Limmer
Where
to begin? More to the point, where to begin exploring family trees without
offending those readers who feel their forefathers rightly deserve top billing in
the Cross Cut orchard. Answer? It's just like going for a quick dip in the
bayou on the way home from school; I simply pinch my nose, shut my eyes tight,
and jump right in - feet first.
The patriarch of the
American Pentecost family was named William. His family's European lineage was
that of the Pendergeasts, but the name was changed to Pentecost upon emigration
to the new world in the mid 1700 ' s. William was born in 1762 and his family
originally settled in Virginia. His initiation as an American citizen was
painful indeed. At the tender age of 14, he fought in the Revolutionary War and
lost an arm in the process. To his credit, he apparently did not let his
disability interfere greatly with the goals and ambitions in his life. He
married Mrs. Delilah Wood (who had two children from a previous marriage) in
1787, some 11 years after the unfortunate incident with the arm, and moved from
Virginia to Jackson County, Georgia the following year. From all indications,
William was a devoutly religious man - as evidenced by his personally
establishing five Methodist churches in Georgia before his death in 1839. One
of those churches was still active as of the time of an interview in August,
1995 with Ms. Doris Meyer, granddaughter of Dick Pentecost, and much appreciated
supplier of the Pentecost family history .
In this, as in all
succeeding family histories in this narrative, an attempt has been made to
trace the lineage of prominent Cross Cut families back to their American
origins. I remind you however, this is the story of a single Texas town, and to
include a comp/ete family tree for each surname would not only be
unnecessarily cumbersome, but, frankly, somewhat boring. With that in mind, on/y
those family members lying along a direct /ine to Cross Cut will be
included.
William and Delilah's first
born was Richard Wood Pentecost in 1788; the year following their marriage.
Richard married Ms. Sarah Perkins who had two children by a previous marriage,
and together, they produced ten more offspring; one of which was Caroline, in
1820, and another was Mark, in 1832.
Mark would have two
wives during his lifetime. The first (possibly in 1855) was Ms. Elizabeth
Causley, whose fate is unknown. The second (thought to be in 1857), and the one
who accompanied him to Cross Cut, was Ms. Sarah Angeline Martin. His marriage
to Sarah produced nine children. If the date of Mark and Sarah's marriage is
correct, the first born to the union was Richard Wood (Dick) Pentecost in the
same year of their marriage. This seems likely as he was named for his
grandfather .
In 1874, five years
before Cross Out mistakenly became Cross Cut, Mark and Sarah
packed up the kids and their belongings and, along with Mark's sister,
Caroline, and her husband Joseph Elsberry, (assuming they met and married in
Georgia), left Jackson County, Georgia and headed for the promised land; in
their case, the Byrd's Store area of Brown County, Texas.
Of Mark and Sarah's
nine children, only three developed direct ties to Cross Cut. William (Bill)
fanned for a time in the area, Sarah Eliza (Liza) married Mr. C. C. Westerman,
and then there was their first-born, Dick.
Most folks around the
turn of the century were content making their way farming or ranching in
relative peace and anonymity. Such was not the case with young Mr . Richard
Wood Pentecost. According to his granddaughter, few of Dick's peers had much
reason to accuse him of devoting an excessive amount of his time to manual
labor. Quoting her Grandmother Hattie, she says, "'they (Dick's family)
would have starved to death if they had to depend on Dick". Dick's fifth
born child, Anna, Doris' mother, related how she, her mother and her siblings
would work the fields without him. Hattie would set her newest born baby on the
end of her cotton sack and drag it along with her while picking. When she
wasn't tending the fields or nurturing her brood, Hattie was busy canning
vegetables to feed her flock during the winter months. But Dick always seemed
to have other fish to fry .
1886 was an active
year for the community. It was in that year that the first school was built and
the Methodist Church was established. The Baptist Church of Christ had already
beaten the Methodist's to the punch however. In August of the previous year, 80
of Cross Cut's faithful adopted "rules of decorum", and Sunday
Baptist services were already well underway. Cross Cut was rapidly blossoming
and it would seem Dick wanted to be a major part of things. So long as that
part did not include unduely strenuous activity. His and Hattie's home place
was situated on a 215 acre tract of land, possibly part of her inheritance from
her deceased father, in the middle third of the W. B. Travis Survey. In the
northeastern comer of that tract was a small hilltop, a bit on the rocky side
and not much use as faemland, but perfect, in Dick's eyes at least, for a town
site. On December 12, 1889, Cross Cut's first urban developer/Realtor made his
very first sale: a "town lot" to J. L. (Uncle Johnny) McPeeters for
the respectable sum of $25.
That Uncle Johnny
purchased a 50' by 100' piece of poor property - in a town which existed only
in Dick Pentecost's head - for the price of 8 to 10 acres of prime farm land
almost anyplace else in the area may seem foolish. Maybe, it being mid
-December, he was caught up in the Christmas spirit. Maybe Dick was a born
promoter. More Likely, it had something to do with the coincidental fact that
he was Hattie's "adopted father" and had reared her from early
childhood.
