The Schoolmarm
Having just turned 50, Mattie Pistole chose a black chiffon taffeta gown to wear the evening of May 24, 1915. She must have been pleased that, at 8:30 p.m., the outside temperature had dropped from the day’s high of 81, making it possible to add a Chantilly lace over-drape to her ensemble. A schoolteacher and wife of the town doctor, Mattie would have wanted to look her respectable best without forsaking a little frivolity.
That night in Seymour, Texas, Mattie was throwing a party for her 27-year-old son, Eschol, an only child. The society reporter for the Baylor County Banner referred to his “joining the ranks of the benedicts,” a Shakespearean reference to marrying despite being thought a confirmed bachelor. With no frothy mother-of-the-bride duties in her future, this was Mattie’s one shot at orchestrating a memorable nuptial event.
She and Dr. Pistole welcomed members of the Young Men’s Social Club and “a few special guests” into their home. A reception room banked with American Beauty and La France roses led into the dining room, where two young ladies served iced punch from a “lace-covered, rose-wreathed” table. Miss Hattie White presided over a book in which guests offered wife-managing recipes; Miss Blanche Morris operated the Victrola, offering up “a tender tribute” to the absent bride-to-be by playing a popular version of the song “Absent.”
The young folks lingered until 11:30 p.m., playing dominoes under rainbow lights on the back lawn. The breathless report in the Jacksboro Gazette included the names of those who gave toasts (punch cups having been passed around) to wives and sweethearts, to the bride and groom, and of course, to their hostess. Her words weren’t recorded in the newspaper, but Mrs. Pistole undoubtedly responded with a gracious acknowledgment of her many blessings.
It’s easy to imagine Mattie slipping into bed well after midnight, tired but too stimulated to sleep. She likely replayed moments in the evening she particularly enjoyed; she may have fretted over minor mishaps. There would have been so much for Mattie to think about, to look forward to — the upcoming wedding, a growing intimacy with her new daughter-in-law, grandchildren.
What Mattie could not know is that all her projected pleasures would come to pass…and that they would end all too soon.
Martha Ann “Mattie” Harris was born April 21, 1865, in Pilot Knob, Kentucky. Her father, Virginia-born James Gardner Harris, a farmer and wagon maker, moved with his parents to Kentucky sometime before his 21st birthday. Mattie’s mother, Mary E. Newman, was a Kentucky native whose father, a slaveholder, served the Confederacy in the Civil War.
Mattie was the oldest of the couple’s 10 children and, at 16, she began teaching at the same rural school she attended as a student. A year later, in 1882, she graduated from Franklin Female College (1868–1917) in the county seat of Simpson County, Kentucky, and subsequently spent several years teaching school in the area.
At 21, she married Samuel William Pistole, 28, who also grew up in Simpson County. Census records show he was attending school at age 12 and, at 21, he was working on his father’s farm in Pilot Knob. By age 27, he had earned his medical degree from the University of Louisville School of Medicine, the country’s 9th oldest.
With that, Samuel Pistole leaped ahead of his agricultural ancestors in academic and professional achievement. His Virginia-born grandfather had parlayed service in the War of 1812 into Smith County, Tennessee acreage; in the 1850s, he purchased a bigger farm in Simpson County. Accompanying him to Kentucky was Samuel’s father, William Newton Pistole; he married a local girl, Winny Melvina Wilson, who died seven years after giving birth to Samuel. The widower remarried in short order, and he and his second wife produced five additional Pistoles, Samuel’s half-siblings.
The abundant and ambitious Pistole clan saw many of their own abandon Simpson County for Texas in the 19th century. Some left the Kentucky homestead as early as 1851 for Grayson County in north Texas; by 1880, one of Samuel’s uncles had settled in Dallas County; his brother later joined him. And four of Samuel’s half-siblings made their way to Dallas proper around 1900. These Pistoles were farmers, merchants, cotton brokers and wage workers.**
And then there was Dr. Pistole who, in the latter half of the 1880’s, packed up his new medical degree and the willing Mattie and headed toward the sunset, where the couple dedicated themselves to a lifetime of serving the physical and intellectual needs of the country’s pioneer Texans.
The Pistoles landed in Jack County, Texas, first residing in tiny Newport and then nearby Post Oak, established in 1878 as a retail center for area farmers. (Its population peaked at just over 100 in the 1930’s). When Mattie gave birth to Eschol there in 1887, Post Oak boasted a general store, blacksmith shop, church, and a general practitioner named S.W. Pistole.
In 1891, the Pistoles moved 20 miles south to the county seat of Jacksboro, where Mattie had an opportunity to grow professionally. In an effort to establish itself as an educational center, Jacksboro had built an institute in 1884 to serve the county’s primary and high-school students. When it added a college curriculum in 1891, the North Texas Baptist College was born.
