BARNES-WHITMIRE

The following bio was taken from page 445 of the book entitled "Rusk County History" compiled and edited and used with permission of the Rusk County Historical Commission.

Transcribed by Claudia Schuster

Submitted by Gloria Briley Mayfield, Rusk County TX Coordinator

Nancy Elizabeth Keeling and Sarah Frances Keeling lived as girls in southeast Rusk County. From the porch of their house they could watch deer head through the forest each day on the way to a salt lick. Nancy Elizabeth (Nannie) became a schoolteacher and rode horseback several miles each day to teach in the Patrick School around the turn of the century.

Nancy’s correspondence courtship with Robert Lee Barnes ended with his having a marriage license in his pocket the first time he met her. Their huge white house was built in the Rhodes Community, where five children were born. Two of the children died at birth; Elna lived five months; and Rupert lived five years. Nellie, however, lived to become one of the teachers killed in the New London School explosion of 1937.

After the death of her parents, Mable Keeling, then four, went to live with her Aunt Nannie Barnes and be a playmate to Nellie. She, too, became a teacher, teaching at Shiloh, Chapman, Minden, and El Paso, Texas and Arlington, Virginia, and Kansas City. She married Joseph Byrne, a career soldier, with whom she went to Tokyo, Japan, where he was a Lieutenant Colonel with the Occupation Army following World War II. Of the two Byrne daughters born there, one, Nancy Carolyn Byrne, survived.

Sarah Frances Keeling married Eugene Whitmire, a carpenter who built many prominent houses in early 1900 in East Texas, especially those with halls, huge porches trimmed with fancy banisters and fretwork on the upper border, and a parlor extending frontward with long slender windows. Their first home was built across the road from the Barnes home, similar in style, with two magnolia trees on each side. The Whitmires then moved away to Cushing where they had a son, James Morris Whitmire, now a businessman in Henderson.

The Barnes family moved to Minden where they bought a two-story house and acreage and a store. After their husbands died, Nannie Barnes invited her sister, Fannie Whitmire, and her son Morris to; make their home with her, Nellie and Mabel in her home in Minden. The sisters both lived there until they died, working happily together, sitting on the front porch in the afternoon in their rockers, sewing and keeping each other company in their last days.

Submitted by Ima Huff