HG History notes, as recalled by Phil Trice

Ralph Hall · Veteran Member

RE: HG History notes, as recalled by Phil Trice

Jane Dearing Dennis · Message Board Moderator

Phil Trice, who lived in Holly Grove in the 1930s, shared the following information in a January 1977 letter to my grandmother, Katie E. King. This was a few months after the Holly Grove Centennial and the publication of a history of Holly Grove, compiled by my grandmother. He was the son of Vida and Phil Trice Sr., a land surveyor who worked in the Holly Grove area. I'm sure there are others around HG who remember him or know more about him. I have been able to determine that he also had a brother, Shelby C. Trice, who is a CPA in Mobile, Ala.
[Note: This is my best attempt at transcribing his hand-written letter. I apologize in advance for any errors. - Jane Dearing Dennis, granddaughter of Katie E. King.]

Dear Mrs. King,

My aunt, Mrs. F.L. Owen of Richmond, has kindly sent me a copy of the brochure on Holly Grove, which appears to have been largely prepared by you. I appreciate that it is more difficult to assemble information than to criticize the product, so I do not intend any criticism. I also realize that oral tradition may be incorrect, and certainly must give way to record evidence, so while I would question only a couple of items on the basis of personal knowledge, the intent is to supplement your information, and to state some of the oral traditions that have come to me. Having published a book of my own almost a decade ago, I did not then lose interest in the subject, but have welcomed additional information, even though I do not intend to publish another edition. I thought you might feel likewise. Let me finally take up what I do dispute. One who works with metals is a “smith.” A “wright” is one who uses tools to make things, usually of wood (cf., Cartwright, Wheelwright, Wainwright, etc.) “Mrs. Walker Patterson (Mary Boyd)” is at least misleading. She was Mary Virginia Dial, youngest sister of my grandmother, who married first Dr. Boyd, by whom she had two sons, and married second Walker Patterson. No Masonic records were lost when our house burned in 1932. The rear rooms were in tandem, with a porch along the south side. At the rear was the kitchen, ahead of which was a wide, enclosed runway. Forward of that was the dining room, in front of which was a bedroom. None of the 3 rooms contained a closet, except for one in the kitchen in which only food and kitchen supplies were kept. When I awoke that night, I saw the kitchen was burning, and I ran down the porch in the hope of rescuing a puppy that had been left in that room. When I opened the kitchen door, the inside of it was afire and the entire room was blazing. Before the fire was extinguished, the kitchen and dining room had been destroyed, and above the ceiling (there was no attic) the fire had spread somewhat farther. Of course, there was some water damage. A visiting niece was in the back bedroom, and a manuscript she had that day obtained from my grandfather, got slightly wet. Let me now proceed to other matters. Most, if not all, the land in the area had been granted to Veterans of the War of 1812. It is doubtful that any of them ever saw the land before they sold it. Some of the land may have had several owners before it was lived upon. Late in 1859 or early the following year, my great-grandfather Trice bought a section of land on the Arkansas County side of the White River for $1.50 an acre, so I assume that those who settled in Monroe county before the Civil War paid no more for their land. As my grandfather was in Holly Grove by the time you say the town was incorporated, he would have been ward of that act. In 1930, he wrote a brief history of the town, which I have not seen since then, but I recall that he wrote that the name had been given 75 years earlier, because I thought at the time that it was only 25 years younger than Chicago. According to him, some wag had originally named the community Fussy Ridge. During the competition with Clarendon for the county seat, a Smith had dubbed it Pull-Tight, but I would assume that the name Holly Grove was taken during that competition. Inasmuch as I have been away from Holly Grove for almost 40 years, I must refer to buildings by ownership at the time I lived there, and street names as we then knew them. The north-south street through the town was Smith Street. The intersecting street farthest north was Church Street, and it ran in front of the school and the old Methodist church, and beside the parsonage. The oldest building in town was said to be the log house around which the George Dial house had been built. To the north of it stood a huge oak, at least a century old, which was said to have started when a young lady who had ridden over from the Duncan area, carrying a freshly-cut switch, stuck it in the ground when she alit, and forgot it when she left. I cannot vouch for that story. Jeremiah H. Dial and his wife, Letitia Caulfield, had come from Cherokee, Alabama. Their house was built before the Civil War, because she and others pointed out to me places therein and thereabouts connected with events while she was there with her children and her husband was in the Confederate Army. He was mustered out in January, 1863, after losing an arm at the battle of Murfreesboro. He had a store on the corner across Smith Street from where the George Dial store was loated in my youth. I know this because my grandfather came to Holly Grove to work in this store, and later, in true Horatio Alger fashion, married his employer’s daughter. I had thought this