INFORMATION ON WILLIAM AND MATILDA'S CHILDREN
(Sixth Generation)
(Thanks to Jim Henry for the information in this section)
Bailey Peyton was known throughout his life as Pate. He was named for Bailey Peyton, a Nashville attorney who frequently bought horses from his father. See History of Frisco, p. 131. Dorothy Kerley Keeran also tells us that Mr. Peyton often raced his horses against those of Andrew Jackson who lived just east of Nashville. In 1860 he was listed on the federal census of Smith County, Tennessee as a teacher. When the Civil War came along, he cast his lot with the South. Since his father was a breeder of horses and mules, he was able to furnish his own mount and get into the cavalry (rather than be a common foot soldier). On the 19th of October 1861, he joined the 2d Tennessee Regimental Cavalry at Hartsville. (This unit was later consolidated with several others and known as the 22d Tennessee Cavalry (Barteau's) Regiment.)
Records in the National Archives indicate that he was promoted to sergeant major and served at least until October of 1863. We think that he married around the end of the war, and by 1870 he was farming near Hartsville and had three children. At that time, Pate claimed to own $2000 worth of real estate, and he had two of his younger brothers, Tom and William, working for him as farm laborers. At some point in the 1870s or 1880s he gave up on Tennessee and moved his family to Texas. He was said to have been living in Lone Oak as late as 1912, and we believe that is where he finally died. (Lone Oak is a very small town about fifty miles east of Dallas. It is in the southeast corner of Hunt County just a few miles north of Lake Tawakoni). Pate is remembered as the only one of Doctor William's seven adult sons who did not drop the a from their surname; they are Kearleys yet.
James H. Kerley was probably named for his grandfather and/or his uncle, James Franklin Kearley. Like two of his brothers, James fought for the Confederacy, but unlike them, for some reason, he was a foot soldier in the 24th Tennessee Infantry. Military documents tell us that he grew to be five feet, eleven inches tall and had sandy hair, gray eyes, and a fair complexion. He enlisted in Nashville on July 3, 1861, and he was captured by the Yankees on November 25, 1863, at the Battle of Missionary Ridge during Grant's Chattanooga campaign. He was taken to Louisville, Kentucky about two weeks later, and after only a couple of days he was forwarded on to a prisoner of war camp at Rock Island, Illinois, arriving there on the 13th of December. The camp was probably filling up, and the jailers were anxious to get rid of some of their prisoners. James declared to his captors that he was “tired of the war,” and after only four days in the camp, he was allowed to go free by signing a solemn oath that he would, among other things, “faithfully support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and the Union of the States thereunder.” (James's signature on that oath survives. He was still spelling his name Kearley at that time). So far as we know, he did not violate his parole.
After the war, he married and had at least two sons, both of whom preceded him in death. James followed some of his brothers to Texas, and in 1912 he was said to have been living in Cleburn. (Cleburn is in the center of Johnson County, about thirty miles south of Fort Worth). There was a Confederate veterans' organization in that town, and James is said to have attended their meetings faithfully. It is there that he died and is probably buried.
Mary Matilda, though named for her mother, she went by Mary. She married a man named Joe Faust, and they remained in the Smith/Sumner/Trousdale county area all their lives. She was the only one of Doctor William's children who never went to Texas. In fact, William and Matilda might have spent some of their final days living with Mary and her family. Mary had nine children. She (and/or her husband) operated one or more hotels at different places around that county. In her later years she was known as “beloved Granny Faust” and she died in 1912.
William Giles came along in 1842. He was just nineteen when the Civil War began. He apparently followed his older brother Pate, because they enlisted in the same unit on the same day. William Giles signed up for a twelve-month hitch, but his records in the National Archives tell us that he “deserted at Murfreesboro, Tenn. Feb. 28, 1862.” He was still AWOL as of April 1863, the date of the last document in his dossier. If he ever returned to duty or reenlisted, we have no record of it. In 1870 he was enumerated in Smith County as a farm laborer in Pate's household. A few years after that - we do not know exactly when - William drifted to Texas, as did most of his siblings. He was married, but we do not know where, when, or the name of his wife; they had at least one child, a girl. In 1912 he was said to have been living in Dallas, possibly with his daughter. We know that he lived for a while with his younger brother Tom in Frisco (just north of Dallas), and he once recounted his Civil War experiences to school children there (circa 1925). According to his niece, Myrtle Kerley Roach, his death occurred in Missouri, but I have not confirmed that.
