Carroll

May 1997 / Carroll Chronicles / Volume 2 

Editorial
Carroll’s have met in Drumright, Oklahoma for the last three years not just because someone had a very good idea, although it was a good idea. Carrolls have met because in our hearts we’ve all wanted to be there. No one made us travel long distances. No one forced us to dutifully meet. We came because in our hearts we remembered just how great it is to belong to a family, to our pasts, to those we are bound to by a substance thicker than water. I want to commend those who have attended our family reunions and have found that it was worth the first awkwardness, worth the time to renew that which was lost, worth looking beyond the wrinkles, beyond the natural changes and the social differences, to say: "We’re connected, and that’s something very special."

Carrolls - Carroll County, Missouri

Though we haven't had them in attendance at our Drumright reunion, several of us have been in contact in recent years with the Carrolls which remained in Carroll County, Missouri after George, John, and Ham moved on to Oklahoma. Just recently, through the Internet, I met a 3rd cousin: Helen Carroll Phillips who is descended from Joseph Martin Carroll, my grandfather's uncle. She and her husband, Cal, live in Washington State and also have a winter home in south Texas. Cal and Helen are family history researchers. They have sent some obituaries through the mail to me. One of these I am posting in this newsletter.
 

Third Annual Carroll Reunion

This article appeared in the Drumright Gusher immediately following the reunion.

 Descendants of brothers,George, John, and Ham Carroll, early settlers in the Yale and Drumright area met Saturday, June 8, at the Drumright Senior Citizens Center for their third annual reunion. The reunion drew family members from California, Kansas, Texas, Tennesee, and Oklahoma.

 The day was filled with merriment and glee as relatives who hadn't seen one another in numbers of years renewed acquaintance. A big hit were the family albums that were offered for view by all. Stories of family interest abounded. Family genealogists exchanged information. A table loaded with family favorite foods was more than enough to feed the approximately sixty members and guests attending.

Driving the distance from southern California, Billy E. and Doris (Norton) Carroll, delighted the family with their presence. Other out-of state attendees were Ralph and June (Christian) Tippit and granddaughter, Jamie, from Spring, Texas, Les and Betty Robinson, Valley Center, KS, Terry and Sherry McMillan, Wichita, KS, Charles and Betty Lipscomb and Pansy Kirsch, Augusta, KS, and Jimmy Carroll, Nashville, TN.

 From Oklahoma: Jerry and Phyllis Swart, and Ella Comingdeer, Tonkawa; Jay Carroll, Steve and Jill Cherry and baby, Emily, Oklahoma City; Barbara Holland and granddaughter Shelly Webster, Maysville; Susan Spears, Purcell; Letha Webber, Pauline Lawrence with daughter and son-in-law, Tulsa; Jim and Lisa Kenyon, Lcay and Brian Carroll, Cleveland, OK; Troy, Randy, and Ty Lott, Robert, Rhonda, Jennifer, and Dustin Juarez, Woody Carroll, Stroud; Jim and Sharon Seward, Teressa and Eric Armstrong, Olive; Merle Philpott, A.W. & Alma Shropshire, Ken & Joyce Wells, Jerry and Betty Carroll, David & Caleb McPhate, Bill M. Carroll, Ray and Fern Carroll, Emery Carroll, Dortha Carpenter, Don Carpenter, Drumright with guest, Lynn, from Bristow.
 

E-mail

Electronic Mail allows a person who owns a computer (or uses one at the office) with a phone hookup called a modem to send messages through the phone line into a large system of inter-connected computers such as the Internet. These messages can then be retrieved by the addressee from their personal computer. Some of these services are absolutely FREE.

JUNO is one such free E-mail service. One can use JUNO for business correspondence or pleasure. Messages and long textual documents can be transmitted in a matter of moments after connecting to a local phone number. Hobbyists often use this service to share information. Families which are separated by many miles can use it even to keep track of much of the day to day activities of their lives (if so inclined).

