Sallie Wiggins Lusk

Sallie Wiggins was my Great-great grandmother. I met her, but don't remember much about her. She was about 75 years old when we lived in Texas, and in my memory, she mostly sat in a rocking chair, dipped snuff, and spit in a coffee can that was always next to her chair. She also liked to chew on twigs (cedar, I think.) She almost never spoke. My father (James Thelbert Lusk) was extremely fond of her and said she made great cornbread and was always good to him.

The family stories about Sallie are confusing and mysterious. When I was younger, I was told that she was born on the Alabama-Coushatta Indian Reservation, but that she wasn't Indian, she was the daughter of missionaries. Given my father's prejudices, and the fact that she couldn't read or write, I was never sure how much of this story to believe. Many years later, my father told me that she was Cherokee, had been part of the Trail of Tears forced relocation, and that she met her husband in Arkansas - but that's impossible, as the relocation happened before she was born. He was getting senile at that point - was he confusing her with her mother? I don't know, but Sallie's husband, Joseph Lee Lusk, may have been the source of that story, as there has never been any information about his ancestry, or his past, beyond the fact that his parent's names were William and Frances.

According to the Texas census of 1900, and Sallie and Joseph were living in Bell County, most likely in or near Killeen. They had been married for 8 years, and they had 4 children: Bertha, Ernest, George Thomas, and Beulah. Joseph's older brother, George, was also living with them. Apparently at the time of the census, the men had been out of work for 6 months.

My father told me that she had a home "on the main drag, in the middle of Ft Hood" (town of Killeen.) He said that she originally had a small cotton farm there, which was sold off over the years as the military base grew bigger and bigger. In 1900, Killeen was primarily an isolated farming community. According to the "Handbook of Texas", Killeen included six general stores, three cotton gins, three blacksmiths, two hardware stores, and a jeweler; around this time telephone service was introduced. Some 780 people lived in Killeen by 1900, virtually all of them white Protestants, since the community openly discouraged blacks and Catholics from living there.

In 1942, the Second World War led to a boom in the military base, leading to a loss of over three hundred farms, and increasing the population of Killeen by thousands. Joseph died in the mid-1940s, and there was a local recession around that time, due to post-war military cutbacks. At some point in the last ten years of her life, she came to live with her son, George Thomas Lusk (known as "Tom") in Llano, about 80 miles from Killeen.

Sallie died in 1957, while we were in Hawaii.

The photo at the beginning of this story was taken in in 1955, while we lived in Llano with Sallie, George and Vera Lusk. During that year:

- Dwight Eisenhower was president
- Jonas Salk developed the Polio vaccine
- Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott
- The first McDonalds fast food restaurant opened
- The US started sending aid to Vietnam
- Germany became a member of NATO and the Soviet Union formed the Warsaw Pact (the cold War officially began.)
- Rock and Roll came to public attention with Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock"
- Bugs Bunny debuted in "Roman-Legion Hare"