Volume 7, Number 3 - Spring 1980
Bradleyville Normal School
Note: Excerpts from letters written by Mrs. Sara Brazeal to Lucille Brown after inquiry in WRVHS quarterly asking for information about Birdie Cross Brown, mother of Omer E. Brown:
April 2, 1974- - -"How well I knew Birdie Cross, but of her parents I knew nothing - - - she was living with her uncle West Cross and his mother when my Aunt Adelaide Johnson married Uncle Wes. She was 11 or 12 (a guess) how well I remember Grandma Cross. She always wore a little cap of white calico, with small figures, box pleats across the front and tied under her chin, hair white as snow - - -In my early life Taney and Ozark Co. were considered poor and backward- people, poor but mostly good folk.
How poor we were 1880-1905 or thereabout. In the early 1890’s they called it "hard times" and blamed G. Cleveland, the president is always to blame.
Prof. R. E. Morris came from Ohio and taught a normal school at Bradleyville from 1890-1895 -- as I remember. There was a store, blacksmith shop, a school house and the cemetery. They built a boarding house and all the farm women kept boarders. Three of my Aunts became teachers from that normal. Bird Cross was a pupil -- all the young folks called her Bird.
My brother, Henry Err, was born Dec. 4, 1891 and was named for Prof. R. E. Morris, and I see Bird gave Omer Err this name.
Back to R. E. Morris, his school was about 3 miles from us, we had only 4 months school. I got very little education. One winter when I was 9 in January, my sister 10, Dec. 14, we stayed at Grandma Johnson’s and went to school with my 3 Aunts and Bird. What a good time all the girls seemed to have -- good girls. Jenny Savage made tea for herself on the heating stove at school. I watched her, it was so unusual. Jennie’s daughter was Bessie Love, a movie star in 1930’s.
Song sung by Grandma Cross:
1st. Come brothers and sisters that love one another and have
done for years past and gone.
How oft we meet in that sweet heavenly union.
That opens the way to God’s throne.
2nd. There are Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
Moses, Joshua and John and Old father Samuel and ten
thousand others will set around Gods throne.
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