In the second post about the women whom I have most admired in my life, I want to tell the story of my Grandma Higgins. I think it will become apparent as the story unfolds why she meant to much to me and how she influenced my life during her 93 years here. She has been gone now some 30 years, but I can see her face still yet so clearly in my mind's eye.


My Grandmother--her Life as a Pioneer Woman
January 13, 2007 / by southwesterngrad / Edit Post

The community that grew up in the Rhea Area in the late 1800's consisted primarily of immigrants from Tennessee and Kentucky who were first and second generation Irish. Either they or their parents had emigrated from Ireland to America during the mid 1800's.

In search of free land they later found their way to Oklahoma Territory. It was in that community that my grandmother grew to adulthood and met her husband, a young man whom she probably had known for several years, since they were the same age. His name was William Robert Higgins, though he was known to all as Will. When she was nineteen and he twenty, they wed. They quickly started their family, their first child, Clara, being born just about a year later.

But again tragedy followed my grandmother, as Clara smothered to death in a large feather bed when she was barely a year old.

THE MARRIED YEARS:

Will's father had homesteaded 160 acres in the Osceola community, about ten miles south of Rhea when the government officially opened the Oklahoma Territory to settlers. He selected a quarter section that had about 100 acres of prime bottom land along the Barnetz creek and about 60 acres of upland. He knew the bottom land would provide rich, verdant soil capable of producing excellent crops. The upland he would leave in grass for the cattle.

After my great grandfather, whose name, incidentally was George Washington Higgins, passed on, my grandmother and grandfather moved onto the "Higgins Place," as it came to be called. It was there they lived as their family grew.


This photo, taken in 1931, shows a family that probably would have been considered prosperous by standards then. Pictured back row(L & R) George [my father] Lillie Mae, Beulah Lee, Eliza; Front Row (L to R) Elmo, Delmar, Cleo, Will, Mary, Roy [ Eliza"s husband], Babies: Eliza's children, Roy Lee and Floy.

I don't know a lot about my grandmother's life during this time. I do know that my grandfather died suddenly of pneumonia when still in his forties. My grandmother, a bit of a poet, wrote a poem published in the local newspaper about rearing her family alone.

She was irritated at gossips criticizing her boys, and she lambasted them fairly obviously in the poem. Dad's family suffered like all did during the Great Depression. My dad joined the CCC camp, one of the programs formed by President Franklin D Roosevelt to provide jobs for young men. He helped build the national park at Watonga, named in honor of the Cheyenne Indian chief, Roman Nose.

(To Be Continued)