Our family’s roots run deep in western Ozark County
When I retired from teaching and came home to the Ozarks from Texas in 2020, I visited the Lutie Cemetery where my father and his Jones/Ledbetter family members are buried. I am embarrassed to admit this, but somehow I always thought we just didn’t know much about his side of the family, as if it couldn’t be known. I deeply regret that I didn’t ask more questions from Grandma (Opal Ledbetter).
As I walked through the Lutie Cemetery I was amazed that so many of the last names written on the headstones were Ledbetter or Jones, and I wanted to know more about “my people.” I began my research and found yet more names of people in the cemetery who were related to me through marriage.
The Lutie Cemetery was first deeded by early settlers James and Mary Friend in 1867. The adjacent Lutie True Hope General Baptist Church was built in 1874. My great-great-grandfather B. B. Jones donated land to expand the Lutie Cemetery in the 1890s, and later donors Mart Jones, Palmer Willhoit and Bill Goff contributed to the expansion.
If your last name is in the following list, you probably have connections to the Ozark County Jones family line represented in the Lutie Cemetery: Adams, Bruffett, Burk, Burnett, Chapman, Cummins, Cutbirth, Duggins, Friend, Gray, Griffin, Hampton, Haskins, Henry, Herd, Hicks, Hobbs, Hogan, Ledbetter, Reich, Risley, Robertson, Robirds, Rozell, Sullivan, Tabor, Tannehill, Teague, Thornton, Upton and Wallace. This list does not extend to generations born after 1950, but I invite you to trace the connections from here.
I would like to write about them all, but many family stories have already been told in the Old Mill Run and the big, brown Ozark County History book. If you’re thirsty for the more sensational stories about, for instance, mean Charley Hampton or ax-wielding Quincy Reich, I’ll get to them some other time.
The original town of Lutie was located about a mile south of the current U.S. 160, behind and down the hill from the Ledbetter Store on road 639. It was separate from old Theodosia (see Sue Ann Jones’s article, page 1A).
When the lake took over the bottomlands in 1953, Theodosia residents moved uphill in one direction or another, and some of them established lake resorts along the waterfront that included Lutie.
On Aug. 1, 1960, the postal service established a new post office in the area and changed Lutie’s official name to Theodosia.
I still like to think of Lutie as Lutie, but it’s all Theodosia now. The only exceptions are the school, the Lutie True Hope Church and the Lutie Cemetery.
If you have not yet caught the history and genealogy bug, perhaps you will find my family research interesting enough to inspire your own. Start by finding out about your people. Ask questions of your aunts and uncles before their stories disappear.
My Jones family
My Jones descendants came to America from Wiltshire, England, during the 17th century. The first to emigrate was Edward Jones (born 1621) and his wife Anne (1610-1676). They settled in Somerset, Maryland.
You may have noticed that Anne was 11 years older than Edward. Age difference in marriage was less important then, at least when it came to finding someone willing to change continents.
Almost two centuries and several generations later, Daniel Jones (1802-1856) and his 13-year-old wife Permelia Gray (1809-1859) became the first of the Jones line to leave Maryland. They moved about 400 miles westward across the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia to southeastern Ohio and had eight children.
Daniel’s oldest son Merrimack Nehemiah Jones (1822-1859) and his wife Sarah Rachel Taylor Jones (1822-1903) had 11 children. The oldest of these was my great-great-grandfather Benjamin Brown Jones (later called B. B. or Uncle Ben), who was born in 1844 in Logan, Ohio.
B. B. was barely 17 in August 1861 when he joined the Unionist Missouri Home Guard regiments organized by Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon during the Civil War. He was wounded in the ankle at the First Battle of Lexington, Missouri in September. He served in Company A, 67th Enrolled Missouri Militia from 1862 until the war ended.
In 1865, Jones moved to Taney County before finally settling in the Lutie area, where he married Ozark County native Delila (“Lila”) Duggins (1847-1904) and built the first general store in Lutie.
He and Lila had 11 children: John Wesley, Azariah (“Sike”), Patience, Caldonia (“Doan,” my great-grandmother), Jackson (“Jack”), Charles, Ruth, Mary Ann, Arizona, Jessie and Lewis.
When Lila died in 1904, B. B. married Sarah Cordelia Henry (1882-1970), and they had four children: Mart, Weldon, Neva and Renzo.