Henrietta Clay was born in 1844. There was a clan of Carrs around Hartsville, and she married one of them. We know that she had at least one son (Price Carr). Henrietta and her family followed her siblings to Texas. As late as 1912, she (like her older brother Pate) was living in Lone Oak.
Joseph C. Kerley was born in 1846, too late to fight in the Civil War. In the 1870 census, he was still single, living at home, and working on his father's farm. He must have married very shortly after that census, because family tradition tells us that he moved to Texas a few years before his brother Tom (who went in 1874) and after the death of his wife and baby. (See, History of Frisco, p. 131). Joe may well have been the first of Doctor William's children to go to Texas. Dallas was the place he chose, and that was probably because one of his aunts, Mary Kearley Rowland, had moved to Texas a few years earlier, and she and her family were farming just south of Plano. (Plano is in the extreme southern part of Collin County (which is immediately north of Dallas County). Today Plano is a northern suburb of Dallas. A few years ago, Dorothy Kerley Keeran found the Rowland family cemetery in a pasture near there).
Joe is said to have bought and sold a tract of land in Oak Cliff (southern Dallas) before 1874. He then opened a saloon in Plano, and it must have been about then that he met and married a young woman by the name of Ida D. Ford. In 1874 his younger brother, Tom, joined him in Texas, and the following year they purchased adjoining tracts of farm land in southern Collin County. At the time of the 1880 census, he and Ida were still there, and they had three children. (He also had two younger brothers and a cousin living under his roof then). Not long after that, he sold his land to his brother Tom, and he moved his family about 150 miles northwestward to Hardeman County. (Hardeman County lies on the Red River about seventy-five miles northwest of Wichita Falls). In 1912 he was said to have been living in Quannah, the county seat of Hardeman, and that is presumably where he spent his final days. I have been unable to find a death certificate for Joe in Texas.
Zachary Taylor was born in 1848. He, too, was just a bit young for the war, and in 1870 he was single and living at home with his parents. Some time during the 1870s he went to Texas, because we find him living (still single) with his older brother, Joe, in Collin County in 1880. He is said to have lived in Kerens, Texas at one time. (Kerens is in Navarro County about fifty miles southeast of Dallas. It is unclear whether Zachary was a resident of Texas or just there on an extended visit with his younger brother, Daniel Webster)
His niece, Myrtle Kerley Roach, once claimed that Zachary was “not quite right” mentally. He was the only one of Doctor William's children who went to Texas and then returned to Tennessee. Myrtle said that he lived with his mother until her death. She also said that after his mother was gone he married (in Tennessee) and had two children, both daughters. But Zachary had not seen the last of Texas, because he is thought to have attended the wedding of his nephew Arthur Bailey Kerley in Collin County in 1903. When his sister Mary died in 1912 he was said (in her obituary) to have been living in Adolphus, Kentucky. (Adolphus is in Allen County just across the state line from Macon County Tennessee). We are not sure when or where Zachary died. Interestingly, there is a record in Texas of a Zachary Taylor Kerley who died on 20 February 1936 in Denton County. (Denton County is immediately northeast of Dallas County and immediately west of Collin County). Could it be that old Zachary returned to North Texas to spend his final years near his remaining brothers and sisters?
Sarah Adriene was the only one of Doctor William and Matilda's thirteen children who was not born in an even numbered year (1849). She was still single and living with her parents at the time of the 1870 census of Smith County. She married a James Greer sometime during the 1870s, and they moved to Texas. In her later years, she was called “Aunt Addie.” She was said to have been living in Dallas in 1912.
Daniel Webster for some reason was called “Governor.” He liked his nickname so well that he sometimes represented his first initial to be G instead of D. He was born in 1856, and went to Texas sometime during the 1870s. In 1880 he married a Jennie Harris in Collin County, and they later moved near Kerens and raised several children. His sister Mary’s obituary in 1912 says that he was living at that time in “Southern Texas.” The place, date, and circumstances of his death are unknown.
