NOTE: In 1981, Arlu, one of Neta June’s Aunts, wrote an original manuscript from which the following is taken. Mom’s cousin, Patsy Rogers, transcribed the manuscript circa 1996 to share with family. In 2011, Larry received the main text from his Aunt Darlyne (Neta June’s sister) along with Grandpa McCann’s story and other ancestry documentation.
We don’t know her maiden name, but our great-great grandma (Elizabeth) was a southern belle from Tennessee. She stood tall and straight and had blue eyes. She was very quiet, but was always working at something — sewing, mending, embroidery, etc. She married a man with the last name of Hatley.
(Elizabeth D. Worley, was born 26 May 1814 in Tennessee, married Green Wesley Hatley, and died in Texas on 8 December 1890. Mr. Hatley was born 26 June 1811 in Chatham, North Carolina and died in Texas on 14 June 1880.)
He (Green Wesley) was a southern gentleman in that he owned a large plantation and some slaves. He did not work but had an overseer to manage the plantation. He was good to his slaves and they cried when he moved to Texas when the Civil War was over. The northern government took his land away from him and parceled it out, 16 acres to each slave. They all stayed with their new land, and Mr. Hatley packed up what things he could in covered wagons and took his family to Lampasas, Texas.
In Lampasas he bought a tract of land and some cattle and began ranching. His sons were the ranch hands while he sat on the verandah in the shade. Great-great grandpa Hatley had brought quite an amount of gold coins from Tennessee in a carpet bag. He kept this hidden.
There was a time he became fed up with the whole bit of trying to make a living ranching, so he just told his wife he was leaving. He did give his wife a few gold coins before he left her and the kids. Of course, she cried and was upset, wondering what in the world she would do with a poor cattle ranch and a bunch of hungry kids. But being pretty sturdy stuff, she went on to bed that night as usual.
Way in the night she heard a horse come plodding up. Mr. Hatley was soon at the door asking to be let in. She let him in and asked him why he came back. He said, ‘Well, it was the .horse that did and went on to explain that the farther he rode, the louder that old horse’s hoofs going clop, clop, clop began to seem to be chanting “go back to your wife, you coward, go back to your hungry kids, you coward, you coward, you coward,” so he just came on back.
The story was handed down that he had buried his carpet bag full of gold on the ranch at Lampasas. Maybe it is still there today!
The Hatleys had a daughter (Telitha) who married a man named Elliott (Bryson). The Elliotts lived at Lampasas and had four boys and two girls. The boys were William, Charlie, Bob and Brice. The girls were Josaphine and Sarah Katheren. Sarah Katheren was born in Lampasas, Texas in 1880 and became the grandma of the McCann and Pat Dresslar children.
(Telitha Catherine Hatley, was born 25 February 1843 Married Bryson in1866, and died in Jacksboro, Texas, 5 February 1929. Bryson Miller Elliott was born 17 December 1845 in Missouri and died in Jacksboro, Texas, 25 March 1925.)
Sarah Katheren was 20 years old when she met Willie Ray McCann. He had come into that area and to the Davis Mountain area looking at ranch land. They married and soon moved to Jacksboro, Texas and then on into Oklahoma Territory. There he owned several grocery stores at different times.
Sarah bore eleven children, six of whom lived to be grown. There were three sets of twins. One set of little girl twins died at birth• Another set of twin girls, Ethel and Gladys, died around 2 years of age and one of the boy twins died at 9 months. He was the twin of Frank Fay McCann who spent most of his adult years in Abilene, Texas. The other children were Bessie, Lola, Herbert Olen, Ira Lavern and Harold Reeves.
Times were very hard for Will and Sarah. The children were lucky to have one dress or pants and shirt for every day wear and one for ‘dress up’ and one pair of shoes per year. When they got a new pair of shoes they were kept for “dress up” and their last pair of ‘dress up’ shoes were demoted to every day wear. The family lived in a house beside the grocery store. The brothers and sisters never had many toys, and being so poor, most of what they did have were homemade. Willie Ray was good at whittling and he carved dolls, whistles and sailboats out of wood for his children, and Sarah made corn shuck or rag dolls for the girls and doll clothes from scraps.
With so many children and having a number of miscarriages, along with so much hard work, Sarah was in poor health a lot of the time, so the girls, Bessie and Lola, assumed a great deal of the baby care and household work. When Lola was 16 she was swept off her feet by an older fellow, Lloyd Elwood (Pat) Dresslar, who was 5 years her senior. and they were married on Christmas Day, 1920. Bessie didn’t like Pat Dresslar at all, and said that her little sister wasn’t even through playing with dolls yet.
However, she used the fact that her parents had consented to the marriage as leverage to get her way about going to nursing school. She had been wanting to go to Kansas City, Missouri to nursing school but Will and Sarah didn’t think a girl her age should be going so far away from home to school. Bessie threw a fit about that not being as bad as letting her little sister get married at 16, so they finally consented to let her go to shut her up. She went on to become director of nurses at two of the nations largest hospitals, one in Kansas City and one in Los Angeles, California. Her nursing career spanned over 50 years and she only gave it up when her eyesight failed.
It was many years after Willie Ray died that Sarah finally had to give up her home in Levelland, Texas and began to live with the children. In 1971 she had stayed awhile in Abilene with Frank, then went to Mineral Wells to stay with granddaughter, Arlu. It was there that she began to tell Arlu that she was “seeing a big purple flower right in front of my eyes’. They became uneasy about Grandma being by herself while Arlu was at the beauty shop all day, so she took her to granddaughter, Bessie Faye’s, at Morgan Mill (Texas) so she would have someone with her all the time. The family, not knowing anything about a stroke or its symptoms, did not recognize that she was probably having mini-strokes.
Lola and Pat had just returned from a fishing trip to Mexico and had gone to Bessie Fayes in Morgan Mill the day before Easter Sunday, planning to take Grandma back to Levelland with them after a brief visit in Morgan Mill. On Easter Sunday morning Grandma went into the bathroom and turned on the water. The ladies heard the water just keep running and running for so long that Lola went to check on her. She was in the floor in a semi-sitting position leaning against the wall. She had had a massive stroke and was unconscious. She was taken immediately to the Stephenville Hospital (Texas). They said there was nothing that could be done for her. A plane was chartered to fly her to Levelland to the hospital there. Of course, there was nothing medical personnel there could do for her either, so she was transferred to a nursing home where she remained in a coma for another seven months. Sarah Katheren McCann died on November 17, 1971 at the age of 91. She was buried beside her husband, Willie Ray, in Levelland Cemetery.
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