OVER COLLIN CO. ON THE
WING
Daily Courier Gazette, April 25, 1952
by Capt. Roy F. Hall
Nobody knows how
Squeezepenny got its name. This writer was told several different source
facts for this, but none of them elite enough to bear the scrutiny of an
educated public-a sensitive public, that is. Anyway the place got its start
in 1855 when William Hampton and family came there from Bonham and
established a mill. This mill ground corn and carded wool for yarn. During
the Civil War the mill actually made cloth to supply the Confederate forces
in the Indian Territory. It became quite famous as the Hampton & Harris
mill. Horse powered.
Mr. and Mrs.
Hampton had one son and six daughter, of which the late Mrs. Jesse Orenduff
was one. He later moved to Weston, and the mill passed into the hands,
eventually, of Tom Craft, who had come from Alabama to old Pilot Grove, and
then to Squeezepenny. Mr. Craft turned the mill into a grist mill and cotton
gin, and it remained as such till about 1900, when it was abandoned, and the
machinery sold. Not a vestige of the old mill remains today.
Squeezepenny
never had a school, church or other public building, and only one little
store, run by Joe Bassham for a few years. The school children have always
gone to the Melissa school nearly four miles away. There has never been even
a collection of houses there, yet the place is known far and wide.
Squeezepenny, sitting under the long hill to the east, is a locality, but a
locality with a name. The long hill mentioned had so many settlers right
after the Civil War from the North that it took the name of Lincoln Ridge
and was known by that name for a half century.
Mr. Craft, who
operated the gin and grist mill for years, had eight children, one of whom,
Bud, still lives on the old place. Bud, the eldest of the children, married
Myrtle Bassham, daughter of Joe Bassham, and they have lived in the same
house at Squeezepenny for 55 years. Mr. and Mrs. Craft have seven children,
all married and living within driving distance. One of them, Raymond, lives
in the old Tom Craft homestead, built ? years ago.
Others living in
the vicinity are Jack Holmes and family, Caleb Craft, Burch Stiles, who
lives in the old J. D. Neal home; Elmer Wallace, Alonzo Hughes, Joe Clark,
on the old Jonah Miller place; and Winifred Moore. Alta Wallace lives in the
old Wallace home.
The J. D. Neal
place mentioned was built by Mr. Neal in 1908. At that time it contained 177
acres of virgin timber, and some of it the largest in the county. This
writer saw oak trees on the place that were at least ten feet in diameter.
Steve Latham was the contractor who built the house, and Mr. Neal selected
all the lumber, not accepting a piece that had so much as a knot in it.
Wills Neal, president of the Collin County National bank is his son.
When Mr. Craft
came in possession of the mill he installed steam power, hauling the big
boiler out from McKinney by several yoke of oxen. As we know gins now, it
was rather elementary, but up-to-date then. The gin floor was high enough
off the ground so that the press could be placed under it. The cotton was
carried from the wagons by wicker baskets up the steps and dumped in the gin
hoppers for ginning. It had three gin stands, and turned out about all the
cotton that was brought to it in one day. Saturdays were given over to
grinding corn, which was rather slow, the meal running out in a stream the
size of a pencil. Those bringing corn to grind did not mind though. It was
Saturday and Saturday in the old days was a semI-holiday to the hard working
people of Collin County.
The people of
that locality have always been hard workers. One time not too long ago, this
writer was passing through there and, seeing some of Mr. Bud Craft's
children picking cotton, went out in the field to talk to them. One of them,
a girl some twelve years old, saw me coming and hastily took off some old
ragged knee pads she was wearing and put them out of sight in her cotton
sack. As they picked along with me walking with them, the pads worked down
to a hold in the sack. I had no idea what they were, and made some anxious
inquiries-they looked for all the world like somebody had been stuffed down
in the cotton. The little girl was greatly embarrassed when her sister
divulged her secret. That little girl, if you wish to know, is now the wife
of Shaffer Jones and drives a Cadillac car.
On the old Neal
homestead, mentioned, is the site of the only stagecoach robbery, or attack
we have record of as occurring in Collin County. This is the supposedly
haunted crossing, mentioned in these columns before. Here it was during the
Civil War that a traveler and his small son was killed by the patrol from
McKinney one moonlight night 90-some-odd years ago. The old road still ran
over the rock crossing till Mr. Neal had it moved westward to its present
location about 1910.
Communities Index
- Recommended
citation:
-
"Squeezepenny
- Collin County
Communities," Collin County, Texas History and Genealogy Webpage by
Genealogy Friends of Plano Libraries, Inc., <http://www.geocities/genfriendsghl>
[Accessed Fri February 13 13:37:28 US/Central 2004 ].