The town of Lutie, the village of Theodosia
Lutie became an official town when a post office was established in a corner of B. B.’s store in 1893. The mail came from Gainesville to Lutie by horseback, and everyone had to go to the store to get their mail. There was no such thing as rural delivery. The B. B. Jones store became a center for socializing and connecting members of the community.
The Jones store was in a large building with a round top and double-wide doors at the entry. It was like a 19th-century Walmart.
Everything from tobacco and clay pipes to grocery supplies, medical remedies, dry goods, household items, shoes, work clothing, women’s hats, farm equipment, hardware, wagon tires, wagon spring seats and tack was available at the B. B. Jones store. You could even buy a coffin if you needed one.
He also had a cotton gin, a grist mill and a cattle business on 372 acres in several tracts noted in an 1894 history as “one of the best improved upland farms in the county.”
B. B. was credited for his role in “the interest of education” and “one of the most commodious school buildings in southern Missouri, which was largely erected through his influence and means.”
Two generations of Jones men became merchants like their father. The first to join the profession was B. B.’s son Azariah “Sike” Jones (1869-1934), whose partnership with his father was indicated by a large sign on the building that read “B. B. JONES & SON. GENERAL MERCHANDISE, LUTIE, MO.” Sike later had a store in Sparta.
Another son, Jackson “Jack” Jones (1878-1943), started his own store inside the same building with his father before moving into a new structure B. B. built for him.
Jack’s new store was at the end of the old Lutie road. A rock house once inhabited by Weldon and Glady Jones still stands in the area.
Pauline Ledbetter Wallace described Jack’s store as a “large two-story wood-sided building that had a long porch running along its front. The upstairs area was used for a time as the high school.” The store had “saddles, harnesses, animal feed and a good many bolts of cloth for sale” as well as “barrels and sacks of things for sale such as flour or beans.”
At that time the Lutie post office was located in Jack’s store.
Benches along the store front were available for people to sit and visit. John Ledbetter, Rayford Wallace and Louie Wallace might come to pick a few tunes on Saturdays. Someone might start a game of horseshoes while the boys played marbles in the yard.
When the new U. S. 160 came in about a mile north of old Lutie, Jack wanted highway frontage. He reduced the store’s size and moved it slowly uphill through a field with mules pulling the structure to the highway on logs while everybody in town watched with amazement.
Three of B. B. Jones’s grandsons were in the grocery business in Lutie or Theodosia at one time or another. Jack’s son Clyde Jones (1902-1953) built a store that is now the Theodosia post office.
My Ledbetter family
The Lutie Jones line is directly related to the Ledbetters of Ozark County through my great-grandmother, Jane Caledonia (“Doan”) Jones Ledbetter (1877-1964).
The Ledbetters came to Virginia from County Durham, England, in the 17th century. The first was Henry Ledbetter (1625-1700) and his wife Mary Molissie (1603-1673). By the mid-19th century the Ledbetter descendants had made it to northern Arkansas.
My other great-great-grandfather was Isaac Tillman Ledbetter (1844-1881), whose wife Rebecca Tabor Ledbetter (1849-1894) married John Friend (1830-1894) after Isaac died. She had five children, one of whom was my great-grandfather, James Henry “Jim” Ledbetter (1873-1948). Jim married Doan Jones and had five sons “full of pep and vigor,” according to Omer Brown.
The oldest was Raymond Ledbetter (1898-1974), who married Dorothy Herd (1897-1985) and had four children, but the first died in childbirth. Other children were Pauline Ledbetter Wallace, Lourine Ledbetter Upton and John Ledbetter.
Raymond and Dorothy bought a store in 1936. Some local residents remember that their building also featured a movie theater. I only remember it during the late 1950s as a grocery store on the northeast corner of the intersection of highways 95 and 160.
The store was named “Ma & Pa Ledbetter’s Grocery & Market.” Grandma always bought Popsicles for me and my cousin Patricia to enjoy as we collected pop bottle caps in the driveway.
Raymond and Dorothy lived in the house behind the store. I saw my first color TV in that house.
The road in front of Uncle Raymond’s store was bypassed by the leveling of 160, but the original building still stands. It is deteriorating like other old buildings in the area. It now has a car sitting on the roof—a remnant from a previous auto body shop business.
