EMELINE RISINGER

 The following bio was taken from page 365 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, Cemeteries of TX

The clasp on Emeline Risinger’s nineteenth century photograph album was broken years ago, and the pages inside are crumbling with age, but the memories those old tintypes preserved have not faded.

 In the early 1850’s, the Risinger family lived in Rusk County at what was known as Pig Eye.  The children attended school at Forest Hill.  Years later, Emeline (1832-1921) would tell her grandchildren, “I don’t know why you call it Glenfawn; it’s nothing in the world but Forest Hill.”

 Nearby lived the Buckners, and – well, you know the story about the boy next door?  In 1852, Emeline Risinger married Moses M. Buckner.  Two years later, his younger sister, Cassie, also married the boy next door, Emeline’s brother, Jackson.

 Apparently there were many bonds between the Risinger and Buckner families.  When war broke out, Moses’ younger brother, James, enlisted at Woodville with some of the Risinger boys and their cousins, James Smelley.  Emeline’s husband, her brother-in-law, James Buckner, and four of her brothers –McCary, Landon, Jackson, and David – died in the war.  Moses died in a prisoner-of-war camp.  Jackson was mortally wounded in 1864 in the Battle of Calcasieu Pass, Louisiana.  Cassie named her youngest child (who never saw his father) Jackson Landon Moses McCary Risinger.

 The only one who returned home at the war’s end was Jim Smelley.  In 1867 he married the Widow Buckner at her father’s house in Nacogdoches where she had moved with her five children after the war.

 Jim Smelley farmed for a living, and when the crop was poor, so was the living.  One year a deer was wrecking havoc in the cornpatch.  The younger Buckner boy, who was a good shot, decided to stop the varmint.  With the help of his half-brother, David Smelley, Buck penned the livestock.  David got to hold the pine torch behind his older brother.  The big flare burned slowly.  Night settled down.  As David later told it, they saw a pair of eyes shining.  Buck leveled down on them, and the eyes hit the ground with loud thump.  “It must have been a mighty big deer,” Buck said.  Going over to investigate, they discovered the neighbor’s buggy pony, shot right between the eyes.

 There was nothing to do but go home, much chagrined, and report to Jim Smelley.  “You boys go on to bed,” Jim said.  “In the morning we’ll go across the branch and tell Mr. Looney and go into town and buy him another pony.”

 In those days, people really lived off the land.  One of Emeline’s grandchildren, Dollie Lowe, remembered watching her grandmother make thread from cotton.  “She had a row of cotton in the garden.  She’d pick that cotton by hand, and she’d spin her thread,” Dollie explained.  “Granny made cotton socks.  I don’t think she ever had any wool.  Maybe Granny wouldn’t be needing any thread, but she’d make some to show me what it was like.  I think she told me she had spun thread down fine enough to sew in a needle before, but this she was doing was about like twine.”  It is quite evident that pioneers like Granny were very enterprising.

 Submitted by Frances Whitmire