1920's in Coal Hill, Arkansas

History of the Weathers Family & Coal Hill

Coal Hill, Johnson County, Arkansas

1920's in Coal Hill, Arkansas

This picture was taken in 1922 in the front yard of the Old Weathers house. The schoolhouse is in the background. At this time this was the backyard. The highway wasn’t built yet. They are from left to right in the front row: Vina Weathers, Charley Weathers, Mary Susan Senters. Back row: Annie Hackney-Ferrell, Etha Senters-King, and Nora

Elizabeth West-Weathers.

In 1920, Celia and Hulbert Dickerson were going together. Most people in town knew him as Hub. Celia had 4 younger brothers, where always pulling pranks on them. One time when there was a big snow, Hub came to see Celia and the boys snowballed him into the house. Hub usually came to see Celia on Wednesday and Saturday nights.

The boys knew this. One Wednesday, there came a snow and Hub had told Celia that he wouldn’t be over that night. As they ate their supper that evening the boys were quiet and looking mischievous. Celia knew what they were thinking, but didn’t let the boys know she knew. Celia went to her room upstairs and started fixing her hair and putting on her

makeup. The boys slipped upstairs unnoticed (they thought) and seen that she was getting ready for her date. The boys were sure Hub was coming, so they went out in the cold and made up a little wagon load of snowballs. They then waited in Hub to show up. The joke was on them for a change, for they waited and waited, but Hub never showed up.

"Ted’s Ghost"

One night when Ted was a boy, he was walking home down the railroad track alone. He looked over to the side in a sage grass field and seen something- white floating up and dropping back down into the grass. It seemed to be making a circle. Ted had heard a lot of ghost stories, but this was the first time he had seen one for real.

If you had known Ted Weathers, then you would have known nothing ever scared him. I doubt if running ever entered his mind. Ted had to have a closer look at this ghost. He walked off the track and into the ditch. The telegraph people had put new insulators on the poles a few days before and had left the old glass ones laying on the ground next to the poles. Ted picked up a couple of them as he crawled into the grass. Ted waited for the ghost to circle back close to him. As soon as the ghost got close enough to him, he threw one of them at it. It let out a pitiful howl. Instead of it being a ghost, it was a big white dog.

They made a silent movie theater out of half of Henry West’s old store. They named this

theater "Joyland". They had shows on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights. They had a man standing in the back turning the movie projector by hand. They would have writing on the screen so you would know what the people, in the movie, were saying. By this time, Coal Hill was getting electricity. The theater had an electric piano down front next to the screen. The only heating stove in the place was down front on the other side of the screen.

Celia and Hub often went to the movies. They like to sit in the back with the rest of the young couples. With the stove down front, it got pretty cold in the back. Sometimes when they got up to leave, their feet were almost frozen. They showed continuing serials at Joyland, to keep you coming back every week. They would leave the hero in a bad

predicament, such as hanging on a cliff. You had to come back the next week to see how he got out of it. These serials became known as cliffhangers.

One of the serials came on with a train coming straight at the audience. Ted and Pert took a young boy with them one night, they knew he had never been to the movies before. When the movie started, the train came on as usual. Ted and Pert started yelling" Get down the train is going to run over us!" The boy jumped down between the seats, but

decided this wasn’t good enough so he ran out of the theater. Homer Robertson and Homer Ferguson was operating the theater and tried to get the boy to go back in and watch the movie, but he stayed outside. One thing that made it so real to him was the railroad track ran right beside the theater.

On May 11, 1922, Thomas Hulbert Dickerson and Celia Pearl Weathers were married. Hub had a brother named Newt that lives in Coal Hill now. Hub’s mother was Mary Elizabeth Reeves before she married his father, William Franklin Dickerson. Hub’s father’s parents were Nathaniel Dickerson and Mary "Polly" Barhan-Dickerson.

