"The land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts."
---Gerald O'Hara in "Gone with The Wind" as written by Margaret Mitchell.
It wasn't until after I wrote the two-part series on The McDougall Place that I had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of Lynette Foster Westmoreland, wife of Dale and mother of Matt. An affable lady, she had genuine interest in my previously published pieces on the property as her husband Dale descends from the Yates. His mother was Lela Belle Yates (1920-1994) who married Clyde Willis Westmoreland (1918-1979).
Setting the stage, with the help of my paperwork and good friend Anne Magee Jackson, John Mousley Yates (1844-1922), who hailed from London and settled in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, married Sarah Jane Blocker with whom he had eleven children. Among them, Charles Murray Yates married Willeta Gardner; Daniel Edwards Yates married Pauline Gardner; and Frederick Whithurst Yates married Camille Gardner. Notably, three Yates men married three Gardner women.
And the Yates family had deep roots on The McDougall Place, which was originally a six-hundred-and-forty-acre tract and one of the earliest places settled in Washington Parish, about which historian Daunton Gibbs, Jr. (1911-1998) wrote extensively, which material I relayed in this column. While my Brumfield forebears, on my maternal side, settled the property in the beginning - after which it passed to the prominent Penn and McDougall families - the Yates came into it in 1922 when Frederick Whitehurst Yates (1894-1968) and wife Camille Gardner Yates purchased the property. They resided in the home for approximately fourteen years before, in 1935, they sold to the Chester Green family.
According to Matt Westmoreland, son of Dale and Lynette, his great-grandfather Charles Murray Yates bought the southern half of the McDougall property. But as Matt explained, "We just called it the George Brown place because he was the tenant farmer who worked the land and lived there." George Brown was a tenant farmer for the McDougalls. And so it stood to reason that Matt's grandmother Lela Belle Yates Westmoreland grew up knowing the Browns. In that day people were close based largely on proximity.
Color me lucky, Matt shared with me a pretty piece written by his grandmother Lela Belle about friendship and farming and the land. It's not something that can be paraphrased. Her story must be retold verbatim so that it does not lose its luster. So without further ado, we return to the past with Lela Belle Yates Westmoreland who, putting pen to paper, wrote:
"George and Anna came into my life when I was about eight years old; Papa took my oldest brother and me for a visit.”
I thought that I was in a different world.
“Anna had the most beautiful flower garden. Everything was in beds with poles around them - little paths went all around. Petunias, cockscomb (celosia), old maids (zinnias), four-o-clocks, cleome (spider flower) and many herbs made a patchwork of beauty. We had watermelon, apricot plums, peaches, and so many other things offered to us. Of course, we ate it all. Anna took us into her kitchen and gave us peach cobbler which she had cooked on a mud chimney hearth. She didn't have a stove. We finished it off with ice cold spring water drunk from a long handled gourd. Papa took his old violin (fiddle). George could play anything that we could hum or whistle. What a day!! I didn't want to go home.”
“In the early 1920's, the Great Southern Lumber Co. harvested the first of the virgin timber. They leased a few acres of land from papa for a ox, mule, and horse lot. The spring furnished the water for the loggers and the animals.
I am told that George Brown's Spirit is still there walking over the land that he loved and that was so good to him.
In the 1930's, the place started going back to nature. Papa got sick, therefore the fences fell down. We children with the help of a hired hand planted corn in the fields - it was beautiful corn. When the corn was ready for harvest, the pigs (I think all the pigs came out of Tchefuncte Chafunta (sp) swamp) ate all the corn. We were in school - therefore didn't get to harvest much of the corn. We shot some of the pigs for fresh meat and some to smoke and cure for bacon etc.
By the 1940's, nature had taken over all the fields. Pine, beech, white and red oak, live oak and ever kind of plant grew in abundance.
In the 1950's, we divided the land between five of us. The George [Brown] place went to Albert Yates. He cleaned the land with a bulldozer. George's place still endures with its live oaks and the spring. Years and years after George died, a long handled goard hung on a nail that he drove into a holly tree.”
Albert sold the place to Dale Westmoreland, his nephew - and what do you expect!!? He built a lake over the old spring that had been such a blessing to all of God's animals and people. So long George Brown Spring and the dreams of a child."
It's not only George Brown whose spirit lives on. Lela Belle Yates Westmoreland's does as well, on the land they loved.