E-mail has the advantage of regular mail, often called Snail Mail, because of its speed of delivery...often just a few minutes. Also the sender doesn’t have to address an envelope, purchase a stamp, or make a trip to the postoffice, or to the mailbox at the end of the drive. Once the message is written, you press a key to send it through the phone line. A local number is dialed automatically, and it is sent!

If anyone in the family is interested in JUNO, just contact me, Jim Carroll, and I’ll be happy to send you a diskette with the software. Note: JUNO doesn't have local phone numbers in every US city. People living in larger metropolitan areas have a better chance at having local access to JUNO.

Tiger School

The following article is about Tiger School where many of the Carroll children and grandchildren of Ham and Eliza Carroll attended. This is an excerpt from the book, Drumright II, A Thousand Memories, by D.Karl Newsom, Perkins, OK; Evans Publications, Inc.
Tiger School was the prototype for Drumright’s later wing schools. A few oil wells had sprung up around the school even before the oil strike of 1912. Small stores existed there as early as 1909, and it was the site of the first oil field post office in June 1910. From 1912 until 1939, several hundred oil field children from the little school came to Drumright High School.

The Drumright News said in March 1915 that Tiger School was built by William E. Dunn in 1908 or 1909. This is not verifiable, but Dunn had moved to that scene in 1908, hoping to establish a town called Tiger.

 One pupil who attended Tiger in 1910 survived at this writing. Blanche Wheeler Kersey, daughter of Frank M. Wheeler, on whose farm the oil strike occurred in 1912, walked about two miles across open fields to school from the Wheeler farm a mile north of Drumright. Her memories are vague, but she recalls Tiger as a one-room frame building with one teacher for the dozen or so pupils. In the spring of 1911, Tiger School burned and remained closed for a year.

Originally, it was believed the school was brick when it opened again in 1912, but when Cecil Albert arrived in 1914, it consisted of two frame buildings. Cecil was 11 when his father, Frank, moved from Avant and became a head roustabout for Wolverine Oil Co. The family settled on a farm owned by Tom Slick four miles south of Oilton and Cecil walked to school every day after someone stole the family’s horse.

His most vivid memory 62 years later was of the Tiger principal. He always chewed tobacco, Albert recalled. He kept the cuspidor not far from his desk. He would talk awhile and then spit. He was a tall angular man and the pupils watched in awe as he unwound almost like a baseball pitcher and took aim at the cuspidor. He was very good.

 Everyone walked to school and everyone was poor, Albert said. Pupils never got to know one another. As soon as school was out, they all hurried home to their oil field shacks or tents.

 Things were about to modernize at Tiger when Ivan Weaver arrived in the fall of 1920. Weaver in 1986 was one of the few living pioneers to have ridden on the first oil field school bus, a covered wagon that picked up pupils at the Stanolind Gasoline Plant east of Drumright and took them to Pleasant Hill.

As he moved to Tiger, the new four-room brick building was almost completed. It had one room for beginners, first, and second grades, one for the third, fourth and fifth grades, and another for seventh and eight graders. The fourth room was for assemblies. The latter had a roll-up wall between it and another room. About 80 pupils were at Tiger then.

In the early 1920’s Tiger was also a place of worship. We had a non-denominational Sunday School every week that gave us religious training as well as education. Weaver recalled. The school also had basketball, baseball, and track teams, even in the early years. Mr. and Mrs. Bert C. Balch were Tiger’s teachers then.

Tiger’s last 10 years of existence may have been the greatest. Enrollment through most of the 1930’s fluctuated around 150. Many Tiger patrons had large families and their children moved through school in stair-step order and then on to Drumright High School. One could be sure that at any given year in the ‘30’s there would be at least one Kelly, Hoggatt, Pennington, Starkey, Mansell, Wilburn, Wise, or Winkler.

