Contributed by Karen Mabry Rice ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ These are not my memories, but memories my father shared with me. Some of them are memories my grandfather, who died before I was born, shared with my father. Lon Mabry had two families. His first wife was Sarah O. Hardison. I don't remember when she died or why - perhaps of a mother's broken heart. They had four children, Mattie Viola, b. 1884, Ella May, b. 1886, John Robert, b. 1888, and William Marion, b. 1892. The two little girls died when they were about 1 year old. John Robert died at age 13, and Will lived to adulthood. Will was the only uncle I had on my dad's side. He lived to be quite an old man. Lon must have loved Sarah and the children who died very much. He was a very sad man, who lived alone for a long time. Then one day, as he related it to my dad, he stepped outside and saw Miss Rosa Copeland in a white ruffled dress, riding down the dusty road, bareback, but "side-saddle," on a mule. He didn't know which one was fatter or sassier, Rosa or the mule, but he was smitten, so he began to pay her court and soon they were married (22 May 1904 in Union Parish). Young Will was 12. When he was 16, my father Ernest was born. Will and Ernest Mabry had 60 first cousins. (You see why I always say I'm related to half of Union Parish?) I don't think all of them ever came to visit the Mabrys at the same time - can you imagine? If just two families came, it must have been quite a sight! My dad remembers lots of kids and dogs playing together in the shade under the big porch on the front of the old Mabry home place. I'm not sure exactly where this was. In the early 1900s, Catherine Mabry sold it and went to live with her oldest son, William Henry, and his family. That home then began to be called the "Mabry homeplace," but it wasn't the same one. My grandfather, Lon, had 9 brothers and 2 sisters. The men were all well over six feet tall. Mary Catherine was short, barely 5 ft tall, like her mother, Catherine Cook, but the other sister, Lizzie, was exactly six feet tall. My grandfather told a story that may been an invented joke, but if so it was obviously told with the love he felt for the sister who was three years older than he. He used to say, "Your Aunt Lizzie could stand in a bushel basket and lift a hundred pounds of potatoes over her head. Now, if you knew your Aunt Lizzie, you'd know that the only thing unusual about that was that she could get her feet into the bushel basket." Can you imagine the teasing these girls endured in this family of big old boys? And obviously it continued into adulthood - without abating the love they felt for one another. I met my Great-aunt Mary when she was a very old woman and I was a young kid, but I could tell as she talked with my grandmother (then widowed from Lon for ten years) how much they all loved one another. The men got their height from their father, as did Lizzie. William Pierce Mabry was 6 foot, 5 inches tall, and had dark auburn hair. He was apparently a proud and opinionated man who didn't give an inch. My grandfather told of riding in a big wagon with his dad when he was a little boy (he was born in 1861). They were going to the mill to get their corn ground into meal. They met a man in a buggy on the road and stopped - I was never told the man's name. William P. jumped off the buggy, grabbed the man's collar and jerked him out of the buggy, saying, "If you do not stop spreading stories about me, I will horsewhip you!" He then tossed the fellow back into his buggy, got on his wagon, and drove off. The man's feet had never touched the ground. As I understand it, William P.'s behavior was not always exemplary and there were perhaps some stories that could have been told. Perhaps the man was Edwin H. Fay. Mary Mabry Quisenberry, one of my father's first cousins, always said that William P. stated firmly that he did not fight in the Civil War. Mary was born in 1888, 3 1/2 years after William P. died, so she must have gotten the story from her father, Joseph Egleston Mabry, who was born in 1864. That was how I recorded the family history until last year. Last year I got an e-mail from Jim Casper, a cousin in Texas, who said, "Hey, I thought you said our great-grandfather didn't fight in the Civil War? I've got a book here that says he did." Sure enough. The book is a compilation of Sgt. Edwin H. Fay's letters, written while with Minden's Rangers in the CSA. It was edited by Bell Irvin Wiley, a professor of history at Emory University, with the assistance of Fay's youngest daughter, Lucy E. Fay, who was herself an associate professor of bibliography at Columbia University. Fay only mentions William P. three times, none of them flattering: On 14 May 1862 from Corinth, Mississippi, he writes to his wife, Sarah, "I wrote you a week ago a long letter which I sent by Mr. W.P. Mabry as also my picture but when I came back from advanced picket I found that Mabry had not got his papers fixed up right and had not gone. He will make one more trial today and I shall send this by him to town and if he does not get off I'll have it put in the Office though I presume that letters will be stopped from leaving here as a battle is said to be imminent though I cannot discover that it is any nearer than it was 10 days ago." On June 15, 1862 from Tupelo, Mississippi, he writes again, "I sent you a long letter and various scraps by Mabry but understand that he left trunk, Ambrotypes, and all at Vicksburg. He had been paid some forty dollars in all for carrying pictures and letters, he had got the money and little cared he for the rest. I don't think he is the right kind of man anyway." Six pages later in the same letter he says, "I sent you the letter by Mabry and you have not got it." I didn't read the entire book, but my spouse, who is a Civil War buff, did. The unit was an all volunteer unit mustered at Minden soon after the start of the war. So, if William P. Mabry was with them, he went of his own free will. However, he was 35, as was Fay. Fay's birthdate fell on one side of the service age limit enacted by the Confederate congress and William P. Mabry's fell on the other. Mabry likely went home the summer of 1862 on an age related discharge, which Fay was not able to get. The letters chronicle Fay's long, determined, but futile attempt to get out of the army. Perhaps Mabry was as bad as painted by Fay, and perhaps not. We'll never know. The only muster rolls of the Minden Rangers that exist are September 1862 to February 1864. Having gone home in June of 1862, William P. was not on them. He never applied for a Confederate pension, having been shot to death at age 60, so "officially" I guess he never was a soldier in the Civil War. # # #