Thomas Nelson was born on February 23, 1852. Tom, as he was known all his life, was born on a farm in Smith County Tennessee, although that land now lies in northern Trousdale County. He was just nine years old when the Civil War broke out. He and his sister Adriene are said to have walked thirty miles to carry salt to their brothers who were bivouacked outside of Nashville with the Confederate army. See History of Frisco, p. 132.
By the time of the 1870 census of Smith County, Tom and his brother, William, were living with their oldest brother, Pate, and his family, and they were working for him as farm laborers. The war had been hard on Tennessee, and the state's economy was in shambles. There was little for Tom to do except work on someone else's farm, and his prospects in the Smith/Sumner/Trousdale area must have seemed very discouraging. Like so many other Southerners after the war, including most of his own siblings, he decided to leave and try his luck farther west. Texas was the place he chose, and we have a pretty good idea why. It seems that his aunt Mary Kearley Rowland and her husband had moved to North Texas several years earlier, probably right after the end of the war. They had settled just south of Plano in southern Collin County. And at least one of Tom's brothers, Joe, had already moved to Dallas and purchased some land in the southern part of the city (Oak Cliff). Others in his family were probably talking about moving to Texas, and it is possible that some of them had already followed Joe there. That far away place with the good, cheap, black farmland must have sounded like the Promised Land to an ambitious twenty-two-year-old whose future in Tennessee was so bleak.
Tom probably had a little money saved up from the work he had done on Pate's farm. In the summer of 1874, he used some of it to purchase a ticket on the train from Nashville to Dallas. When the train pulled out of the station, he must have known that there was a good chance he would never see his mother or father again - and, in fact, he never did.
When he got to Dallas, Tom discovered that Joe had sold his land there and purchased a saloon in Plano. But Tom was not interested in running a saloon or living in a town, he wanted to farm and raise animals like his father. Tom used some more of his meager savings to buy a horse and went out looking for a suitable piece of land not too far from where his aunt and his brother were living. One day in the spring of 1875 he found what he was looking for. It was a tract on the banks of White Rock Creek about three miles southeast of the little hamlet of Lebanon. The grass was tall, there was a spring on the property, and the soil was black and rich and deep. The price that was finally agreed upon was $6.50 per acre. Tom had to buy the land on credit, of course. And he succeeded in persuading his brother Joe to buy an adjacent tract. After making a down payment, Tom had only enough left to purchase a plow and a pair of oxen.
He quickly began breaking out the new farm land by himself. Unfortunately, there were no dwellings of any kind on his farm when he bought it, not even a barn or stable. So that first winter (1875-1876) Tom is said to have spent the long, cold nights in a haystack to keep warm. Truly, this was a young man who not going to be denied his own piece of land. Later, probably in the spring of 1876, Tom earned enough money by breaking land for his neighbors to build a simple two-room house.
Tom's new farm was immediately next to another farm that was owned by a man who had immigrated a few years earlier from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia; his name was Charles Brown. In the summer of 1876, Charles's father, William H. Brown, brought Charles's three unmarried sisters to Texas in a covered wagon. They are said to have arrived at Charles's farm for a “visit,” but it is a fact that they had no permanent home at the time, and they were probably looking for a sympathetic relative with whom they could live indefinitely. The three Brown girls were Sarah (who was twenty-six), Mary Susan (twenty), and Laura (eighteen). Tom Kearley was twenty-four and looking. He did not have any money to speak of, but he had a horse, a house, and a black-land farm. In just two years, most of this young Tennessean's dreams of a new life with a bright future were already beginning to come true in Texas. All he was really lacking was a wife.
Tom was not slow. He soon found first one reason and then another to stop by the Brown place, and it was not long before he was taking Sarah riding with him. Sarah was a couple of years older than Tom, and after a year or so his choice finally settled on her sister, Susan. His attentions to the young lady were reciprocated, and a wedding was planned for the fall of 1877.
One evening while Tom was away from his farm (courting Susan we are told), his little house was destroyed by fire. This left the young couple-to-be with no place to set up housekeeping. It was finally decided that the wedding would proceed as planned and they would just live with the bride’s brother Charles (and her father and her two sisters) until Tom's house could be rebuilt. This can hardly have been a suitable arrangement for these - or any - newlyweds, but there was no better solution. Tom and Sue (as he called her) were married on November 14, 1877.