 Dan Kelly was one of five A.C. Kelly children whose era at Tiger extended from the early 1920’s to the mid-1930’s. Kelly was possibly Tiger’s most noted graduate. After graduation from Drumright High, he eventually became president of T.G. & Y., a national variety store chain.

 The Kelly family first lived on a farm near Tiger and later on the Minnehoma lease across from the well-known ball tank. Dan Kelly had retired from T.G. & Y and in 1986 he and his younger brother, Jim, were operating three variety stores. His memories of Tiger School indicate that some things had changed and some had remained the same in the later years.

 Almost everyone walked to school and almost everyone was still poor, he recalled, but we were together more. From the fourth grade on we got to compete against Pemeta, Fairview, and other schools in athletics. We all looked forward to the holiday season and free Christmas candy.

 The Pete Hoggatt family may have set a record at Tiger. Hoggatt came to the oil field as a teamster in 1913. Nine of his children, starting with Mildred in 1916 and ending with Billy when the school closed during World War II. In between were Bryan, Joe, Philip, Rosalie, Geneva, Ethel, Eldon, and Margreat. Four of the children were born in a tent south of the Cities Service camp.

Cecil Albert, Ivan Weaver, and Dan Kelly all consider Tiger School days as an important phase of their lives, and Kelly adds, For anyone raised during the depression, it was a great opportunity to be in the Tiger area. The teachers were so kind and helpful. School records show Tiger closed officially on November 5, 1942, but the 1938-1939 year may have been its last year of instruction.
 

In Memory

Leroy Haley
Funeral services for Millard Leroy Haley of Ringgold, Louisiana, were held March 30, 1996 at Rockett Funeral Home, Ringgold, Louisiana. Burial was at Rocky Mount Cemetery, Ringgold, with full Military Honors.

 Millard Leroy Haley was born June 6, 1938 at Tryon, Oklahoma. He passed away Thursday, March 28, 1996 after an extended illness.

Shortly after graduating from Maysville High School in 1956, Leroy joined the Air Force. While stationed in Germany, he married Maria Theresia Kessler of Zweibrucken, Germany, in 1963. He retired from the Air Force in 1979 after serving almost 23 years.

Survivors include his wife, Tracy; one daughter, Derdrie Hicks and her husband, Joel, of Jamestown, Louisiana; his mother, Bessie Cronian, of Maysville, Oklahoma; two sisters, Sharon Smith and her husband, Floyd, of Lexington, Oklahoma, and Barbara Holland and her husband, Royce, of Maysville; aunts, Elnora Thomas and Grace Carroll of Maysville; one cousin, Ed R. Carroll and his wife, Jan, of Waterloo, Iowa; two nieces, Lori Webster of Maysville, and Susan Spears of Purcell, Oklahoma; two nephews, Rod Smith of Rosedale, Oklahoma, and Tommy Smith of Purcell; nine grand nieces and nephews; and many other relatives and friends.

Leroy will be missed.

The Maysville News, Thursday, April 4, 1996

Joseph Wesley Carroll
Joseph Wesley (Joe) Carroll passed away June 16, 1996 at his farm home of more than 50 years. Joe Carroll was 95 years old, born March 13, 1901. He married Juanita May Creason on February 3, 1925. Three children were born to Joe and Juanita: Richard Harley, Robert Lewis, and Helen Josephine. Richard passed away three months before his father on March 10, 1996.

Uncle Joe, as he was known to so many family members, had lived alone on his farm outside of Bosworth, Missouri since the death of his wife Juanita in 1970. He was still able to drive his pickup for shopping in Brunswick and Carrollton as well as Bosworth and Hale. He loved baseball, accumulating a considerable store of knowledge about the game and enjoyed nothing more than listening to a game on his radio. He died quietly and peacefully doing just that, while sitting at his kitchen table, where he was found the next day.

Joe Carroll's father was Hugh Riley Carroll who, at the age of 16, had accompanied his father Joseph Martin Carroll and his uncle Nathan Carroll together with their families in the move from Henryville, Indiana to Miami Station, Missouri in the fall and winter of 1879.

