Tarlton, Arkansas in the late 1800s was a bustling community with a post office and the Tarlton School grades 1-8 and neighbors helped each other. The Woodard family had close neighbors in Jim Benton and his wife Edith. Edith Benton was born August 27, 1880 and died November 2, 1918. And are buried in Tarlton Cemetery. They lived on the Old Benton Place between the original Ephraim Woodard Homestead on the Falls Hollow Road at Tarlton. Their farm was located about a half mile off Highway 123 and their neighbors were the Woodards and John P. Daniels families.

As young George Boone Daniel grew up on the farm of his parents, John P Daniel and Mary Ann Daniel, he visited the Benton family often. Dorothy Woodard Haynes told me that the little Woodard girls, Iva, Ethel and Dorothy had to walk two miles to the Tarlton Schoolhouse and on the way they had to cross two creeks and climb over the fence to cut through the Benton pasture. She said her papa cut a foot log across the creeks for them to walk the trail and blazed trees so they could find their way home in the snow. She said, too, that he built a set of steps for them to climb over the Benton's fence.

George Daniel married my mothers sister, Nellie Woodard in 1925. Uncle George told me he and Nellie were getting little apple sprouts from the abandoned old Benton orchard in about 1929 and, he said, the old barn was still standing. He climbed up in the barn loft there and looked around and found this old churn back in the corner underneath the eaves, carried it home and stored it away.

About 1953 when we were visiting on the mountain, he said he had something for me he had saved for many years and since I had shown an interest in the history of Lurton, he would give it to me. He went up in his barn loft and unlocked a door and brought down an old handmade wooden churn. It was unusual in that it had no nails or steel bands, just wooden bands and the boards swelled to make it watertight. In very good condition except one side of the top had been slightly chewed by rats when he found it.

I brought my treasure home to New Orleans, cleaned and oiled to nourish the wood and placed by my front door to hold umbrellas. In the years of country decorating that followed, it held cattail ferns and fake trees...When this passed, I stored it again in my attic beside the post office boxes I had brought home and really felt bad for storing the old churn away again. In 1992, I heard the Newton County Historical Society had a new building and I decided to pass on my Newton County treasures.

The Newton County Museum is in the Bradley House at Jasper...and I donated the churn along with this story of how it came to be...In years to come, will be viewed by school children as a handmade churn with no nails or steel bands, a craft long gone. How life was when nails and metal bands were precious. Stop and visit as you pass through Jasper, Arkansas.

Another treasure left behind the Benton place is a huge old rock shaped as a stair step that my cousin Vernon Rosamond told me the Bentons used forladies to mount and dismount from their side saddles. They simply led the horse beside the rock and walked up. What a great idea.

(Sybil Hefley of Harrison wrote me about her Aunt Edith Benton after this article came out in the Newton County Times.)

"My grandfather was John Louis Edwards, born Sept 25, 1846 and died Nov 30, 1893. He owned a big plantation at Russellville. He had negro slaves. When he died grandmother sold the plantation and moved to Vendor in Newton County. The cemetery where he is buried was on the plantation. The lake now covers the land and the cemetery where he is buried is up on a hill above the dam. It is close to the highway."

"Would you like to have a copy of Aunt Edith and Uncle Jim's marriage license? I have the original here, given me by my mother. Her folks called her Eady. Thats what my dad always called her. That's whats on the marriage license, but her real name was Edith. I have thought about putting a copy with the churn in the Newton County Museum. What do you think?"

"I am sending you a photograph of a china doll that belonged to my Aunt Edith. She gave me the doll when I was a baby in the year of 1917. She passed away in 1918. When she was a little girl about six years old, she slipped the doll out and took it to school. Grandmother didn't know she took it and she got the boot broke off the right leg. You know, china dolls will break. I thought about having it fixed but decided to let it stay like she gave it to me."

"I enjoyed the article you had in the Newton Co Times last week and the story of your cemetery visit. Take care. Sybil Hefley" (of Harrison, AR)

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