Oscar and Lizzie (STRONG) LEOPARD

The following bio was taken from pages 286-287 of the book entitled "Rusk County History" compiled and edited and used with permission of the Rusk County Historical Commission.

Transcribed by Gloria Riley

Submitted by Gloria Briley Mayfield, Rusk County TX Coordinator

William Oscar Leopard was the son of Andrew Jackson Leopard and Mary Ann Elizabeth O’Quinn Leopard.

Andrew Jackson Leopard was the son of John Leopard. There is no record of his wife.

John Leopard, born in South Carolina, 1800, died in 1883. He made pottery. His factory was in Rusk County, east of Henderson, Texas, on the old road to Pine Hill and Roquemore. His grave is in a pasture east of the Hunt Cemetery.

Mary Ann O’Quinn was the daughter of Daniel O’Quinn and his wife, Lacy Giles. They were from Georgia. Andrew Jackson Leopard’s grave is in the Hunt Cemetery. Mary Ann was burned and died later. We are unable to locate the site of her burial. We are told it is near Gladewater, Texas.

Elizabeth Mahala "Lizzie" Strong was the daughter of John Thornton "Thornt" Strong and his wife Mary Jane Ballenger Strong. Thornt Strong was the son of John Strong and his wife Mary Ann Whatley Strong, who came from Georgia circa 1849-1850 and settled near what is now Church Hill and Strong Cemetery. They bought over a thousand acres of land and gave part of the land where a school, and the Church Hill Methodist Church stands today. They also gave land where the Strong Cemetery is located, east of Henderson. They were extensive farmers who had brought their slaves with them from Georgia.

Lizzie Strong’s mother, Mary Jane Ballenger Strong, was the daughter of Thomas "Tom" Ballenger and his wife Mary Wingo Ballenger. They came from South Carolina and settled in Prospect Community northeast of Henderson.

William Oscar Leopard and Lizzie Strong were married Sunday, December 18, 1898, by a Rev. Hundricks at the Strong home east of Henderson near the Chapman Community. William Oscar changed his name to Oscar William Leopard so his initials would spell OWL, like the Hoot Owl. He was known as O. W. "Oscar" Leopard.

O. W. and Lizzie were big farmers. They both loved Sacred Harp Singing and were great singers. They built their first home on land that was owned by John Strong and Mary Ann Whatley Strong. The land was given to Thornt Strong, and Thornt Strong gave it to Lizzie. The first house was built around 1900; the second, between 1915 and 1917; the third, in 1946. It is still on the same hill were O. W. and Lizzie started housekeeping. It is known as Leopard Hill and is near Strong Cemetery.

O. W. and Lizzie had ten children, five boys and five girls. The oldest child was Annis Lee, who was almost a year old when she died. There followed Edward Leopard, Gladys Leopard, Marion Thornton "Buddie" Leopard, Lacy Leopard, Lucille Leopard, Inez Leopard, John Willis Leopard, and twin boys, Hubert and Herbert Leopard. Hubert was almost a year old when he died. Lacy, Lucille, Inez, and Herbert are living at the present time. Herbert lives in the Leopard Home today. It is still home and gathering place for all the Leopards as well as for other relatives and friends.

O. W. believed in working and could always find a job for anyone who was around. His parents died when he was small and his mother’s sister, Aunt Matt O’Quinn, and her husband, Uncle Joe Hunt, took car of O. W. for several years.

O. W. and Lizzie had very little when they married, but they both worked hard. Lizzie was crippled and used a crutch, but she worked in the fields, in the hay meadow, and at the syrup mill. She milked cows, picked geese, and made feather beds and pillows. She also pieced and made quilts. No one has any idea the number of quilts she has made over the years. She did all of the cooking and housework. O. W. was known to be the best syrup maker in East Texas. Lizzie made biscuits by the pans full and baked half bushel of sweet potatoes at a time. When the kids came in from school, they would get a baked sweet potato and go to the field.

All of us kids had to work hard, but O. W. and Lizzie would take us to tent shows, circuses and fairs, whenever one came to town, and we had a lot of homemade ice cream. We can remember getting the cow up to milk so we could make ice cream. And we knew the cream would be so bitter we could hardly eat it if the cows had been eating bitter weeds!

Lizzie was always laughing and telling us about things she did and things that had happened to her. One day when it was cold and raining and Lizzie had to go to milk the cows, she had a sore finger, so she got a rag and wrapped it up. Several nights later after she and O. W. had gone to bed—midnight or later—she started laughing. O. W. was mad because she had waked him up with her laughing and couldn’t tell him what she was laughing about. Finally she said, "I tied up the wrong finger!" I’ve heard her tell that story as well as other stunts she had pulled, and always she would laugh. What a better world it would be if everyone was like Mother—always in a good mood, singing and laughing.

O. W. Leopard was elected Constable in Rusk County in the late 1920’s. He and Lizzie took a trip to Oklahoma in a wagon not long after they were married. They planned to move there to be near his sister and her husband. Emma Leopard had married Edmund Bell. O. W. didn’t like the water in Oklahoma, so they came back to Rusk County.

They later made trips to Oklahoma, and to Spur in West Texas, in a Model-T Ford. A daughter, Gladys, married Clarence Prior and they moved to Spur, Texas, with Clarence’s folks, Obe and Beulah Prior. O. W. and Lizzie took Homer Phillips, O. W.’s nephew (the son of Ella Leopard Phillips), Oscar’s sister, and her husband, Lee Phillips and four of us kids—Herbert, John Willis, Lucille, and Inez—all in the Model-T to Spur, Texas. I wonder how we and the Model-T made it, but make it we did. O. W. liked to hunt and trap. He killed a lot of jackrabbits at Spur.

We Leopard kids went to school at Church Hill, a walk of two and one-half miles. Sometimes it would be so cold we would have to stop and build a fire to warm our hands. We had to walk, ride a horse, or go in a buggy or wagon. Even when the Model-T came along, it was seldom used to take kids to school. We walked. We can all remember sitting on logs and sharing our lunch with one another at school, hoping we would get to exchange our syrup and biscuit or maybe a sausage, a slice of ham, or a baked potato for an apple or fruit of some kind.

Those were happy days, but they were hard and rough. No one knows what they were like unless he has experienced them. Our parents, O. W. (Oscar) and Lizzie, worked hard, but they had a good life. Lizzie used a crutch, but she walked to school and later raised all of us kids, and worked right along with others in the fields. She could always talk and laugh about the "Good old days." She had to use two crutches when she was about eighty years old, but she could still do her housework. She fell and broke her crippled leg three different times over the years. The last time she fell, she broke her hip and could never walk again. She was eighty-eight years old then and used a wheel chair until a year before she died. She was confined to her bed for about a year before she died, but was alert and active while she was in the wheelchair.

O. W. Oscar Leopard was born March 9, 1880 and died October 30, 1953; Lizzie Strong Leopard was born June 2, 1881 and died November 7, 1977.

Written by Herbert Leopard and daughter, Inez Leopard Dunlap.

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Additional information added June 08 2006  Submitted by  Melvin Vinson: