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Iowa Park (Iowa Park, Wichita Co., TX) - Andrew and Gertrude Weeth, a relatively young couple with nine children and expecting their tenth child, moved into Texas from Nebraska in 1889 with high hopes for the future. But within a year after their arrival in Iowa Park, three members of the family, including the 37-year old mother, fell victim to a typhoid fever epidemic. What appeared to be their bright star on the horizon seemed almost to eclipse. Yet with an intrepid spirit that characterized their German emigrant forebears, the family held together, staying on to make an indelible mark on the pioneer prairie.

Mrs. W.F. (Weeth) George, the Weeth's fifth child, who is now 96 years of age, can look back to those times and subsequent years - and with the equanimity of an old-timer say, despite the early-day struggles, that:

"Life has been good to me,"

"We were awfully low a good many years after Momma passed away," Mrs. George the former Nellie Weeth, conceded. “But the demands of life were overriding - the rearing of the children, the establishment of a home and cultivation of a section of Texas land they could call their own.”

Mrs. George recalled the family arrived here on Dec 18 - her ninth birthday. They came by train from Chalco, NE, near Omaha.

"We had to lay over in Kansas City for a while and my auntie had fixed a big basket of food - there were so many of us children. Some of them got sick headaches. We were glad to get to Iowa Park,"

Her father had preceded them to Iowa Park the previous spring to build a house and a barn and to dig a well on their 640-acre farm six miles north of Iowa Park on Gilbert Creek.

After the family arrived, they learned their household goods would be delayed in shipment and they had to put up at a hotel for a week.

"I don't remember the name of the hotel now," she said. "There were very few people then. Iowa Park hadn't been laid out but a few years. There was just a post office, a hotel, a few houses, and a little store," she recalled.

Strangely an acquaintanceship they made upon their arrival here was to lead to their deep loss in the typhoid epidemic.

Mattie 18, the oldest daughter, had gone into town to "help out" ay the hotel.

"The lady at the hotel had a daughter Mattie's age and she was so lonesome", Mrs. George explained. "They had come from a thickly settled neighborhood and she begged Mamma to let Mattie come in and help wait tables and be company for their daughter. That is where Mattie got sick with typhoid. She came home and that is when the rest of us took it, " Mrs. George said.

Source of the typhoid epidemic was a community-type well in town. Mattie drank from the supply there. "Water was so scarce you know, and nearly everyone was hauling water from the town well", Mrs. George said. Ironically the Weeths had their own farm well which was free from contamination. After Mattie became ill and died, a brother Eugene 15 and their mother contracted the fever and died a month later. "I was sick too," Mrs. George, the second oldest recalled. "I didn't walk for three months."

The four youngest children, including an infant boy born shortly after the family's arrival in Iowa Park, and her father, were spared. "They gave them quinine at night, she explained.

"We had one neighbor - a wonderful man and he devoted his time to help take care of the sick. We couldn't get a nurse out of Fort Worth and we had no ice to run the fever down."

"There was a doctor here, but those were the horse and buggy days. There were so many people sick that if he could get around once a week to his patients that was all he could do," Mrs. George said.

It was a traumatic experience for her, "and for my daddy. But my aunt and uncle came several months later and got the four youngest children and took them back to Nebraska," where they stayed for eight years before returning home.

"When the children came home, my auntie told them. 'You must mind Nellie (Mrs. George) because she is your Momma now.'" Her father never married again.

After her mother died, Mrs. George said, the girls in the family "gradually learned how to cook." We had nobody, no kinfolks around to teach us. Later on though; one of the cousins from Nebraska came to Texas and stayed for two weeks. She showed us how to cook and sew." When the family came to Texas she explained, they brought enough supplies for a year, and food they had produced from their Nebraska farm. Mrs. Weeth had "even brought a jar of butter. It is good that she did. When we got here we could not find a milk cow, only a range cow, and we had a hard time getting the cow gentle enough to milk her," Mrs. George said. Her father soon set out to organize a school in the area, the Weeth community, which was named for him. Weeth and a few of neighbors, she said, built the school and their first teacher came from Tennessee. "A man by the name of Wells from Tennessee gave the grounds for the school," she said.

Sunday school classes were taught there, and ministers of different faiths would come occasionally and preach, she said. The school in later years was absorbed by school districts in Clara, Burkburnett and Iowa Park.

"When we moved here," she said, "we drove from Iowa Park out to where my Daddy had located and there wasn't a fence or a house or a tree. There wasn't a thing. Just a prairie." Cattlemen had the use of the open range and ran "hundreds of cattle" on their land, including theirs, "until we got it fenced."

Some of her earliest remembrances were that the Indians from Oklahoma, "would camp at our place on Gilbert Creek. They came over her to sell their goods and buy supplies. They would come by our house to get water to drink. There was a little pond for their horses. My Dad was use to the Indians in the early days of Nebraska; he was with them so much. Of course we children were afraid," she reminisced, chuckling at the thought. "We would hide out."

Deer and antelope ran freely through the countryside, she said.

The Weeth farm was on the site too, of annual Wichita County picnics, held each August, she said. Big crowds gathered at the grove of elm and hackberry trees on Gilbert Creek.

"It just seems like they came from every neighborhood. They had a band there and they would dance until midnight. Candidates would come and speak. That was when I was 17 or 18. That was a long time ago. There wasn't buggy or a horse in the livery stable in Wichita Falls. Everyone would come out at the annual picnic."

The creek was the favorite haunt of the flaxen-haired Nellie. She liked to sit on a plan across the water and listen to the birds and frogs." And watch for the mailman coming in his horse and buggy. "There were so many pleasant memories there," Mrs. George says, still wistfully, "I guess I was lonely."

Both parents of Mrs. George had immigrated to America from Germany, her father's mother having come to this country as a widow with her four sons to raise.