With the help of his father-in-law and brother-in-law, Tom Kerley built another two room house, each room being 16 feet square. There was a porch across the front with a door from each room opening on to the porch. The lumber was white pine from Jefferson, Texas, and was hauled from Plano by ox cart. The house was situated a short distance from the spring which for a time would serve as their source of refrigeration. As soon as the house was completed, Susan white-washed the interior walls and the couple set up housekeeping with their meager possessions. One room served as a kitchen-dining room and the other as a bedroom-sitting room. See History of Frisco, p. 132. This little house was probably built in late 1877 and/or early 1878.
The couple's first child, Myrtle Ada, was born in the bedroom of the little house on January 24, 1878, and Tom became a father just a month shy of his twenty-sixth birthday. Their second child, who arrived on April 18, 1880, was another girl, and they named her Maude. The farm was coming along nicely, and things seemed to be going well for Tom and Sue - perhaps too well, because tragedy struck the following year (1881). Tom had a hired hand by the name of Bill Fox working on his farm and living with the family, Fox came down with a case of the measles, and the two young Kearley girls got them from him. Fox recovered easily enough, and so did Myrtle, but Maude was only ten months old, and her immune system could not throw off the infection. She grew steadily worse and on the 19th of February she died. Maude was buried a few miles east of the farm in Rowlett Cemetery, the first of many Kerleys to be laid to rest in that place.
Tom and Sue's third child was their first son, and they named him Arthur Bailey. He was born on 22 July 1881. Another couple of years passed before the next child came along, and it was a second boy, whom they named Thomas Herbert. A page torn from the attending physician's ledger book on the day of the boy's birth shows an entry in the amount of $10.00 for “OB services.” See History of Frisco, p. 133.
Sometime after 1880, Tom's brother Joe sold him the adjoining land that he had purchased several years earlier, and he moved to Hardeman County. As Tom's children kept arriving, he added two more rooms and porches to his little house.
Rena Matilda Kerley was the fifth baby in the family, and she was born on November 5, 1885. We can not trace the origin of her first name, but her middle name was obviously taken from Tom's mother, Matilda Holt Kearley. Rena was born in the same bed and the same bedroom of the little farm house as were all eight of her brothers and sisters.
The next baby after Rena was a girl who was named Annie Laura. No doubt she got her middle name from her aunt (her mother's younger sister) Laura Brown. She was born on 27 July 1887.
The seventh child was a son whom Tom and Sue named Chester G. Kearley. His birth occurred on March 8, 1889. It was sometime during that year or the next that a dark-haired young man from North Carolina showed up at the farm. He introduced himself as George Sapp, and he was looking for work. Tom hired him as a farm laborer, and it is possible that he may have hired George’s brother, Gene, too. George was apparently a pretty good hand, because he worked for Tom several years and saved his money carefully.
Then in the summer of 1890 several members of Tom's family were stricken with typhoid fever. Little Chester, already weakened by dysentery, caught the fever and did not recover. Only sixteen months old, he died on the 19th of July, and was buried beside his sister Maude in the Rowlett Cemetery.
Just two months after Chester was buried, another baby boy was born (on the 18th of September), and he was called William Marvin. He could have been named after either one (or both) of his grandfathers. It appeared that Tom and Sue's family was complete; they had three boys and three girls still living out of the four boys and four girls who had been born. But four years later the tie was broken when the ninth and final baby, a daughter, Oma Lee, came along (August 7, 1894). It was probably after Oma's birth that Tom sent his mother a train ticket to come to Texas and help with the family while Sue recovered. Like her siblings, Oma grew up to be a dark brunette.
Sue's brother Charles eventually sold his farm that was next to Tom's and bought some land a few miles west of where the town of Frisco is now situated. But the two families still remained in close touch; on alternate weekends the Browns and the Kearleys took turns journeying to visit each other. (For this story, as for most of the details of Tom Kerley's adult life, we are indebted to Dorothy Kerley Keeran's article in The History of Frisco.)
There is a group photograph of the family taken just about 1900 in front of their little house. It was probably made on short notice by an itinerant photographer, because the family does not seem to have had time to dress up for the camera. All nine of the Kerleys were in the picture, and several of the children were holding their animals. Tom was sporting the huge, bushy mustache that he wore most of his adult life, and Sue seemed to be eyeing the photographer's time machine with a scowl.
