Leonard Dabney Cawthon

From notes of Lula (Hunton) Cawthon:

Daddy's Table BlessingNov 30

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank thee for this table spread with the comforts of life. Bless this food for its intended use for the nursement [nourishment] of our body and minds, and eventually save us in thy kingdom. We ask thro' Jesus name. Amen.

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John Martin [Leo's father] farmed the land where Northwest Arkansas Mall is today [Fayetteville] and the fields below the mall on the east and west side of highway 471 [previously US 71]. Leo told his granddaughter that when he lived there the whole area at one time was planted in corn. He guessed there must have been near a hundred or more acres of corn.

Leo was baptized in 1906 at the Shady Grove Baptist Church of Christ (Flashback, March 1950).

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SCRAPBOOK Picture 3: Shady Grove School

In Johnson (or Springdale?), Washington Co, AR. Leo went to school here. His siblings Delt, Lillian, Minerva, and Johnnie are in the picture.

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Leo and Lula were married on the steps that went upstairs from what is now the master bedroom in Dale and Theda Ezell's house.

When Dale and Theda moved into that house in May 1947, Leo and Lula moved to Des Moines, in time to get Helen in school there that fall. Lula worked in a candy factory there. Sometime later they called: Leo was in the V.A. hospital. Dale and Theda got Blanche and Ellis came over to milk while Dale and Theda went to Des Moines.

In 1948, Leo and Lula moved to an apartment in Siloam while building their new house next door. Leo cut the trees for the lumber and took them "next door" to Walter Thompson's to have them cut into lumber.

(Theda [Cawthon] Ezell to Richard Ezell, 24 April 2004.)