They were married in Tennessee and moved to Oark, Arkansas. They are buried in the Hogan Cemetery near Oark. Hub was born September 17, 1897 and died February 17, 1974. After their marriage, Hub and Celia moved into the Wiening house next to her parents. This was setting where Perts house is today. On August 25, 1924, Celia and Hub had their first baby, they named her Nora Elizabeth. She was named after her

grandmother Weathers and her Great-Great grandmother Weathers. She married Robert English from Altus in 1942. They now live in Little Rock.

On September 5, 1927, They had a second daughter, they named her Doris Jean. In 1948, Doris Jean married Price Oliphant. His family lived at Hartman. After their marriage they moved to Fayetteville and Price worked at a service station. When Harold Weathers left in 1950, this left the gasoline station and washateria unattended. Hub

and Celia drove over to Fayetteville and talked Price and Jean into coming back to Coal Hill and getting started in business. Hub and Celia made them a small load to help get them started in business. They lived in the little house Ted had built in 1930. They stayed in Coal Hill until 1957, then they moved to Little Rock and are still living there. Neither Nora Elizabeth nor Doris Jean had any children.

I asked Celia to write me a little something for my book, and this is what she wrote.

In October 1924, One afternoon Hub came in from town with a pleasing smile. He said to me " What would you think of buying a home?’ I was excited and I asked "Where?" He pointed out the place, we could see it from our back porch. This I could hardly believe. It was the place I thought I would like to live when I married, and make it our home. It had been a dream from childhood.

This is a picture of Hulbert Dickerson and Celia Weathers, taken in 1921. It was taken in the yard of the old Weathers house.

This was an ideal place about two blocks from Mom and Dad. At this time, we were living in a house next to them. We bought the place when our child was nearly 3 months old. We moved in it in November. Three years later our Daughter number two was born. The four of us loved our home.

The girls grew up, married, and made homes of their own. Hub passed away after living here 50 years. Now in the year, 1979, I still live here in my home of 54 years, with many good memories. Celia Weathers – Dickerson.

This is a picture of Lora Deloris Leverett. This picture was made in 1924, when Lora was 15 years of age. The dress she is wearing is the dress that she got married in.

Lora and Ted had been to a silent movie at Joyland and were walking back to Lora’s grandmother’s house. Arch Shepard and Crystal Leverett (Lora’s sister) were walking ahead of them . Now Ted had been trying to get Cris to ask Lora to marry him and she wouldn’t do it. When they reached the house, Arch and Cris announced

that they were getting married. Ted then said to Lora, "Why don’t we make it a double wedding?" On July 15, 1924, they had a double wedding.

At the time of Ted and Lora’s marriage, he was working on the railroad making $2.40 a day. At this time, this was good money for a few days work. Later on, he went back to the mines.

After Celia and Hub moved out of the Weining house, Ted and Lora moved in it They lived there until 1929. Ted and Lora had four children. Charles William was born April 14, 1925. Mary Claudine was born Mary 31, 1928. Lee Roy was born August 22, 1937. Jackie Wayne was born February 25, 1950.

In 1926 – 1930, Harold, Pert, Ted, Woodrow, and Charley all worked in the mines. Once when asking for a job, the mine owner asked what kind of job they wanted. Ted said he wanted a job loading coal so he could make more money loading by the ton. The mine owner gave him such a job. When he asked Woody what he wanted

he said he wanted a job with all the work taken out of it. He gave him such a job driving a engine pulling the cars of coal out of the mine. Pert and Harold saved their money from the mines and bought them a new car in 1926 and again in 1927. They bought a star car. After driving the car for a year on rough roads it was considered "to be worn

out", so they bought another. The way they decided who’s turn it was to drive the car was, whoever took it out it was his until he brought it back. Sometimes they kept it out 3 or 4 days at a time. If one of them came home at 2 o’clock in the morning and the other needed it in the next day or so, he would get in it and leave, so he would have it when he

needed it. These cars cost about $650.

This is a picture of Charley Weathers. It was taken in the late 20’s. The baby is Nora Elizabeth Dickerson. The house in the background is the old Weather’s house that Josh moved out of the bottoms in 1879. This picture was taken from where my house sits today. The bull calf is a poled Hereford and is the type of cattle the Weathers family had on the farm.

