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Indian Pioneer Papers - Index

Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma
Date: August 2, 1937
Interview: Dora Elrod Spring
Post Office: Hugo, Oklahoma
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Alabama 
Father: Albert Elrod
Place of Birth: 
Mother: Charlotte Copeland
Place of Birth:
Interviewed by: Hazel B. Greene 
Interview #7035

Dora Elrod Spring is the widow of John Spring, who died May 13, 1937. He was the son of William and Jane Spring. His age was about seventy-seven and he was buried at the Spring family cemetery. He was the brother to Susan Spring Sanguin and Patsy Kendrick. He had eleven other brothers and sisters.

I am all white; was born in Alabama and was reared all over the southwest. I was about six when my father, Albert Elrod, and mother Charlotte Copeland Elrod, decided to move to Arkansas. When we got there, Pa was dissatisfied, so we loaded everything we had in an ox wagon and pulled out, just traveling in Arkansas and Indian Territory. Sometimes he'd stop at sawmills and log awhile. He finally got a big team called Doc and Bill. They were a good log team.

Ma got tired of camping and dragging around and the children getting no schooling, so she refused to go further. She said she wanted to settle down. Well, that made Pa mad so he just went off and never even wrote to us. We heard he was dead.

I was staying in the home of old George Dillard, close to Belzoni, in the Indian Territory, close to that old court ground, and my sister was a servant in another family. I was just a servant, so once when they had so much company there at the Sulphur Springs Court Ground, and just couldn't wait on them all, I went to live with Dr. and Mrs. W. D. Kendrick, over on their ranch in the forks of Frazier Creek, five miles north of Spencerville.

When they moved back to Goodland, in 1903 I believe, I went with them and lived with them until I married Mrs. Kendrick's brother, John Spring, in 1904.

He had a house full of children and he was about one fourth Choctaw. I came right to this old place to live. He built it after the home that he built for his first wife had burned. Her name was Nancy McCoy and she died many years ago, about 1903. He and I had two girls and two boys, all grown now. I am fifty-two years old.

When Ma got my sister and I and the two boys in homes, she went to Alabama, saying that she knew we could take care of ourselves; but the boys didn't. They were living with an old man who was supposed to have stolen hogs and those boys were notified that they were to be witnesses, so they disappeared. We never heard from them again.

Ma came back and lived with me till she died a few years ago. She is buried in the Springs' Family Cemetery.

Transcribed for OKGenWeb by Sue Roebuck <roebuck@1starnet.com> January 2002.