 Two of Joe's brothers are still living; Clifford of Bosworth, Missouri and Bill of Marshall, Missouri. These branches of the Carroll family, the descendents of Joseph Martin Carroll, and those of Nathan Carroll, seemed to have lost contact after Nathan's descendents moved to Oklahoma shortly after the turn of the century.

Obituary courtesy of Calvin and Helen (Carroll) Phillips

Services for W. W. Carroll
Memorial services are to be held Wednesday, January 22, at the Bailes Funeral Home in Drumright for Woodrow Wilson Carroll, born November 30, 1912. Mr. Carroll died Sunday, January 19, at the age of 84. His father, Ham Carroll, moved his family to a farm northeast of Drumright about 1905. Woodrow was the last surviving of thirteen children.

Mr. Carroll attended Tiger School, two miles north of Drumright. He served his country in World War II as a member of the 137th Engineering Combat Battalion. His specialized training kept him from face to face combat. On the Rhine River, in the heat of the final months of the war, the men rested at night in pairs, barricaded in concrete crypts, listening to the sounds of heavy fighting around them. During the day they were busy purifying water from the river for the troops. His battalion received two Battle Stars.

Mr. Carroll worked for the Service Pipeline Company in Drumright for 19 years supporting his family while also caring for a small farm with a good number of livestock. Later he was a trucker, hauling sand and gravel, and has owned a number of fine quarter horses.

 He is survived by his six children, Bobby Carroll of Oklahoma City; Phyllis Swart of Tonkawa; Donna Garrett of Ft. Smith, Arkansas; Jim Carroll of Goodlettsville, Tennessee; Jerry Carroll of Bowie, Texas; and Bill Carroll of Drumright. He is also survived by 20 grandchildren and 22 great-grandchildren.

Burial will be in Lawson Cemetery, Yale, Oklahoma.

 Obituary appeared in Drumright Gusher.

Jerry Swart
Jerry Swart, age 60, of Tonkawa died on Saturday, Feb. 1, 1997 at the St. Joseph Medical Center in Ponca City.

Services were held Tuesday, Feb. 4, 1997 in the First Christian Church of Perry at 10:00 a.m. Rev. Lynn Scott officiated.

Jerry was born on June 2, 1936 to Ted and Mary Ruth Swart in Perry.

He married Phyllis Vines Swart on November 22, 1995.

Swart served 14 years as Air Traffic Controller and 17 years as a Real Estate Broker. He was a 32 degree mason; a member of the White Shrine, the India Temple, the Perry Elks Lodge and I.O.O.F. Lodge of Tonkawa.

He graduated from Perry High School in 1954 and attended OSU. He served in the U.S. Air Force and served two years in the Philippines.

Survivors include his wife, Phyllis of Tonkawa; two daughters, Vicky Garcia and Sandra Swart, both of Houston, TX; one son, David Lane of Perry and one step-son, Mike Vines of Tonkawa; four grandchildren; his mother, Mary Ruth Swart of Perry and a brother, Robert L. Swart of Kingfisher.

He was preceded in death by his father in 1988 and one sister, Roberta.

Memorials may be made to the Shrine Hospital. Brown Funeral Home of Perry will act as custodian to the funds.

***

 (Jerry was not associated with the Carroll family for long, but he quickly made his way into the hearts of us who had occasion to fellowship with him. He is lovingly remembered. JHC)

Connecting Our Kin: A Family History Collection, copyright 1998-2010, is a not-for-profit, personal, on-line genealogy project, formatted and presented by James H. Carroll, Goodlettsville, TN.  Excerpts and contributions from other sources have been used sparingly and with appropriate credit given. You are welcome to copy information found at this site for personal use and share information with other researchers or genealogical organizations, but this information may not be sold or used in a commercial project without expressed permission.