The Walker’s Chapel Reunion of the Matlock/Wise Family

 July is National Family Reunion Month, and next Monday, July 31st at 2PM we will be having a Genealogy and Family Reunions presentation at the History Center, where you can get ideas for ways to collect and use family history at your reunion. Recently I re-discovered some oral history interviews where a Bossier Parish family reunion provided such an opportunity to gather family history, as well as shed light on everyday rural life in the first half of the 20th century. On October 11, 2003, Bossier Parish Libraries History Center staff attended the Matlock/Wise family reunion in Walker’s Chapel and conducted oral history interviews with Rex Matlock and his younger sister Jo Matlock Baker. 

Walker’s Chapel is located about 12 miles east of the north Bossier Parish town of Plain Dealing. Rex Matlock described his family’s “homeplace,” grandpa Matlock’s 80-acre farmland, where his family lived during his young childhood in a house that was one big room, “the fireplace room,” with a very small bedroom in back. Most of the family of eight slept in the big fireplace room. They grew cotton for an income, his father tended a garden for the family’s subsistence, and his mother cooked on a wood stove, until the family moved to Bellevue in south Bossier Parish for his father to make a better living in the oilfield, where an older brother was already established.  

The family tried to buy very little at the one store in Walker’s Chapel (Winham’s). His father would pay on their account once a year when he sold his cotton. He grew a lot of things in his garden and he always had plenty of potatoes and tomatoes. Rex’s mother would can the tomatoes, while the potatoes, kept dry, would last through the next seasons. 

Sugar was one of the things they did buy at the store. His father grew some sugar cane, but he made syrup out of it. The extended family in Walker’s Chapel used a syrup mill there. Mr. Matlock recalled, “I got to stay home from school one day to poke cane in the mill.  We had this mule-driven mill.  It was a long pole reached out from the mill.” The mill had two flat cylinders that ran close together and “what they do is stick that cane up in there and it would run through and squeeze out the juice and there was a bucket to catch the juice … They’d take that and put it in the … great big, old rectangular-shaped iron pan” that was two or three feet deep. Then you would “Fire it up and constantly keep it stirring.”

Rex’s youngest sister Jo Matlock Baker was too young to remember living in Walker’s Chapel, though she remembers visits to see their grandmother and other family members. Her memories really start at the Bellevue oilfield where they moved when she was three. In Bellevue, the family lived in a three-room shotgun house with one small room later added on to the side. Their house had more rooms but still, physical comforts were rudimentary compared to her present day, even after leaving the farm.

Mrs. Baker remembered wearing flour sack dresses because, “All the flour and feed and stuff came in material that you could reuse.” Prior to getting electricity, she remembers the ice man that delivered ice for the ice box. You’d put a card in the window telling him how much ice you wanted left, and she remembered using kerosene lamps. Also, she stated, “We didn’t have an indoor bathroom until I was in high school,” then laughingly added, “I shouldn’t have said that on that tape.”

When asked if they had family celebrations or reunions like the lively, food-laden event going on around them during the interview, Mr. Matlock answered, “Oh yes, at grandma’s house, yes. The Fourth of July was the big one. Daddy would barbecue a pig and they would have a… big old wooden keg and make it full of lemonade.  And that was some of the best lemonade.” He pointed out that they always had homemade ice cream, too.

Come to the History Center’s presentation on MONDAY, JULY 31, 2023 AT 2 PM, “Genealogy and Family Reunions” and gain some practical tips and handouts for reunion planning and get ideas for fun ways to promote family history at your reunion. Presenters are History Center staff Pam Carlisle, Outreach Historian, and Kevin Flowers, Research Assistant, formerly of the local tourism bureau where he helped groups plan their reunion events.  The History Center is located at 2206 Beckett St, Bossier City, LA. We are open M-Th 9-8, Fri 9-6, and Sat 9-5. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org

For other fun facts, photos, and videos, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB, @bplhistorycenter on TikTok

Images: 

• Walker’s Chapel Methodist Church
• John R. Matlock of Walker’s Chapel, north Bossier Parish

Article by: Pam Carlisle