Heartbreak in Van Paul, Texas
by m.s.wardrip
2017 — “Hell, who would have thought she would shoot herself?”, Johnny explained to the arresting officer.
1923 — Van Paul, Texas was booming. There were no jobs here or anywhere else nearby, but the railroad finally came here. We all got jobs and built a big fine house. The Moore family was at last prosperous. It took a lot of hard work and cooperation and the homestead was established. You could say the Moore family had arrived.
1925 — Papa Moore dies in his sleep, leaving Mama Moore with three children in diapers, three in grade school and two in high school. Sister Loretta moves in to help with the children.
1926 — The two oldest girls Johanna and Lucy have children out of wedlock and move in with mama and aunt Loretta.
1930 — Mama Moore dies from pneumonia. She is buried next to papa Moore in the Van Paul Resurrection Cemetery out on Highway 9.
1931 — Aunt Loretta dies from an infection she got from a spider bite in the garden.
1933 — Johanna and Lucy both get married and move away to Dallas. Uncle Joey takes over the house and turns it into a car repair business. The house turns from a home into a garage with a lot of beer drinking guys.
1934 — Uncle Joey falls and hits his head on a lawnmower and dies at General Hospital in Crafton, TX. The house goes to cousin Wilfert who buys it for back taxes and one dollar. Wilfert Moore remodels the house and moves his big family in. He works for the county spraying weeds.
1940 — Uncle Wilfert’s oldest boy, Ned goes off to Great Lakes, Michigan to basic training in the Navy. He rode a train there from Van Paul and it was his first time out of town. He became a great sailor in the Navy. He was put in charge of fresh produce in a Naval base shipyard. Uncle Wilfert falls into bad health.
1945 — Ned moves into the house after Wilfert and his wife Mary die. Ned paints everything and lives a quiet, simple and spartan life by himself, as a bachelor, rarely going out and living on his government pension for being wounded in the service (He tripped over the forks of a forklift and busted his skull.) It doesn’t pay a lot to be disabled, but it keeps him out of the pensioners home. Ned lives here for thirty-two years and quietly passes away in his sleep. Oddly, he leaves his estate in the will to his first, one and only girlfriend, Suzanne Sminton (Now Suzanne Sminton Estes)
1977 — Suzanne and Bartlett Estes move in to the old Moore place. Bart is a criminal who makes his living by stealing car parts at night and selling them by the truckload in the surrounding counties. He has done it for years and is good at it. He also drinks booze, sniffs glue and smokes pot. The worst part is that he beats Suzanne when money and dope run out. She keeps quiet and works to make money doing laundry for others. She has had three miscarriages due to Bart’s fist punching her belly.
1981 — Bart goes to prison for opening an auto parts store that sells stolen auto parts. Suzanne’s longtime boyfriend, Stan Vowels moves in the home and they open a landscaping/lawn service. Stan fixes lawnmowers, small engines and they both mow lawns. Stan saves enough to purchase a tractor and a bush hog mower to pull behind it.
1983 — Bart gets out of prison, shoots and kills Stan and goes back to prison. Suzanne accidentally runs over her new boyfriend, Clayburn, with the bush hog and he dies from injuries. She lives in the home with Arthur Teasley for the next ten years, pretty uneventful, except they fall into dire poverty
1993 — Art is in the backyard sitting on a bench eating peanut butter/cheese crackers and drinking cherry kool aid when suddenly a limb from a big tree falls on him and he dies from his injuries. Suzanne takes up with a new friend, this time a girl, Becca from Summerville. They party hearty! Well known as a local party house, they get raided at a party, all go to jail and the judge orders the party house condemned.
1997 — The house sits empty until H.P. Longmire puts up the money to buy it from the county. He paints the place up and makes a flea market out of it. He goes through several girlfriends before marrying one who divorced him in seven years and took the house in the deal. She lives there with her new beau, Ted Yarley. Ted fixes the place back into a home and installs a new furnace, plumbing, a bathroom and a new porch. The old house is holding up very well for it’s age as long as someone occupies it. When no one is there, it starts to go down pretty quick.
2004 — A tornado takes out the three big trees and part of the roof. A plastic tarp covers the backroom where Ted was killed in his sleep by the huge tree that crashed on his bed, sending him to the ground below, underneath the house. Anne Longmire lives alone there until Robert Shanks moves in with her. He is a retired farmer with a back injury. He gives her his social security check every month in exchange for a place to live. Anne is a private licensed bookkeeper, working out of her home. She does taxes for people and notary service.
2009 — Robert suffers a stroke and dies at the emergency room. The attorneys arrange for Anne to still live there even though she is indigent. Just pay the taxes is all the county asks, but upon her death, it goes back to the county.
2016/17(New Years Eve and Day) — Her meth-head nephew and his girlfriend move in and take over. They cook meth, deal meth and do meth while keeping Anne locked up in the master bedroom and bath. They sealed the windows black and shut. They feed her daily and give her prescription meds to keep her knocked out and maintained. One New Year’s Day, when they were out of town, she broke out, got a pistol and shot herself in the head. The meth-head neighbor Johnny Tooley came by the house when the unmarked detective car was there.
2017 — “Hell, who would have thought she would shoot herself?”, Johnny explained to the arresting officer.
2018 — The old Moore place out on Highway 9.
2020 — The Old Moore Place
