Cowarts

This is my great-grandmother's family taken in 1899. My great-grandmother is standing in the back in the middle. She was the oldest of nine children born in 1879. She was the daughter of Samuel Rushing Cowart (b. 1855) who is sitting in the front, and of Margie Ann Camelia Rebecca Bush who is also sitting in the front though I'm not sure which one she is. There are three older women in the front and I'm not sure if she is the one on the right or in the middle. The oldest looking woman on the left is undoubtedly one of my great great great grandmothers, probably Mary Ann Breland who was born in 1817 and is Samuel Rushing Cowart's mother. This photo would have been taken in Bush, St Tammany, Louisiana where they lived. I do remember my great-grandmother, Zipporah (a.k.a. Pearl) Cowart though when I knew her, she was grandma Grosche with the "e" being pronounced as a long "a". Grosche was the name of her third husband.

When I was younger, we would visit her and my grandparents, in Bogalusa, Louisiana quite frequently. She lived in a house that had been built around 1917. It was a typical (I don't know why I am saying "was" because it is still there.) southern house that was built on top of piers so that you could crawl around beneath the house. It was painted white with a green roof and had a clapboard exterior. There was a fairly large yard with chicken coops and a large work shed (corrugated steel exterior) that my grandfather had built. The house was on a corner and had two driveways both of which were just gravel. There was also a large porch on the front of the house with a bench swing at one end of it.

Some of the things I remember, when we used to visit and that I liked to do, was catch frogs and look for colored rocks on the driveway. There used to be a zillion thumb sized tree frogs all over that yard. There were so many that it was hard not to step on one once in a while. I remember that on the driveway, there were always a bunch of flat ones that the car had smashed. They tell me that many years ago, however, they had been spraying pesticides and all the frogs "croaked." In some of my later trips back there, I didn't see frogs anymore. The driveway was covered with pea gravel and the rocks would usually be of all different colors so while the adults visited, I'd be outside looking for pretty colored rocks.

One other feature of the house was that there was a big fig tree in the front. When the figs were ripe, they would pick them and then bottle them in a heavy syrup. If I think real hard, I can still taste those bottled figs which were really yummy.

As for my great-grandmother, I can't really remember any coversations with her but I remember that she was older with gray hair and kind of portly. She always wore a long dress that seemed thread-bare that had a floral pattern on it and she wore glasses. When I look at her photographs, I see a woman who aged very quickly. Her first husband died when the youngest child was only four years old. I heard stories that she would rent out a room to boarders which means the kids (4) probably had to squeeze into a room by themselves. I have a photograph of her working in a factory where she looked pretty haggard. She did, however, live a long life. She passed away in 1971 at the age of 92 years old and I probably hadn't seen her since 1963 after we had moved to California.