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where they sold notions, confections, dry
goods and dairy products; their living
quarters were in the rear of the building.
According to a family member’s ac-
count, “Mrs. Little, hearing a roaring
noise, glanced out the back door and saw
an angry rolling funnel-shaped black
cloud bearing down upon the village.
She screamed for Black Mammy to rush
out and gather in the children, while she
and Mr. Little tried to close the heavy
wooden shutters on the windows…All
the white children were rushed inside,
but, as the little black boy was not among
them, everyone felt that he was blown
away. Then, the cyclone struck the house,
tearing off all its wooden shutters on
the creek side of the building, but leav-
ing the structure unharmed otherwise.”
Later, the boy was found “up in a treetop,
on a feather mattress, very tearful and
frightened, but unharmed.”
LAND LOST
In 1859, William and Nancy were “ac-
cidentally” shot and killed when they
returned to Navarro for a family tradi-
tion—a holiday deer-hunting trip with
cousins. “It has been said that they
were shot over a land dispute and the
courthouse was burned to destroy the
records,” according to one family mem-
ber’s account. Their son, William Arga-
lus Little returned with his two sons in
1913 to find some of the cousins living
in William and Nancy’s old plantation
house. William attempted to talk to the
cousins about the trouble over the land,
and had to stop one of his sons, who
threatened to shoot the cousins. “They
found one of the old slaves living in a
small house on the land and he told them
about the shooting of Argalus’ parents
and indicated it was a murder for pos-
session of the Little family’s land,” the
account continues. Ten years later, the
Texas oil boom reached the Navarro Oil
Field, but the descendants of William
Argalus Little and his wife, Martha
Jane, were unable to participate in the
wealth it brought to the area settled by
William’s father almost 80 years earlier.
Interestingly, when the current Texas
State Capitol Building was being built,
William Argalus was living on Warner
Avenue in Austin, three blocks off South
Congress Avenue. Dorothy can imag-
Dorothy and her sister, Betty Finley, are both members of the John Berry Chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of
Texas (DRT). Betty also lives in Sun City Texas with her husband, Pete.
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