“I wasn’t around to experience that Trinity River bottom land, but Dad has told me some really good stories over the years,” Andy Evans said as he introduced “two of our very own Lions” Wednesday at the noon meeting of the Livingston Lions Club.
Clarke Evans, a lifelong Polk County resident, and his son-in-law, Gary Davis, a local historian, presented a program on “Life Before Lake Livingston.”
“I really want to commend my son-in-law, Gary Davis, for what he’s done on the history of Polk County. He has done an excellent job,” Evans said, adding, “We’re six generations here now and we’re very proud of it.
“The creation of Lake Livingston was probably one of the biggest cultural changes that’s occurred in Polk County, although we didn’t realize it at the time,” Evans said.
“It was not popular, that lake going in. When we heard the lake was coming in, there wasn’t anybody more against it than me. It’s one thing to sell because you want to and another to sell because you have to.
“We had a dairy and we worked side by side seven days a week,” Evans said of he and his father. “I was an only child, but I sure would have liked having a bunch of brothers to help me work that dairy farm.
“We had about 100 cows. We woke up at 3:30 a.m. to milk 100 cows and feed them before school started. It was a way of life we’ll never see again. It’s gone. I think there were 21 dairies when we were milking. Now there’s none,” Evans said.
“My uncle by marriage, Lewis Stanford, was one of the largest cotton farmers in the county. The cotton farming down there was the lifeblood of this town. My uncle had a cotton gin. When the gin cranked up, it ran seven days a week, 24 hours a day,” he said, adding that cotton season ended right around the time school started.
“There were tenant houses that had two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen. There was no water, no inside bath and no electricity until 1950. Those poor tenant farmers never got ahead.
“One of my favorite families was the Johnson family. They had 17 kids. I don’t know how they all fit in that house. They all turned out good people.
“When the cotton farming was over, Scott Johnson learned a new trade and went to work for Elmer Harrison at Harrison Shoe Shop. One of his sons was the first casualty of the Vietnam War. And Dixie Henderson’s brother Buddy had a son who was also a casualty of Vietnam, so that was two gone from the Kickapoo area,” Evans said.
“I didn’t really know what poverty was until I grew up and thought about those families. They had huge families, and they just never got ahead. I had a fantastic support group – my dad, my uncle, my cousin who was 10 years to the day older than me.
Evans said the Trinity River was on one side of his family’s property, Kickapoo Creek was on another side and Penwaugh Slough was on another side, where he said he did a lot of duck hunting.
“The river had a mind of its own. You had to respect the river. When we would flood, it would come up Kickapoo Creek and Penwaugh Slough,” he said.
“After the land was purchased for the lake, they gave all the buildings back. My daddy was very conservative. We took up every fence post and every strand of barbed wire. We sold the house, but we moved the dairy barn to Old Israel Road to my house in Livingston,” Evans said.
In retrospect, Evans said the lake has been good for his family, especially with him being a local realtor.
“We’ve had some real fine people come in. You can see it in our service clubs, our churches, the community.
“There’s a lot of memories out there that I cherish very much,” he said.