Mattie was hired to lead the primary department. In addition, she fully participated in the college’s Summer Normal (or teachers’ college) for both aspiring high-school graduates and those already employed as teachers. The Jacksboro Gazette served as a significant booster of the school, devoting hundreds of column inches a year to its activities.
The local newspaper also kept close tabs on the doctor’s wife, releasing what amounted to a periodic report card on the school’s highest ranking female educator. During her first semester, the paper reported that Mrs. Pistole was doing her work well, smoothly, and quietly and is in love with her pupils.
During her second semester, Mattie invited two local gentlemen to judge a reading contest in her classroom. The newspaper’s report was rhapsodic: The very least that can be said is that Mrs. Pistole is an excellent teacher and thoroughly comprehends the child-mind. The little ones in her room show that superior skill has been guiding their little minds.
In July 1896, five years into her stint with the Baptist College, Mattie was chosen to head the preparatory (high school) department. The Gazette published the school board’s reasoning: Mrs. Pistole has had the primary work well in hand and the work has been notably good.
Neither Mrs. Pistole’s talents nor the Jacksboro paper’s enthusiasm were enough to keep the college afloat. Staggering under competition from other institutions in the region, North Texas Baptist College closed its doors in 1897. The Pistoles’ six-year stint in Jacksboro was over.
On August 17, 1898, the Pistole family moved 100 miles northwest to Seymour, a town reputedly named for a cowboy who lived in the vicinity. Two decades earlier, a group of Oregon settlers had pushed out the native Americans who had long enjoyed the area’s wild game and fresh water. By 1880, the town’s population of 78 included ranchers, farmers, and the merchants who served them. The railroad arrived in 1890. When the Pistoles came eight years later, the town boasted a newspaper, a courthouse, a bank, 24 kerosene streetlights and its first telephones.
The Pistoles settled in: the doctor dispensed pills, delivered babies and stitched up the injured, traveling 19 miles to the often aptly named Goree to do so. He occasionally gave a talk: Free Use of Fruits Necessary to Health was one of his topics.
Mattie resumed her teaching career and, like her husband, occasionally traveled. In December 1899, she took the train for the two-day Northwest Texas Teacher’s Association meeting in Wichita Falls. And, in the spring, she and 12-year-old Eschol, went all the way to Franklin, Kentucky, where they visited relatives for several months. It’s possible Mattie’s trip home coincided with the failing health of her mother, who died the following year.
By 1909, Mrs. Pistole was a fixture in Seymour classrooms. In a history written for Seymour High School’s graduating class of 1920, Elizabeth Bowman recalled first grade passing joyously and quickly with 45 carefree youngsters gathered in the primary room at the old Masonic Hall building under the direction of Mrs. Pistole…learning Mother Goose rhymes, singing, playing, and mastering the art of reading and writing. There was no mention that the school year ended abruptly, without the customary ceremonies, because several students contracted smallpox.
That spring also brought some excitement for the doctor. Two small tornadoes touched down in Baylor County, killing a man whose home split apart and scattered 150 yards. With “the wires” blown down, Dr. Pistole was collected and brought to the scene by a messenger in a hand cart. There was nothing he could do: the victim’s head was mashed into pulp, the newspaper reported in the period’s unrestrained style.
Also in 1909, Eschol returned home to Seymour, having finished his studies at Baylor University in Waco. He followed his mother’s lead and began his first year of teaching, earning an end-of-year B+from the local paper: Mr. Pistole is a good teacher and was well liked by his pupils. The following year, he planned the Baylor County Teachers’ Institute, inviting his mother to offer her expertise in primary education.
The second decade of the 1900s was a busy, productive time for the trio of Pistoles. The doctor was in demand for healing and leading: he sat on numerous civic committees and boards. Mattie helped launch the Pierian Club for ladies bent on studying literature and beautifying the streets of Seymour. Eschol participated in political debates and gave at least one talk — What Can We Do to Help Religion by Making Right Social Conditions — to the Baptist Young People’s Union. When time allowed, the family traveled down to Goree to visit the Cartwright family, related by marriage to the Kentucky Pistoles. During her summer break in 1912, Mattie returned to Franklin to visit her sister, Lizzie.
By 1915, Eschol had abandoned teaching to work as a merchant at the W.E. Kirk dry goods store and Bailes Bros. grocery; ultimately, he settled in as manager of the Farmers Store, where shoppers could buy fruit jars, ice, Folger’s coffee, cotton seed, and drugs dispensed by the boss’s father, Dr. Pistole. Perhaps to encourage business, Eschol joined three fraternal organizations: the Masons, Woodmen of the World, and Knights of Pythias.
