Chester Benn

Sulphur, OK 

Field Worker, John F. Dougherty June 12, 1937
Interview:  #4430
Address: Sulphur, OK
Born: 1882
Place of Birth: Texas
Father: J.J. Benn,  born in Texas (brother says Tennessee), Farmer & Tanner
Mother: Mary Collier, born in Texas (brother says Tennessee)

My parents were J.J. Benn and Mary Collier Benn. Father was born in 1841 and mother was born in 1859.

Both were Texans. Father was a farmer and tanner. There were four children. I was born in Texas in 1882.

Father moved to the Chickasaw Nation in 1887. We came in covered wagons, crossing Red River at Delaware Bend, and located near Thackerville. We later moved to Nebo, south of Sulphur. Here we lived in a log house with one room, dirt floor, no doors, and no windows. We used a cowhide for a covering for the doorway. Father leased two hundred acres for ten years from a full-blood Chickasaw woman named Jane Brown. He was to pay no rent, but improve the place instead. He built a good three room house and a good barn on the place and every year he hauled Mrs. Brown two loads of corn. He broke the land with oxen. He paid the Chickasaw Government a five dollar permit and had about sixty head of cattle.

He put up a small cotton gin and grist mill on Pennington Creek. It had an overshot wheel, and he ginned about two or three bales of cotton a day. By working all night he could gin six bales. When cotton was brought there to be ginned, the owner was told to return in a week for his cotton. We sold our cotton in Ardmore for four cents a pound and the cotton seed brought three cents a bushel if we sold it. Nearly everybody threw the seed away. Some fed it to their cattle.

We just had two months of school each year. We paid ten cents a day to attend. There were no grades, and we used what books we had at .

I picked cotton for forty cents a hundred and when I worked by the day on the farm, I received forty cents a day and my board.

I was married to Annie Brewer in 1904. We had five children. I have lived in Murray County since 1892.

Transcribed by Brenda Choate & Dennis Muncrief, November, 2000