A dirt road was built through Coal Hill in 1927. This road came through Hartman, went on the hill, down off the hill into Coal Hill, then on to Alix, and from there to Altus. It didn’t take long to get from one town to another on this road.

The first radio came to Coal Hill about 1927. It had earphones and could only be listened to by one person at a time. Later Homer Robertson bought one with a speaker. He put a big speaker on it so lots of people could hear it at the same time. One night Jack Demsey was fighting and it was being broadcast on the radio. Not many people had a radio so the people gathered at Homer’s house to listen to the fight. The front room was full and people were sitting all over the lawn. Homer placed the speaker so everybody could hear the fight. Everybody had a good time that night as the favorite, Jack Demsey, won. About all that electricity was used for at this time was light bulbs. Some people said that on a dark night you would have to strike a match to see if the bulbs were burning or not.

At this time, there were only two radio stations you could get around here and they had a lot of static on them.1928 was the last year Charley Weathers and his family farmed the land down at the field. They still had about 7 acres of strawberries, but didn’t farm cotton. The last year they farmed, they had trouble getting all the cotton picked and

were until February getting it out.

This is a picture of Charles William Weathers taken in 1929. It was taken on the front porch of the house they lived in back out in the country. The goat was his pet.

In 1929, Charley Weathers bought a farm over the hill northwest from Coal Hill. Ted and Lora decided to move out there and raise cotton. They moved about 2 miles out there and bought a few cows, some chickens, a team of mules, and a goat. Yes, he bought a goat. Charles took this goat for his pet. He would put a rope on the goat and ride it and

lead him around. One day, Charles decided to ride the goat and when he got on it, it bucked him off. Lora thought his arm was broken and she wanted to get rid of the goat, but it wasn’t broken and he kept the goat. Ted broke the land with the mules, and planted the cotton. After the cotton came up, Lora’s sisters came to help thin the cotton. Thelma kept the children (Charles and Claudine) while Lora and Lois hoed the cotton. On June 2^nd they had the cotton hoed over and a good garden growing. Everything was looking real good and it looked like they might get ahead. It came up a cloud and the wind started blowing. Ted brought the mules to the barn and came in the house. The wind blew the back door open and they had a hard time getting it shut. After they got the door shut they put a table up against it and sat on it.

The wind blew a pailen fence over on top of a row of cabbage in the garden. Then it started hailing, the hail beat the garden, and the cotton down even with the ground.

When the wind stopped and it quit hailing, Ted and Lora went out to see what had happened. The hail was 6 inches deep. Coal Hill was only a mile away (As the crow flies) but the hail didn’t hit the town. It seems the hail had just went down through Walker’s Hollar.

After the hailstorm, Gus Hurst and his family came over to visit. They had everything to make ice cream with and plenty of hail for ice, so Lora mixed up the ice cream and Ted gathered the hail up for the freezer. They used a hand crank freezer and everybody enjoyed homemade ice cream that evening.

The next morning Lora gathered the cabbage the fence had fallen on, and made kraut out of it. They now had to decide whether to replant the cotton or move back to town. They moved back to town to the old hotel that they called the flat. Some of the other people that were hit by the hailstorm replanted their cotton, but it was too late in the year and they didn’t make anything.

This is a picture of Helen Ferguson made in the late 1920’s.

On November 22, 1930, Woodrow Weathers and Helen Ferguson were married. Helen was Wood’s childhood sweetheart. Helen’s parents were G.D. Ferguson and Jacklyn Patty-Ferguson. Her brother’s name is Robert "Robb" Ferguson and her sister is Anne Ruth Ferrell. They built Highway 64 through Coal Hill in 1929. This was the first paved road to come through here. Charley tore down the Weining house and used the lumber to build a combination gasoline station and grocery store. He built it on the northwest corner of block 10, the land that Vina had bought in 1881. The highway ran along the north

edge of this land and Charley knew cars would be coming by on the highway and need gas. Woodrow ran this station for the next few years. Woodrow and Helen built a cafe close to the station later on.

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