Hattie was born
Harriet Laine Clark in 1865. Her father was a local rancher who was killed when
his horse stepped in a hole and threw him. Young Hattie was taken in by the
McPeeters family (they never had children of their own but adopted Hattie, as
well as six other children) and raised as their own until her maniage to Dick.
She did not come to the McPeeters home an empty handed orphan. Quite the
contrary , she inherited her father's estate after his untimely death and
showed up at Uncle Johnny's door a young lady of considerable means and
property .Like most men of his time, Uncle Johnny was prudent. He gave his love
fteely, but saw no reason why his new border should not pay her own way from
her inheritance. But he was also an exceptionally honest man. Detailed records
were kept on every penny spent for Hattie's care and a running account was
always available for her examination. At the tender age of 15, Hattie took the
remainder of her inheritance into a marriage with then 23 year old Dick
Pentecost.
Apparently Dick met
with more sales resistance from other potential 'town lot" buyers. Not
everyone could be convinced to part with their hard earned money by words
alone. What he needed, he probably decided, was a visual sales aid. So, in
1893, Dick commissioned Mr. Mark E. Ragsdale to survey the hilltop and layout
what he envisioned as the future town of Cross Cut, Texas. By September 1st of
that year, the survey was complete and an official looking map was drawn to
show to all future prospective buyers.
We will assume Dick
set out forthwith to entice local folks to purchase lots in his new town, for
what is a town without citizens? From all records however, not many agreed with
his ambitious assessment of the rocky little hilltop. In short, there was no
apparent great rush to get on board Dick's train to the future. Most probably,
its greatest shortcomings were the absence of precious surface water, and the
length of travel required to obtain it. Had those who finally did move within
its limits known that subsurface water was also absent beneath its
twenty acres, that wells drilled would produce only brackish, non-potable
water, it may never have seen an inhabitant. That lack of drinkable water, in
fact) plagued Cross Cut citizens for its entire existence. While Dick was busy
trying to promote the town, another landmark event in the history of Cross Cut
occurred. On a warm July day in 1897, Mrs. Caroline Pentecost Elsberry, wife of
Joseph Elsberry and older sister of M. N. (Mark) Pentecost, died. Dick’s aunt
was buried in the southeast corner of an eighty acre tract owned by his father
and mother.
Mark and Sarah apparently decided to utilize the remainder of the tract to give their son, Dick, a respectable trade and a steady source of income. On 12 September, 1898, only fourteen months after the interment, a warranty deed was filed transferring ownership of 80 acres of land from "M. N .Pentecost and wife Sarah A. Pentecost" to "Kellett-Chathan Machinery Company of Waco, Texas" in exchange for "($800.00) Eight hundred Dollars in Gin Machinery paid and delivered to R. W. Pentecost our son.
A plot of the boundaries
specified in the deed shows a block of land 603 veras ~ wide by 774 veras deep
(approximately 80 acres), with a two acre notch removed - one apparently part
of the original survey but not included in the current sale - from its
southeast comer. The important deed verbiage is as follows: "Beginning at
the D. H. Norwood N. E. Comer thence south 674 vrs. to a stone set for the N.
E. cor. Of cemetery, Thence west 113 vrs. To a stone for N. W. cor. of
cemetery. Thence south l00 vrs. To S.W. cor. of cemetery ". With no
documentation supporting the contrary, it seems safeto say Mrs. Caroline
Pentecost Elsberry was buried on property owned by Mark and Sarah Pentecost,
and that at some point in time during the following fourteen months, a cemetery
was officially established and donated by Mark and Sarah Pentecost to the
residents of Northwest Brown County. With one stroke of the pen, the elder
Pentecosts supplied Cross Cut with two necessities: a cemetery and a cotton
gin.
As an aside, that same 80
acre tract was purchased from the gin company on August 24, 1899, less than a
year after its original sale, by Mrs. H. P. McPeeters for $500 in cash. Dick
somehow reacquired his father's land between the time of the purchase by Mrs.
McPeeters, and May 7, 1915, for on that date he sold it to E. DeBusk for
$2,000, a tidy profit by anyone's standards. The Notary Public verifying that
sale was a gentleman named W.H.G. Chambers.
We will get to him in a later chapter.
For now, back to the new
cotton gin. We can assume, considering his heritage and probable upbringing in
the home of a man who established five churches, that Mark was a firm believer
in the Protestant work ethic. It would appear he also had his finger firmly on
the pulse of Brown County economics. Agrarian families during his day raised
two types of crops: one for food and feed, the other for cash income. The
"cash crop" in Cross Cut was cotton. It was from the proceeds of the
family cotton crop that Junior got his new shoes, and Mamma got curtains. The
railroad came to Brownwood, a day's wagon ride south of Cross Cut, in 1885. By
1898, the year of Mark's purchase of gin equipment for his son, Brownwood was
rapidly becoming the largest cotton buying center west of Fort Worth, handling
tens of thousands of bales per season. The operative word here is
"bales". Cross Cut was sorely in need of a gin to make those bales.
