A Pioneer Woman of the 1900's.

Susie Lavonia Ober Beasley
born Mossville, Newton Co. Ar.April 7, 1889
died Clarksville, Johnson Co. Ar. Jan 24, 1956
buried Oakland Cemetery, Clarksville.

Married Arthur Claude Beasley. April 17, 1906 at
Swain, Newton Co. Ar.

She was one of the last of what history refers to as a
"Pioneer Woman"


She grew the food, made the clothes, gathered herbs for healing and cooking, raised the children, milked the cows, worked in the fields, took in boarders, nursed the sick, laid out the dead-making the pillows and linings for the homemade coffins and all the other 'chores' that enabled a family to exist.

She had large vegetable and flower gardens with rock fences to keep out the animals. In one corner of her vegetable garden I remember gooseberry bushes and a few tobacco plants. She kept her tobacco 'twists' in a flat wooded apricot box under the bed. A smoke house was used to cure the meat of homegrown pigs and cattle.

In her front yard was a glower garden, where she raised asparagus at the end of a row of roses.
This was used at decoration time in the many flower arrangements she made. Dozens of flowers were made of tissue paper to supplement the wild roses and flowers growing along the fence rows and in the fields. Starting the first Sunday in May, Decoration Day ran throughout the summer.

Union Cemetery on Memorial Sunday, Rosetta the first Sunday in June, along with Russell Cemetery in Ozone were among the 'must attend'. If transportation was available they went to Mossville Cemetery decoration where Grandma Ober was buried. Grandma wearing a new homemade 'decoration dress' and hat loaded up the wagon with food and flowers, grandpa in his white shirt, the kids, friends and relatives made up a caravan of wagons and horses off to the cemetery to see family and friends. Some they wouldn't see until the next summer when Decoration came again.

Grandma was an excellent seamstress and I can imagine the joy she felt when she got her first treadle machine. Her daughters were among the 'best dressed' in the community. The coat she wore to milk in was an original ' coat of many colors' that Dolly Parton wrote and sang of. Grandma had cut in various shapes and colors pieces of scrap material, sewed them together, and then did briar stitch embroidery on each seam, cut out and sewed the jacket, lining it with and old blanket. I thought it was beautiful.

In a letter to her older sister Bertie, she urged Bertie to carry her own wood and water as she did. She wanted her husband "Bum" to be a strong old man.

There was always company, especially in the winter when men couldn't work ( a lot of them could be referred to as 'free loaders') so grandma canned in half gallon jars using washtubs placed over a campfire. Years latered she commented that her children didn't eat certain foods anymore. Her daughter-in-law reminded her that the children never did eat those foods, but there was so many around the long kitchen table that Grandma was to busy to notice who ate what. With the money she received from timber/sawmill worker boarders she saved and bought a battery radio. It had a long wire antenna that stretched through the trees for several yards like a telephone wire. She ordered the radio from Sears Roebuck and Co. along with an extra set of the glass tubes it used. If one blew out she would immediately order a replacement so they always could listen to the radio.

They built a new house when my daddy was a young lad. Grandma did not have door sills put in so she could just sweep the dirt right out the door. She built her own kitchen cabinets out of scrap wood and wooden boxes. Some of them had curtains instead of doors. She made her quilts, her brooms, caned bottoms for her chairs, crocheted and made rugs out of necessity. Today these are called crafts. An educated woman she loved to read and used coal light (kerosene) lamps for light.

She dug roots and peeled bark sending full mail bags to the Chicago Drug houses to used used in making medicine. This brought in some cash. In the 1920's she became postmaster for Garber. They build a small wooden building which was the PO and a store. Supplies were brought in from Clarksville. She kept a basket packed and was ready when a neighbor needed help with illness or accidents. She helped a neighbor deliver twins and then buried them in the lady's flowerbed.

For a number of years in the fall she sent me a matchbox of chinquapin nuts because she knew how much I loved them and they weren't available in Oklahoma where we lived. I still treasure a small black autograph book with my name in gold that she sent me for my 8th birthday.

Sears and Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs were read from cover to cover, new styles, new inventions, everything, it was there. Grandma used them to look at when she designed and made clothes and curtains. The old catalogs were used by the children for paper dolls. My cousin envied me my cut out paper dolls and I envied her the catalog dolls.

Grandma raised a son, four daughters and a grandaughter in very primitive circumstances but
she managed to provide them with things that most of the neighbors didn't have. I can only imagine the wonders upon wonders Grandma felt when they moved to 20 acres on the edge of Clarksville in the fall of 1947. A pump in a pump house, no more well with a lard bucket on a rope, electricity, a wringer washer and Uncle Ester gave her a new and her first refrigerator.
Later then moved into Clarksville, no more cows to milk, walking distance to 'downtown' and their first indoor bathroom.

Her hard life came to an end at the age of 66, sitting in her rocker, laughing at a joke. She left this world as she went through it' enjoying life'.