The Most Land, the Best Cattle by Judy Alter

Author:Judy Alter [Alter, Judy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493052639
Publisher: TwoDot
Published: 2021-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

Mrs. W. T. Waggoner, June 4, 1939.

As she was a careful businesswoman, Ella was a bit parsimonious, perhaps because of the early habits of her lifetime. Electra Biggs, who called her grandmother Mammy, as did many others, once recalled that when she asked Mammy’s cook to bake her favorite cake, Ella worried about the amount of sugar required. (It could have been during wartime rationing, but Mrs. Biggs did not specify the year). Ella also hired a new companion who happened to like her coffee in equal parts with cream. When Ella saw her use almost an entire pitcher of cream one morning, she instructed the kitchen the next day to put only a bit of cream in the bottom of the pitcher.

When Electra, married and mother of one infant with another on the way, asked her grandmother to provide a window unit air conditioner for her New York apartment, Ella replied, “Air conditioners are unhealthy. Get a fan.”

Ella lived with a companion, a housekeeper, a maid, and a chauffeur who drove her 1940 Packard. The chauffeur frequently tried to get her to trade her car for a newer model, but she refused to spend the money.

Shortly after her ninety-ninth birthday, Ella became ill and spent the last year of her life bedridden, her hearing and sight failing. There was no celebration for her hundredth birthday, and she died shortly afterward. Pictures supplied by the family for the book on Thistle Hill show a remarkably beautiful woman in middle age but one who grew progressively more solemn in appearance, especially with an increasingly severe hairstyle, and one who shrank as she aged. The unknowing person, seeing her on the street, would have been unlikely to recognize her as a person of wealth and power.

But Ella Waggoner had lived a remarkable life, from the prairie cabin and the tavern in Decatur to the exclusive Rivercrest neighborhood in Fort Worth. Just as the estate building in Vernon may be seen as a pinnacle, Ella may be seen as pivotal in bringing her family from ranch to city. W. T. established his headquarters in the city for business reasons, but he built his Summit Avenue mansion for Ella. One suspects she wanted to be near to her grown children, all three of whom lived in Fort Worth for varying periods of time. But it is not difficult to imagine the move to Fort Worth as part of Ella’s plan for her family’s life, a grander step but still one related to her insistence that Electra go to finishing school.

We can only wish that Ella had kept a journal of events and her interpretation of them, her feelings and emotions over a long life that spanned almost half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The world changed in amazing ways during that hundred years, and apparently, so did Ella Halsell Waggoner.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.