08-20-01

Unless someone comes into the store and tells me a little of the latest news or something about past history, I find myself searching for something to tell about in this column.

So the other day, Bobby Redfearn was in the store, and I was asking him about something old that happened in his neighborhood, and he quickly replied that I was older than him and I would have to tell him something.

Well it occurred to me that sometime back during the last half of the 1800's there was a store out in his neighborhood, near the south side of the Redfearn settlement and former peanut farms. I told Bobby that I had an old map that was well over 100 years old, and it shows a business located close to the Liberty community.

At the time this map was put together there were 57 houses in all of what was incorporated into the original town of Aubrey back during the 1920's. While incidentally there are now 63 houses located in Bill Nash’s subdivision just directly west of my home where my grandfather raised corn and cotton back over a hundred years ago.

After talking to Bobby Redfearn a little while, he was able to remember the name of the old store, and directly, Bobby said, "Well, yeah, I remember that there was an old store building there when I was a real young boy, and I believe that they called that old place the Lindley store. It was located up on top of the hill from Running Branch and was located just north of the Liberty Church on a road going north a little ways up the hill."

The first thing that came to my mind while listening to Bobby was that the little old Lindley store must have been somewhere in the middle of some of the huge sand pits that have come along and devoured everything from the top soil to way on down to the earth’s streams of iron ore and mineral water that is so close to the top or our terrain.

There was another store in that neighborhood in the Liberty area and east of the church. A few weeks back I mentioned the gin and saloon that was on J.H. Byrom’s farm some one hundred years ago also.

This old map shows a portion of the area as it was in the last half of hte 1800's and more particularly just after the railroad came through in 1881.

On the map, you will note that the dots on the roads indicated where a house was located.

It would be interesting to see how the modern highways relate to this map of our area.

One lady has promised me a story about her family who were Cherokee founding ancestors. Hopefully her story will be completed soon.

Also the local tax relief committee is still working for a tax rollback, I noticed in the news that a tax relief committee is also at work in the Houston area, so it sounds that the politicians better begin listening and stop doing so much telling, because this is a very serious effort that is going on. After all there is a desperate need for listening politicians in lieu of the telling type, and perhaps the elected officials will go back to being the servants of the people.

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