to have been the first store in town, but it may be that the coming of the railroad caused two or more stores to be begun about the same time. Jeremiah Dial apparently owned the land between the two creeks, up to the south edge of town, down to what became the Mull place. He also owned land east of town, to the creek, 80 acres north of the town (some of it within the corporate limits), as well as property in the town. His oldest child, Bessie, born 1857, died young. His second was Isabella Caulfield Dial, born 1859. When she married (my grandfather) he gave her the east 40 acres he owned at the north edge of town, about an acre of land fronting on Smith Street and bounded on the north by Church Street, on which he built her a house. When her sister Mary married, he gave her the west 40 acres, plus about an acre and a house just across the street to the south of my grandmother’s. The Dials were Presbyterian, the Trices Methodist, but a wife was expected to join the church of her husband. Grandma not only became a Methodist, but also came to pretty well dominate that church before her death in 1929. I had heard that Grandma donated the land for the Methodist church and parsonage, and that Aunt Mary donated the land for the school. This would square with the fact that such land abutted their respective properties. However, it may well be that lots were sold along the north side of Church Street, as I would not question record evidence of donation by others. Moreover, while the old church stood, I recall my grandfather placing an iron stake at the northwest corner of the church property. As this was only about 100 feet north of the street, this would be an indication that this had been laid out in lots. (This was not the case for the parsonage.) The same may have been the case as to the school, as that building as was next to the street and I don’t know how far back the grounds extended, but when the new school was built in 1922, the grounds extended about 400 feet from the street, so Aunt Mary must have donated the rear 75%, although she may have done so only when the new school was proposed. This could be ascertained from records. My grandfather was a Mason for 64 years, was grand master of Kerr Lodge numerous times, and was district deputy grand master of Arkansas, the highest Masonic office in the state. He served a term as county sheriff, several terms as county judge, and was mayor of Holly Grove. Persons outside the family have said that he owned the first automobile in the county. It was an Oldsmobile, but I remembered it only after it was permanently out of use, and sitting in the garage. However, it may be that Dr. Sylar owned a car earlier. I remember Tom Mull. My grandfather suspected he may have been son of John Murrell, whose headquarters had been in Arkansas, supposedly near Duncan. This suspicion may have had no basis other than that Mull was reticent about his origins and his past. (The same was true as to old McCastlain.) Mull left his estate to a nephew in Memphis, Mull Ward, who took his uncle’s name. Inasmuch as you wrote of churches as distant as Pine City, you might be interested in the incident of two white strangers who called a meeting of blacks at a church south of town, were speedily run out of the county before the meeting by several local men, then went down the tracks to Elaine, and held such a meeting, which erupted in a race war. Then there was the murder at the depot, by a man in blackface, who ran to the hotel to remove the disguise, but was followed and captured. Things I remember:
1. The light plant, which began to produce electrocity at dark; at 10:50 the current would stop for a minute, to warn that it would stop for the night in 10 minutes; the “accidental death” of the engineer, whose body was found in the moving parts of the machinery; the mud streets, wooden sidewalks, and the gas-lamps lit at night, the last of these being at the street about in front of the Roy Renfro house.
2. The little sign on a tree, about across the street from the old lamp, at a slight bend in the street, which as late as 1931 proclaimed the speed limit to be 8 miles per hour.
3. The town picnics, fish fries, etc.
4. The 1927 flood.
5. The fire that razed the block behind the H.C. Lair store.
6. The Rabbit’s Fool minstrel show each fall.
7. The baseball teams.
8. The bottling plant
9. Ice, hauled from Clarendon, at $1.00 a hundred pounds.
10. The opening and gravelling of the “North Road”; helping in 1926 to survey for the power line right of way which now includes the road that comes in from the east.
11. The summer “revivals” at the Methodist Church.
12. The schism in the little Baptist congregation, after which the Matthews-Riner group built a frame church across Smith Street from our house; the night that building burned, and I was on the roof of our house to watch for sparks; the replacement with a brick veneer building.
13. The cord-wood that would fill our backyard in autumn, and which I would carry into the house for hours on end during cold weather.
14. Movies shown a few times in a building later occupied as a store by Pang Guy and his Chinese successors.
15. Telephones on the wall, of which you would crank the handle, and tell Central who you wanted to talk with; the disputes as to exact time between owners of expensive watches, which were settled by calling Central, who consulted her $2.00 alarm clock.
I hope that some of this may be of interest to you.
Sincerely,
Phil Trice
[Phil Trice was an attorney who lived in New Orleans. He died in September 1977.]

-- Edited by Danyelle McNeill Fletcher at 19:49, 2006-02-25