Price Family Home

from Nancy Curtis

The house that Susie Faye and J.M. Price lived in to which you reference in your history of the Crim Family is not now and never was at the junction of 259 and 64. The house was originally built in 1912 as a 4 room farm house on the north side of F.M. 13 just a tad over from the intersection of Hwy. 42 and F.M. 13 ... then when J.M. became a multi- millionaire when the east Texas oil boom hit when the Daisy Bradford 3 oil well came in bringing the advent of many more wells in Rusk Co. making many families very wealthy including J.M. and his wife and 3 daughters and son. In 1934/35, J.M. made huge changes to this house, which we purchased in December of 1988 from Gwen Price, the second wife and widow of J. M. Price, taking the roof off, adding a full second story, an "L" shaped balcony on the front and east side of the house that covered the matching "L" shaped porch on the front and east side ... he enclosed an existing porch on the east side, enclosed a porch on the back and enclosed a porch area on the west side to make a utility room ... enlarged the living room and the dining room ... added two bathrooms, one downstairs and one upstairs, added running water to the kitchen and extended the kitchen north by about 6' making it quite a bit larger. The bathrooms were completely tiled and beautiful colored porcelain fixtures were installed ... cast iron with porcelain ... they are still beautiful all these years later ... heart-pine was used in the whole house ... floors, stairs and railings as well as the picture frame paneling going up the 23 riser staircase which is curved. All of the old parts of the house ... the kitchen, the dining room, the living room and the front - south (only original) bedroom and the bedroom where all four of the Price children - Elwyn, Bessie Lou, Sterling and Luna Faye ... according to information I received directly from Mrs. Bessie Lou Price Mason before her death in a letter. The house was lived in by Joseph Marcus Price until his death in, I think 1978 or 1978, his first wife, Sadie Faye until her death down at Scott-White Hospital from a pulmonary embolism after surgery in 1948, all three daughters but his oldest daughter graduated high school here then moved to New York and attended college at Columbia where she met the man she would marry after he moved down here ... she taught English at Carlisle and her husband became the Superintendent. I don't know where they lived here or anything else about their lives. Bessie Lou was voted most beautiful in her class at Carlisle. I wish I had had the opportunity to talk to her more about her family. I do know she married Jolley Mason and had children but I don't know how many but I believe her grandchildren still own the building that houses the Price Post Office and receive monthly rent. Sterling was killed in England at the end of WW II in a plane crash ... Mrs. Gwen Price told me "confidentiality" that he was "showing off" when he crashed but who knows? He was married to a young local woman and already had two children when he went to war ... she moved to Oklahoma, outside OK City after he Sterling was killed, married again and had more children. I know almost nothing about Luna Faye except that she married, and she and her husband moved to Alabama where she died in 1996 which was 2 years after Mrs. Gwen Price died after she had to move down to Houston with her daughter. That is the reason, she told me that the Price daughters hated her so much is because she was so close in age with them. She was born, I believe April 14, 1912 or 1913 ... can't remember but I have it written down. A close friend of hers Mrs. Gussie Moore, told me that J.M promised Gwen $4,000,000.00 if she would marry him ... she did but never got the money AND received a lot of abuse from him. She was 39 and he was almost 70 when they married. Her daughter from her first marriage "hated" J.M. and as soon as she graduated from Carlisle she started college at SFA and only came home when he was not home. I have also heard stories about J.M ... his "Tom-catting" around after he got rich ... bought a woman in Henderson a yellow Cadillac and never missed flying to the World Series with Gussie Moore's husband but never let Gwen do anything fun. She was the sweetest, kindest lady I have ever met ... and I have not had one single person in Price/Carlisle EVER say one single unkind thing about her. I tried to get her to stay and live with us ... I told her I would take care of her ... my sweet mom died in 1984 at 58 ... but she said she would if our girls were older but our three youngest were 5, 1 and I had our youngest in 1990 ... another little girl. My step-daughter came to live with us with us in 1989 so we had 6 daughters graduate from Carlisle between 1990 and 2008 ... we had daughters attending that school for 24 years.

I really just wanted to clear up the location of the house ... I figured out one time that J.M. was 27 years old when he built this house ... he owned his own saw mill during that time ... his nickname in this community was "Tight Price" ... lol. His parents are buried about a half of a mile east on 13 in a tiny family cemetery that is not marked. The Price family lived in this house for 76 years before we bought it from Gwen Payne Smith Price who was reared in Laneville and who is buried in Cushing no where J. M. Price. I found a big metal, 5 gal. Lard can that was full of very old letters dating from about 1880 to the 1930's ... very interesting reading. I know almost as much about the Price family as I do my own family in Texas that started with 4 of my great-grand parents immigrating to America about 1870 on two different sides of the continent. It took me over 20 years to discover what J.M.'s drunkard Uncle, U. M. Brown's actual name was!