Interview: W.O. Key

Vol. 50 - p466 11/29/1937

In 1886 my father owned a gin over in TX and he saw how inconvenient it was for the people in the Indian Territory to take their cotton over into TX to have in ginned, so he moved his gin over into the Territory... (snip... not available.) In 1889, I lived close to Caddo and knew Joel Kemp there. He was part Choctaw and part Chickasaw.

He said that his daddy, in slavery time, had a plantation of a thousand cleared acres northeast of Ft Towson. He said that the story and a half "big house" was built of hewn logs. It had a twelve foot hall and ten foot porches nearly all around it and contained several rooms, with chimneys and fireplaces of native stone at each end of the house and one for the kitchen, because they cooked on fireplaces then. The same chimney furnished the fireplaes both above and below stairs. The slave quarters were a little way back of the house and consisted of several cabins. Then of course there were out-buildings, bars, etc. all built of logs.

The father's name was Joel Kemp, also. On January 17, 1900, I moved to that "thousand acre field" which was then a little north east of Doaksville, about five miles. I found some of those Negro cabins and the "big house" still standing, though the roof was pretty well fallen in and the whold thing was unfit to live in. But Indians lived in some of the cabins.

Some of the LeFlores had charge of the portion of land that the big house was on and they sold the logs which were hauled off and something was built out of them. Some of the Aaron Indians filed on some of this land and I filed on four hundred and eighty acres of it, but I have let the most of it get away from me. I should have been rich with the oppourtunity I had with all that land and the woods full of game and the streams full of fish and trees full of turkeys.

Jordan Folsom, an old Negro balcksmith who was at Doaksville when I came, and Uncle North Hill were slaves of Joel Kemp on that plantation and told me that they helped to clear that thousand acres. North filed on the forty acres that the town of Ft Towson was built upon. When the town of Doaksville was moved to the new site and named Ft Towson, Uncle Jordan Folsom moved his little shop to the new town and worked in ti until just a few days before he died in 1906. So I guess that is the story of "the thousand acre field".

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