One of Tom's cousins by the name of Otis Kearley (Otis was the son of Tom's uncle James Franklin Kearley) once came to live with him on his farm. Otis was said to have been quite handsome but rather undisciplined. While living with Tom's family, he attempted to rob a farmer on Preston Road who was returning from Dallas after having sold his crops. As it happened, the farmer was armed, and Otis was killed in the holdup attempt. Tom was so embarrassed - or disgusted - by the affair that he refused to claim his cousin's body for burial.
Tom Kerley has been described by some of his grandchildren as having been a strong-willed, autocratic fellow. He was not a very religious man; he probably never joined a church in his adult life, and he was rarely seen inside of one. Sue, on the other hand, was a Methodist all her life, and was described as being a “sweet” person, especially in her later years. Tom never forgave the North for winning the Civil War, but Sue was a true-blue Union sympathizer just like her father. It has been said that every time Tom and Sue got into an argument about anything, they ended up by fighting the Civil War all over again.
Tom and Sue's oldest children began leaving home around the turn of the century. And it was at about this same time - probably the late 1890s - that George Sapp quit the farm, drew his wages, and opened a cafe in nearby Lebanon with his brother. A few years later, in 1904, Tom built a new two-story farmhouse for his family. He continued farming his 130 acres and never seriously considered any other occupation.
While they were still living on the farm, Tom bought a horseless carriage. His choice was a Ford touring car. Tom was getting up in years by this time, and his physical and mental skills probably were not as sharp as they should have been for him to learn to operate it safely. All his life he had ridden horses and driven buggies, and he never completely made a successful transition to a transportation device that would not stop when he hollered “Whoa!” On one terrifying occasion, Tom stalled the motor while crossing the railroad tracks. A train happened to be coming, and it was bearing down him as he yelled at the inert Ford to “Giddyup!” The stubborn car refused to budge, and Tom finally abandoned it when the train got too close. As it happened, the engineer managed to stop the train before it demolished the automobile, but Tom was badly frightened, and the incident convinced him, once and for all, that horses were intellectually superior to - and infinitely safer than - motorcars. After that day, Tom did not often get behind the wheel of his car, but he used the vehicle to teach his granddaughter Maurine to drive.
In 1921 the baby of the family, Oma, married a local boy and left the farm. Tom and Sue had saved their money over the years, and sometime in the early- to mid-1920s they retired to the nearby town of Frisco where they built a new house a couple of blocks south of Main Street. (In 1902 Frisco sprang up about a mile north of Lebanon when the railroad bypassed that little town. Tom Kerley probably built his house there no later than 1925; his will, which was dated September 6, 1927, mentioned his “home place in Frisco,” so we know that he and Sue were living there by then.) It was a three-bedroom, white frame structure in the architectural style of the times, and it even had indoor plumbing. Most of their children were living around Frisco, so they got to see their grandchildren almost every day. And sometime around 1925, Tom's older brother William Giles came to live with him and Sue for a while.
In September of 1930, Tom Kerley was stricken with appendicitis. His illness either progressed too quickly or went untreated for too long, because it developed into peritonitis. The old emigrant from Tennessee died in his own bed at three-fifteen in the morning of October 1, 1930 -- forty-one years to the day after his father passed away. Tom was buried in the Rowlett Cemetery on the following day.
He was seventy-eight, and he had spent the last sixty-six years of his life on the black-land prairies of North Texas without ever returning to his native state of Tennessee for even the briefest visit. Tom was only an “adopted” son of the Lone Star State, but once he was there, he became a dyed-in-the-wool Texan, and Texas was fortunate to have had him.
As the Great Depression settled over the country, Tom Kerley's will was offered for probate, and his real and personal property was appraised at $15,000 - the fruits of a lifetime of hard work on his farm. Tom designated his son Bill and his daughter Rena to be co-executors of his estate. He left his house in Frisco and his 130-acre farm near Lebanon to his widow for the rest of her years; after her death, the properties were to be divided among his seven children. Sue survived Tom by just over eleven years.