Eschol also was courting Lorena Deats, the 26-year-old daughter of a successful cattleman and saddle shop merchant in the town of Albany, about 65 miles south of Seymour. After Eschol proposed, the upcoming nuptials launched a flurry of social engagements, including a “stag dinner” for Eschol with a menu of turkey and dressing and three kinds of cake. And Lorena was the honoree at an eight-course “bridge luncheon”; at each place sat a hand-crocheted basket of nuts and a kewpie dressed in a bridal veil.
The wedding took place June 10, 1915 at the Methodist Church of Albany, the Rev. O.P. Clark presiding: it rated two columns in The Baylor County Banner. Lorena wore white satin and carried a bouquet of lilies of the valley and sweet peas. There is no mention of what Eschol wore or held in his hands. The account of the nuptials, however, included half a column praising the principals, characterizing Eschol as one of the most prominent and popular young men of our town, and Lorena as one of the most loved and esteemed young women of Albany.
On the occasion of their only child’s wedding, Dr. and Mrs. Pistole also earned accolades, for sound parenting: Having ever been united with the progressive interests of the town, first through his father Dr. S.W. Pistole, and his mother, who holds such high place in the hearts of Seymour people through her work in our schools…(Eschol Pistole) has a future of success assured him.
The young Seymour businessman fully embraced respectability and responsibility. When he and Lorena returned from their honeymoon in Galveston, they moved into a home Eschol had made ready before the wedding. He bought a four-cylinder Monroe roadster that Christmas. In the fall of 1916, the couple produced Eschol Harris, Jr., called Harry. When asked on his WWI draft registration in 1917 whether he claimed an exemption, the proud father wrote: Yes. Dependent wife and child.
When Harry was two months old, Eschol and his father encouraged Mattie to retire from her position as principal of the town’s primary school. Having spent 18 years with Seymour schoolchildren, she reluctantly agreed. Although her grandson likely benefited from her retirement, Mattie didn’t limit herself to babysitting: she embraced others in her new family. When Lorena gave a party honoring her visiting sister, “Mrs. Dr. Pistole” (as the newspaper referred to Mattie) dressed up and played dominoes with the other ladies. And, she reached out to her son’s mother-in-law, traveling to Albany for extended visits with Lorena’s mother.
Perhaps retirement also allowed her extra leisure to enjoy her own boy, whose busy life as a merchant, husband and father likely stretched him a little thin. Their 27 years as a cozy trio ended that night in 1915 when Mattie donned her dignified black gown and bedecked her home with flowers to mark the occasion of Eschol’s marriage, an apparently joyful event that connected two families and steered them into a hopeful future together.
That future veered wildly off-course Saturday afternoon, May 4, 1918. Eschol was sitting at his desk in a corner of the Farmers Store when, inexplicably, he reached for the automatic shotgun he always kept nearby. It discharged accidentally, the coroner ruled, blasting into Eschol’s head, killing him instantly. He was 30 years old.
The citizens of Seymour “were shocked unutterably” by Eschol’s sudden death, reported the Baylor County Banner. His funeral brought an immense crowd that filled the house and overflowed into the yard and into the street. So numerous were the bouquets and wreaths that a special auto was necessary to carry them to the cemetery, demonstrating the tender feeling had for this splendid young man. As a member of the Masons, Eschol was afforded the funeral rites of the order, and he was buried in Seymour’s Masonic Cemetery.
Lorena, a widow at 28, took two-year-old Harry and went home to her family and friends in Albany. She raised her son, then filled the decades left to her with volunteer work, bridge parties, club meetings, and church functions. Harry attended the University of Texas and became the president of a Houston oil company; at 62, he predeceased his mother. Lorena, who never remarried, lived to be 94 years old. She was buried in Albany Cemetery near her parents, whose 50-year marriage must have been her ideal: she had chosen June 10, her parents’ wedding date, as her own.
Eschol’s grieving parents not only lost their son, but they lost proximity to their grandchild. Although the Jacksboro and Seymour newspapers reported the Pistoles’ every move for decades, after Eschol’s death, there is a single mention of Lorena and Harry visiting them, in June 1921. Dr. Pistole virtually disappeared from the pages he once occupied, getting only occasional notice for renewing his newspaper subscription. The 1920 census identified him for the first time as a pharmacist rather than a physician; he was then 62 years old.
