Plantation gives peek at past
Cass County’s Tara stands along the Old Texarkana Highway just past Bowie Hill—its history gone with the wind also.
Laura and Joey Peavy of Texarkana now own the plantation home David and Rachel Moores built. It was one of few Civil War-era mansions in Cass County. Others included the Reece Hughes home in Hughes Springs, the C.E. Moore mansion in Kildare and the Sledge plantation home in the former Cusetta area.
The Peavys and their family have owned the home in recent years. They don’t know what to do with it and have no immediate plans, they say.
But local historian Eugene Stanton does. He wants it kept for the memories. Mostly his own.
“It was my childhood playhouse—unlocked, unoccupied and said to be haunted. A pair of shoes was said to have walked down the stairs. I scared many a girl there,” Stanton said.
He also wants to dispel a few rumors about the house.
“There is no buried gold out in the yard. And no tunnel from the cellar out to the back that Cullen Baker might have used for escape.”
It’s true, however, that in its day, out the back door of this plantation home—through the cotton fields and Sulphur River bottom land—one might have crossed the river at Moores Landing and made one’s way to freedom.
But such rumors are tidbits to the tales that did take place here. Stanton has a box full of letters between David and Rachel Moores, the home’s builders. The letters are from the 1850s and Civil War to David’s death in 1892 and Rachel’s in 1902.
These handwritten letters have been transcribed into 294 pages of double-spaced type. They tell a major love story during a forgotten time.
The Moores’ home was a plantation with overseers and at least 30 named slaves. Its land extended from the Forest Home community in northern Cass County across the Sulphur River and on to Harrison Chapel near Redwater and U.S. Highway 67.
The Moores’ letters are lovely and timeless. Their handwriting begins with the large flourishing script of youth and declines decades later to the light and feeble, quivering script of old age.
Theirs was a time when love was distant and slow, but constant and abiding.
In the first letters starting in the 1850s, the two are writing as Rachel is off in other states seeking a cure for her “female problems.” David writes to Rachel in Mississippi, then New York and finally, in a worried letter, to Louisville.
“I am so uneasy not getting any letter the last mail I fear that you are sick and unable to write,” David writes from Courtland in October 1860. “The date of the last letter I received from you was 23 of Sept. five days over a month. The mail comes tomorrow evening and I shall go down and wait until it comes in. If I don’t hear from you, I will start for Louisville to see about you and what is the matter.”
David does hear and Rachel returns after her long medical difficulty. David then must go off to the Civil War. His letters then tell of his advice to Rachel about how to run the plantation and its helpers.
At one point he advises Rachel to kill all 40 hogs. But no overseer and few plantation helpers are there now, so Rachel tells David that she went to the nearby Iron Mountain foundry to get five men to come and help her.
In their letters, they constantly tell how much each misses the other. Here’s an example from Rachel:
“When I get a letter from you, Dear,” Rachel writes, “I can sit me down immediately to reply. I feel it does me much more good, it seems, something like a conversation. You say, Love, you wish you could receive a letter from me every day. I wish you could. If it were not for fear you would get them both at once, I would write twice a week, feeling so deeply for your solitude … (and) you saying you would hold me on your lap and kiss me for one whole night makes me wish very much for such a pleasure.”
Plantation life and people surrounding it are described well in the letters. David Moores was the son of Charles and Mary Harrison Moores from South Carolina, who were themselves children of American Revolution soldiers and were Texas pioneers founding the nearby Harrison Chapel in 1840. Rachel was of the Godbold family.
David and Rachel built their plantation home in 1854. They had more than 2,000 acres extending across Moores Landing, which was located where Cass County Park is today.
Today, all that is left of Harrison and the Mooresville community that also developed is the old Harrison Chapel Cemetery in Redwater.
Texas did not have as many plantations as other parts of the South because it had so few years to develop them, emerging from statehood in 1846 and then the Civil War in 1860s, which freed the slaves.
It took slaves to make a plantation work. When David needed money to assist Rachel, he could either sell land or slaves. Here’s a business description that also tells something of how important slaves were to their masters:
In the box of letters and beginning with the first page is this note of the purchase of Louisa, 12, as a slave in 1853 for $650.
“I warrant her sound in boddy (sic) and mind and the titels (sic) good,” W. H. Wood of Columbia County, Arkansas, wrote.
Louisa would continue to be Rachel’s servant and friend for almost 50 years. She would be named in Rachel’s 1902 will. It said:
“I give and bequeath to my faithful old servant, Louisa Walker, my satin and lace mantle, two best woolen U-Shirts, all my hose, my album, and the sum of $200 to be deposited in Texarkana National bank to be drawn by her as she may need. I also give her one mattress, one pair blanket and all my heavy flannel underwear.”
Eugene Stanton remembers as a child he and his father, H.S. Stanton, walked the woods and lands that once would have been the Moores’ plantation.
“Our house was about two miles from the Moores’ home. I was a child before the lake filled up in 1955, but I went with my dad when there was no lake. I felt I could tell where everything once was such as the slaves’ quarters.”
Through the years, the home became owned by Arthur Treadway, his son Doyle Treadway, V. D. Glass, and Donald and Sharon Woodruff.
The house stood vacant at times, but things were different then and not much damage was done to it or its interior, Stanton said.
Recently, he had a chance to go inside his childhood-memory mansion with the Peavys. It is now vacant again.
Eugene went also to see the graves of the Charles Moores family in Harrison Chapel and the David Moores family in Rose Hill Cemetery, Texarkana.
He was thoughtful and quiet afterward.
“We just called the home the old antebellum home. Sometimes church was held in some of the rooms and sometimes parties on the upstairs balcony. Those times are gone, but David and Rachel’s home is still here. I hope it will be preserved.”