Emery Ledbetter (1899-1964) was the second son born to Jim and Doan Ledbetter. He moved to Santa Monica, California, as a young man. I only remember seeing him once. He married Nora Marie Haskins in 1919 and later Dorothy Mae Yarberry. He had a daughter and two sons named Harold and Gerald.
My grandfather Rayford (“O. R.”) Ledbetter (1902-1979) was the middle son. He was a farmer and lived on P Highway west of Theodosia. In 1921, he married Opal Tannehill (1903-1999). They look very young in their wedding photo. Neither of them had reached 20 years old.
They had two children, Doris Ledbetter Thornton and my father, Amos Ledbetter.
Grandma was the daughter of Sherman “Pad” Tannehill (1876-1938) from Ocie, far away from the Jones’s in horseback miles. She was one of two sets of twins born to Pad and his wife Myrtle Ford Tannehill (1878-1958). Grandma’s twin was Ethyl (Duggins). The other twins were Pansy (Arnold/Rozell) and Tandy Tannehill.
Grandpa and Grandma kept busy with the farm, which included beef and dairy cattle, hogs, a full garden, chickens and sometimes goats. Grandpa also bought and sold property, and he built and sold several houses along P highway where the Lutie Fire Tower used to be and along the lake front area at the end of P highway. He served as a Western District judge in Ozark County from 1950-1954. He was Presiding Judge in the county court in 1954.
Doan and Jim Ledbetter’s son Allen (1905-1998) became a much-loved and well respected Baptist preacher who traveled throughout the Ozarks with a missionary spirit and faithfully served his own church in Ava.
He married Bertha Hampton (1908-1997) and had three children, Delpha Ledbetter Hogan, Carl Ledbetter and William D (“Dee”) Ledbetter. Bertha’s father Monroe owned one of the country stores in Lutie/Theodosia and another in Ocie, one mile east of Big Creek.
The youngest of the Ledbetter sons was Hobart (“H. H.”) Ledbetter (1908-2002). His first wife was Edna Reich (1911-1934). They had two children, Lena Ledbetter Hobbs and Darrell Travis Ledbetter (pronounced “Tray-vis”). After Edna died, Uncle Hobart married Jerda Maxine Hogan. They had three children, Joyce Ledbetter Hampton, Sue Ledbetter Baber and Dwight Hadley Ledbetter.
Hobart is probably the most widely-known of the Ledbetter sons around Theodosia because of his popular Ledbetter Store.
Hobart bought the store from his uncle, Jack Jones. It was the one Jack moved on logs up to the new 160 to get highway frontage. Hobart renamed it the Ledbetter Store and added a side room for testing cream. Muriel Willhoit later started her first café in the side room before opening a larger restaurant down the road called Willhoit’s Café.
When I was about six years old I went with my grandparents to Willhoit’s Café for a very large music party featuring Lonnie and Thelma Robertson. I was excited to hear live music for the first time outside church, and I will never forget coming back late at night in the back of Grandpa’s pickup looking at the stars. We were all so sorry when the café burned.
The Theodosia post office moved into the Ledbetter Store in 1960 before relocating to its present location in the former Clyde Jones store on Highway 160.
Maxine worked alongside Hobart in the store. It had a big wood stove inside the entrance, and there were always a few people warming their feet around the stove during the winter. Maxine gave me candy bars every time I went in the store. She was a soft-spoken, sweet lady that everybody loved.
The Ledbetter Store is still standing, but it deteriorates more every year. I often took photos of the store when I came home from wherever I was. Every photo shows a new mark of time on the old structure, even though various businesses tried to revive it.
H. K. Silvey now lives on the property, and his son-in-law David Burnett owns the abandoned store.
Granny Doan lived in a little white house west of the Ledbetter Store until she died, and I remember walking down to see her with my cousin Patricia when we stopped at Hobart’s store. She cried every time we came to visit.
Doan was a large woman who dominated her five sons as well as her husband Jim Ledbetter, according to Grandma, who said it was the Jones blood that made her so.
Every time I got angry or misbehaved Grandma credited it to the Jones blood in me. I never understood why, but wise oracle JoAnn Willhoit Livingston said it sounded like an “in-law perspective,” rather than a defect.
I’m going to go with JoAnn’s version. The more I know about “my people,” the more I am happy to be one of them.