Children of Tom and Sue
Myrtle Ada was born in 1879 and grew up to be the tallest and biggest-boned of the Kerley girls. She had her own opinions about things, and she was not lacking in self confidence. Myrtle married an Emmett D. Roach (born in 1874) around the turn of the century, and they spent their lives in Frisco. They had six children, half of whom died in infancy. (Two of the three unfortunate infants were twin boys (William and Willis) born in 1908). The three who survived to adulthood were: Thomas E., Mary, and Rena Lillian.
As a young married woman, Myrtle once had the occasion to make a trip by herself back to Tennessee to visit her aunts and uncles and cousins around Hartsville. She spoke of that journey when she was elderly, and she remembered meeting many of her relatives that the other Kerleys back in Texas never saw. Myrtle recounted the story of this journey to Dorothy Kerley Keeran.
Emmett Roach died in 1938, and Myrtle lived on until about 1971, attaining the age of approximately ninety-two. The house in which she spent the final decades of her life was on the main street of Frisco, and she continued to drive her car until she was well into her eighties (much to her children's chagrin!). Myrtle is buried in the Rowlett Cemetery.
Maude died of measles in 1881 before reaching her first birthday.
Arthur Bailey, born in 1881, was for some reason, known as “Nick” Kerley (although his nieces and nephews generally referred to him as “Uncle Arthur”). Nick married Ida Jane Wade on December 17, 1903, and they lived a short distance north of Frisco. Four children were born to Nick and Ida: Thelma Jane, John William, Edward Arthur, and Dorothy Irene. He passed away in 1955, just a few months after the death of his wife. Nick, too, is buried in the Rowlett Cemetery.
Thomas Herbert was born in the summer of 1883. All his life, he went by the nickname of “Hub.” Hub attended a business college after high school and married a local girl by the name of Rossie Rolator. They spent their lives in and around Frisco. Many of their years were spent working Tom Kerley's farm near Lebanon. They had one son, Chester (1912-1955). Rossle died in 1960, and Hub passed away in 1966. They are buried in the Rowlett Cemetery.
Annie Laura was born in 1887. Ann, as she was called, graduated from the Denton Normal School (in Denton, Texas, about twenty miles from Frisco and Lebanon) and taught for a while at Megargel, a small rural community in the southwestern corner of Archer County. She married a William T. Doggett and spent most of her life in Denton where her husband was the superintendent of the city's schools for more than two decades. They lived on West Oak Street and had three children: a son who died a few days after birth, Virginia Clair, and William K. Ann was widowed in the late 1950s and lived on for another ten or fifteen years. She is one of the two of Tom Kerley's children who are not buried at Rowlett.
Chester died in July of 1889 at the age of about four months and was buried at Rowlett.
William Marvin, “Bill”, born in 1890, was the youngest boy in the family. Like all his brothers and sisters, he had very dark hair, but he was the only one of the bunch who had blue eyes instead of brown. He attended a pharmacy college in Dallas, and he owned a drug store for many years in that city (on the corner of Ross and Haskell). Bill married a woman by the name of Edith Lindahl who had immigrated to the United States from Sweden. They had one child, a daughter by the name of Leonora. Edith died in about the 1940s, and Bill passed away in the early 1970s.
Oma Lee was born in 1894. In 1921 she married a local man by the name of Sam Lane in Prosper, Texas. Sam was a World War I veteran who had been Woodrow Wilson's chauffeur and personal bodyguard when the president was in France for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles (1919). In 1922 Sam and Oma moved to Frisco where he operated a gas station and garage until 1947. Sam was also the Texaco distributor in that town, and he was elected mayor in the 1940s. He and Oma had four children: Harold, Billy Bert, Jack Ray, and Sammy Lee. Sam died of a heart attack in 1949, and was buried in the Rowlett Cemetery. Oma lived on in Frisco and retired to a nursing home in the 1970s. She passed away in 1976 and was interred beside her husband.
Rena Matilda. Most of Rena's life has already been described in our discussions of George Sapp and Tom Kerley, but we will briefly recapitulate it here. Rena was the middle child of nine who were born to Tom and Sue Kerley near Lebanon, Texas. When she was born on November 5,1885, Grover Cleveland was in the White House, and future president Harry Truman was still in diapers; the Civil War had been over for twenty years, but Reconstruction and military occupation by the Yankees had only ended eight years earlier; Geronimo was still on the loose and causing trouble; Butch Cassidy had not yet learned how to rob a train; the first public showing of primitive motion pictures was eight and a half years in the future, the Wright brothers would not fly for another eighteen years; and although the horseless carriage had already been invented, it is virtually certain that no one in little Rena's family had ever laid eyes on one.