Mattie, of course, returned to teaching. The children she taught early in her career were young adults, and it’s likely their kids found a seat in Mrs. Pistole’s primary classroom. Certainly, the seniors of Seymour High School fondly remembered their old teacher, as evidenced by entries in the Jackrabbit yearbook. In 1919, Velma Martin recalled her first-grade teacher’s “firm but kindly guidance.” In the 1920 yearbook’s mock senior calendar, the teenagers included her in an inside joke: Dec. 4 was designated the day Mrs. Pistole got up on wrong side of bed. By 1921, Mattie was teaching English at the high school, where some doggerel in the Jackrabbit underscored what her faculty photo suggested: Henry Grey is a boy strong in muscle/It takes Mrs. Pistole to make him hustle.
Apparently, Mattie returned to an elementary classroom in 1926. The daughter of Whit Criswell Bryan, Mattie’s first-grade student that year, posted on her genealogical blog a photo of her father’s report card, signed in the lower right by Mrs. Pistole.
The years of meaningful work and the connections that resulted from it undoubtedly helped to sustain Mattie Pistole when, 11 years after the loss of her only child — in a moment of terrible symmetry — she lost her husband of 43 years.
At 8 on Wednesday morning, April 16, 1929, Dr. Samuel Pistole entered a local drugstore, walked into the rear office, sat down in a chair, drew out a small caliber pistol, put it into his mouth and pulled the trigger. The bullet exited near the top of his head. He was already dead, the gun at his side, when those in the front of the store raced inside. Dr. Pistole was 70 years old. The Dallas Morning News’s reported that “his only child, a son, died in a similar manner.” The Directory of Deceased American Physicians 1804–1929 listed his death as suicide by gunshot. He was buried near Eschol in the Masonic Cemetery of Seymour.
Mattie, a childless widow of 64, continued teaching, according to the 1930 census. Among her neighbors, she was one of the few who owned a radio. Music and books may have helped Mattie fill the long evenings in the small West Texas town.
Sometime after 1930, Mattie made her way back to Simpson County, Kentucky, about 45 years after leaving it. Her sister, Lizzie, who also became a widow in 1929, had taken a couple of 70-year-old boarders into her home in Franklin. Perhaps she offered a room to Mattie. It was Lizzie who informed authorities of Mattie’s death, of a cystic lung lesion, May 28, 1937.
The death certificate says Mattie died “at home.”
Martha Ann Harris Pistole was 72 years, one month, and seven days old. She was buried in Shady Grove Baptist Church Cemetery, in Franklin, where her parents lay.
Special thanks to Janice Thornhill at the Baylor County Museum in Seymour for her help.
ADDENDUM (Feb. 25, 2019) The following was posted 13 April 2005, on an Ancestry.com Message Board
…Around the 1950s or 1960s, my grandfather, Frank Harper Stamps, wrote the following:
During my childhood and youth, I had a very strange complex. I was obsessed with the fear that I was an orphan and that I had been left on the door step of my supposed parents’ home one cold and snowy night. This fear always made me shiver, as I visualized a tiny baby left out in the cold.
There seemed to be a great difference between myself and the rest of the family. My father was highly educated, having graduated from the university and the seminary. He was versed in six languages and had earned thirteen diplomas. He was teaching Greek and Hebrew in a Texas college at the time of my birth. I almost worshiped my two brothers, who were so much smarter than I. I thought they were so handsome, while I was so dull and anything but good looking. My mother was the wisest and sweetest thing in the world, and I looked up to my three sisters as if they were angels from Heaven. All of these fancies were so real to me and so exaggerated in my mind that perhaps they were responsible for my complex and fears.
One day I tearfully unburdened my heart to my mother, telling her all of my fears. I said, “Mother, did you find me on your door step when I was a baby, or is it true that you are my real mother?” She was greatly surprised and hastened to assure me that my fears were groundless. However, my fears persisted, until one day fate stepped in and tore away all doubts and fears.
It happened this way. I was conducting the singing for an evangelist in Seymour, Texas, and we were invited to conduct chapel services at the high school. At the close of the services, one of the teachers approached me and said, “Do you happen to be the son of Reverend J. J. Stamps who used to live in Jacksboro, Texas?” “Yes, that is correct,” I said. She said among other things, “I am the wife of Dr. Pistole, who owns a drugstore in Seymour, and I am sure my husband will be glad to see you, for we were friends of your family when you lived in Jacksboro.”
I hastened down town to the City Drug Company and found the doctor and introduced myself to him. He was delighted to see me, and inquired all about the family. Then he said this. “Frank, I want to tell you something that will interest you greatly. I was a friend and neighbor of your family when you were born, and I am the very doctor that brought you into the world.”
The doctor did not understand the full meaning of the tears of gratitude that welled up and overflowed as I realized the impact of what he was saying. The great burden of my life had been lifted and my fear had been conquered.
Frank H. Stamps
3316 Macon Road
Memphis, TN
