RANSOM DESHA LOVE
On February 24, 1877, a column in the Daily Arkansas Gazette noted: “There is a gentleman living in Pope County, in this State, who answers to the euphonious name of Darling Love.”
That report prompted a follow-up on February 25: Not only does Darling Love have a brother named Pleasant Love, the Gazette reported, but a local attorney added that he once sat a jury that included Darling Love, Posey Rosey and Lovely Witt. The attorney also remembered calling a witness named Welcome Home.
“Pope County,” he mildly concluded, “is famous for its oddly combined names.”
And so, we put to rest any notion that, growing up, Ransom Desha Love — the son of Darling and wife Cerena — was an outlier either in Pope County or in his own family.
Not all the Love children had unusual names. Of the nine siblings, there were James and Julia, Sarah and Calvin. But, there also were Lorenzo Dow, Hartwell Spain, Madrid Eldona, and Arkadelphia. At some point, the expectant parents must have turned to a map for inspiration.
Ransom, born in 1846 in Pope County and an eventual Texan, is the only member of the Love family buried in Dallas’s Oakland Cemetery. His parents might be pleased to know — it was Ransom’s singular name on the stone in the historic cemetery that made me want to know more about the Love family.
Like his father, Ransom was a farmer; in 1870, the men were working adjacent acreage in Galley Rock, a community on the Arkansas River first settled by the Cherokee. Ransom had married Mary Susan Weir three years earlier, and the couple had one son, sensibly named Jerome.
A decade later, father-and-son remained on neighboring farms: Darling and Cerena were empty nesters, but by 1880, Ransom and Mary had welcomed four more children to their household. Their second-born, Hartwell, died at age 3, but Jerome, Ida, Calvin and May lived to adulthood.
The family’s patriarch died in 1881; Cerena (mistakenly spelled “Serena” below) followed in 1895. They were buried in Pope County’s Mt. Zion Cemetery, where a marker acknowledges them as pioneers.
Ransom and Mary were still in their Arkansas farmhouse in 1900, the year they lost their youngest child. On Valentine’s Day that year, May Love, 21, married William Hays, 22, of Panola, Mississippi. The couple made their home with his widowed mother. Seven months after the wedding, May died. If the size of a monument reflects a loved one’s regard, May’s death surely broke William’s heart.
Having lost two of their five children, Ransom and Mary Love uprooted themselves, leaving Arkansas for good. They made the move to Texas, where their three remaining children prospered.
The Loves’ first-born, Jerome, received his medical degree from the University of Arkansas, but in 1901, he moved permanently to El Paso. In 1939, he received national attention for his innovative “trailer-hospital,” a mobile unit that allowed him to treat patients who could not come to him.
Dr. Love retired a year and a half before his death at age 80, having practiced medicine 53 years. He is buried in El Paso’s Concordia Cemetery.
Just as Dr. Love was settling down to life in El Paso, brother Calvin and sister Ida were doing the same in Palmer, an Ellis County community south of Dallas. Perhaps they urged their big brother to join them there, because in April 1902, the good doctor and his wife-to-be, Ollie Payne, traveled to Palmer to say their I-do’s.
Dr. Love promptly returned to El Paso, but his parents were another story. By 1910, Ransom and Mary had moved onto a farm adjacent to their son, Calvin, 36, and his wife, Mollie, 46. The couple had no living children; they shared their farmhouse with Mollie’s mother and a servant.
Calvin was variously employed over the years as a farmer, hardware merchant, real-estate broker, and druggist (at 4303 Oakland Avenue, .1 mile from Oakland Cemetery). In 1930, he was running his own grocery store in Mena, Arkansas. When he and Mollie returned to Palmer, Calvin sold bricks for a living.
Mollie died in 1942; Calvin lived another six years. He is buried in Dallas’s Restland Cemetery.
In 1895, Ransom and Mary’s middle child, Ida Margaret, married a man whose name was a good fit in the Love family. Pleasant Leroy Amos Jeffers took his bride to Palmer where, in 1900, he was supporting her and their three small children as a patent-medicine salesman.
1910 found the Jeffers and their (by then) five children on Eugene Street in Dallas, about a half mile from Oakland Cemetery. Pleasant apparently made a good enough living as a manufacturer’s agent to accommodate a big family: Ransom and Mary had moved in with the Jeffers by 1918. Six years later, Mary died at age 83.
Ransom lived another 10 years before he joined his wife at Oakland Cemetery. According to his death certificate, he died of “senile hypertrophy of the prostate.” He was 87 years old.
On Ransom’s interment card is a note that speaks well of Pleasant Jeffers. It reads: “Son-in-law Jeffers did some cemetery work to help pay funeral expenses.”
The Jeffers eventually moved to Clayton Avenue in the Lakewood Hills area of Dallas. Pleasant died of pneumonia following a heart attack in 1947. Ida died of heart disease in 1961. They are buried in Restland Cemetery.
NOTES: Ransom’s middle name, Desha, is an Americanized form of the French “duché,” a variant of the diminutive “duc,” or horned owl. [Source: Dictionary of American Family Names, 2nd edition, 2022.]