Rena grew up on a black-land farm a few miles southeast of Lebanon, Texas in the southwestern part of Collin County. When she was four years old, a stranger walked up to the house one day looking for work in her father's fields. Neither she nor anyone else dared to guess that two decades later that same man, George Sapp, would become her husband. By the time her wedding day arrived (27 October 1910) Rena was only a few days shy of her twenty-fifth birthday-plenty old enough to marry by the standards of those times. If her parents were concerned about the fact that the groom was more than seventeen years older than their daughter, they did not protest too loudly. By then the Kerleys had known George Sapp for at least twenty years, and they probably held him in high esteem regardless of his age. Rena's courtship does not seem to have been a particularly passionate one -- she later claimed that she never allowed George so much as a kiss until after the wedding.
At first the newlyweds lived in an upstairs apartment on the main street of Frisco near where George and his brother operated their cafe. It was probably in the following year that she and George moved into a small house that they bought in the south part of town. And it was at about this time that Rena and her brother-in-law Eugene locked horns over the question of whether the cafe should remain dry or apply for a spirits license; Rena won, and before long Eugene sold George his interest in the cafe, left for California, and never returned. Rena was a teetotaler all her life, even though she occasionally kept a bottle of liquor (such as rum) in the kitchen for cooking. But she told her daughters that if she had been a man she would probably have been an alcoholic, because she liked the taste of spirits so well.
George William, Rena's first child, was born in early 1912 when she was twenty-six. Maurine Edith was born in the summer of 1913, and Rena's final baby, Mary Lee, was born in early 1917 when Rena was thirty-one. As soon as the children were old enough, they and their mother began helping George in the cafe. Rena's father died in the fall of 1930, and her mother invited her and her family to move in with her in the three-bedroom house that she and Tom Kerley had built in Frisco less than ten years earlier. Though it was not a large house, it was comfortable by the standards of the day, and it probably offered more room than the one they were living in at the time, so George and Rena and their three children accepted Sue Brown Kerley's invitation.
Rena's daughters both graduated from North Texas State Teachers College, became school teachers, married, and settled down in North Texas. (Maurine Edith married Horace G. Henry of Nocona and had one son. Mary Lee ("Dick") married Chester Calvin Crowley of Archer City and had two daughters and two sons.) After thirty years of marriage, Rena was widowed in November of 1940 at the age of fifty-five. She and her son kept Sapp's Cafe open for another year or two, but America's entry into World War II took him away, and the cafe closed for good. When her mother passed away about eleven months after the death of her husband, she continued living in that same house.
It was about 1936 that she was first stricken with rheumatoid arthritis, and over the next dozen years or so, she was gradually disabled by that illness. By approximately the end of World War II she was largely confined to a wheelchair and could walk only with the aid of crutches. Large doses of cortisone, a new drug at that time, afforded the only relief she ever got from her disease.
Her son married after he returned from the war, and he and his wife moved in with Rena. (George, known to the family as "Brother" and to many of the locals as "Frog," married Lee Fincher and had one child, a son named Mark.) In the 1950s, she occasionally went to stay with her daughters on extended visits, but by the latter part of that decade she was so crippled by arthritis that she was unable to rise from her bed and required constant attention. Rena spent the last few years of her life in a nursing home in McKinney (about a dozen miles from Frisco). She passed away on January 26 1962 and was buried beside her husband in the Rowlett Cemetery. She had lived to be seventy-six years old.
And what of the Kearleys who remained behind in Sumner and Smith and Trousdale Counties in Tennessee? As we have seen, most of Doctor William's children migrated to Texas, so those who stayed around Hartsville were mostly his brothers and their male descendants. Alas, they are all gone today. Although the Kearley genes are probably still common in the local populace, the 1987 telephone book for Hartsville (including Green Grove and Hillsdale) does not contain a single Kearley (nor any variation of the name). It is said that the Kearleys who stayed near Trousdale County fathered mostly girls; it may well be so, because their family name has disappeared from that area as surely as if Old Mate had never brought his wife and children there from South Carolina at all.