Thanks to Mark Pentecost,
the needed gin was delivered and in place. Whether or not his son ever
personally operated it is not known, but seems doubtful, for the next recorded
reference to it was a 3-1/2 acre exclusion from a land deed of sale in 1903
-and the name on that small plot was not that of Dick Pentecost, but Mr. J. M.
Coffman. That particular transaction was the sale of 215 acres more or less,
situated in the middle third of the W. B. Travis survey, and it included
"all the town of Cross Cut except the blocks and lots which have heretofore
been sold or contracted to be sold by R. W. Pentecost.". The new owner of
Cross Cut, Texas was a gentleman named A. T. Davis of Callahan County. The
sales price was $4,000, making Dick Pentecost the 8th richest man in Cross Cut
in declared assets. But it also left a land promoter without an acre of land to
promote.
Dick may not have
spent much time sowing or harvesting crops, but he did not ignore his homework
altogether. In between his promotional activities, he managed to father twelve
children: Francis A. in 1881, Johnny in 1883, Dora Lee in 1886, Eula Bell in
1888, Richard L. (Little Dick) in 1890, Anna Viva in 1892, Clyde W. in 1895,
Ruie Ola in 1897, Walter Asbury in 1899, Mary Loyd in 1901, Orval Clark in
1904, and finally, Wanda Lavelle in 1906.
Nothing more
devastates a parent than the loss of a child, and Dick's and Hattie's first
three sons died in their teens: Johnny died of congestive heart failure at the
age of 16. Richard's horse stepped in a gopher hole and threw him to the ground
when he was just 14 -a cruel reminder
of the way in which Hattie's own father died. and Clyde had just reached the
ripe old age of 17 when he died from what was first believed to be an abscessed
tooth, but was later diagnosed as cancer. Their tombstones stand side-by-side-by-side
today in the Pentecost family plot in the Cross Cut cemetery next to those of
Dick and Hattie, constant reminders of how hard life must have been for
youngsters in those early days. And more than that, they give silent,
everlasting testament to the strength, fortitude, and sometimes, almost
unbelievable forbearance exhibited by the sturdy women of that era. Women such
as Hattie Clark Pentecost.
Immediately following
the sale of Cross Cut and the property adjoining it to the east and south, Dick
was, figuratively speaking, in high financial cotton. But without a steady
source of income, even large bank accounts soon begin to dwindle - especially
when one is given to co-signing notes which would never be paid by the
borrower. Dick rapidly gained a reputation of being a "good old boy"
by the towns people, and a soft touch by those who took advantage of his
generosity. Unfortunately, his popularity was gained at the expense of his own
family.
Along with his
position as the local Notary Public, the only steady job he ever held, Dick
even tried his hand for a time in the grocery business, but, apparently, that
commercial venture didn't last much longer than his real estate project. One
would suspect the threat of going to work for a living began to loom large as
his savings account shrank. About the only thing he hadn't tried was
prospecting for gold, so he loaded the family in the wagon somewhere around
1913 and headed for the small mining town of Miami, Arizona.
How long he chased that
particular dream, or when he returned to Cross Cut is not known. Suffice it to
say the only thing he brought back from Arizona that he didn't taken with him
was a new son-in-law. His daughter Anna was the only one of the Pentecosts to
strike it rich in Miami. She met and married Raymond Meyer. On their return,
Dick moved his family into the house which years later was owned and occupied
by Elsie Byrd, mother of O. B. Byrd, and shortly thereafter the family began to
drift apart.
Dora (Dode) married a
gentleman by the name of Crosby; Mary wed Homer A. Dozier; Orville married
Patsy Westerman and moved to California; and Wanda married Eldon Clark.
Unfortunately, neither Francis, Ruie, nor Walter ever found their soul mates.
In 1924, a few short years
after their return to Cross Cut Hattie Clark Pentecost contracted pneumonia,
slipped into a diabetic coma, and died. She was 59 years old.
Those who remember
Dick in his later years tell of a lonely old man sitting on the porch of
Jackson's Drug Store, smoking a pipe and waiting for the occasional citizen in
need of a Notary Public, and watching the world go by in front of him.
Ironically and sadly, that image was to be his final legacy to the town he so
ambitiously conceived and created. Bransford Eubank, in one of his lighter
moments once quipped, "The only reason Cross Cut didn't grow was because
Dick Pentecost sat on it". In 1949, Richard Wood (Dick) Pentecost,
erstwhile promoter, Realtor, miner, entrepreneur, and founder of Cross Cut,
Texas, finally found the inner peace he sought for over 92 years.