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Submitted: 1/22/17 • Approved: 1/22/17 • Last Updated: 1/25/17 • R1171601-G0-S3
Mar 3, 1914 - July 11, 1995
thecabin.net
Reading fragments from a diary, Inez Coker of Vilonia said her relatives, the Wilson and Simpson families, came to the Vilonia area in November, 1869, from Mississippi in covered wagons. Noah and Molly Simpson were her great-grandparents.
“They were either headed for north Arkansas or Texas, but here is where they got to,” she added. It was four years after the War of the Rebellion. Her great-grandfather’s wagon broken down on their way from Mississippi to Arkansas. They crossed the “great Mississippi,” by barge to Helena, Coker said. Their travel was interrupted in the Otto area, with her great-grandmother, Molly, going into labor and giving birth. The families set up camp there and stayed. For about three years they managed farms there with the aid of their former slaves, who voluntarily followed them in the move. Both families later moved to the community of Beryl.
Born in 1915, Inez Coker said she may be the oldest resident of Vilonia. She will turn 99 on Oct. 31.
“At least, I don’t know anyone any older,” she said, a smile on her face. She points to a couple of pieces of paper with dates written on them that she has been glancing at while talking. “I’m getting so old, I’m losing my memory.”
On that note, she spends a few minutes talking about her health which, she said, is relatively good. She mowed her yard and did all of her housework up until last year. If it wasn’t for her 81-year-old son, Gerald Coker, she said, she would probably still be doing her yard work. He has arranged for it to be done by someone else. Working in her yard is one thing she enjoys. A cool day, she ponders on the thought of getting her lawnmower out of the shed and mowing a few rounds anyway.
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“I’ve got 136 acres here,” she said, pointing behind her house.
She also enjoys traveling and has done quite a bit in the past 20 or so years. However, she has lived in Faulkner County all of her life except for about four or five months.
Her parents are the late J.B. and Savannah Evatt. She began attending first grade in a classroom operated by the Nazarene’s Arkansas Holiness College, she said. Her grandparents, Elijah and Martha Evatt, were employed there. Her grandmother was a cook, and her grandfather was a “flunky” of sorts. He performed a variety of services, including filling the washpots with water and starting the fires to get the water boiling. That’s what the college girls used, she said, to wash their clothing.
Coker said a few years later she lived with her grandparents, along with her cousin, because it was handy to the school.
As a young child she recalls following her grandfather on Highway 64 behind his horse and buggy. A car was seldom seen. But one day when she was 7 or 8, one seemed to appear from nowhere and a neighbor boy was struck and killed.
“He saw us walking behind the wagon and ran for us,” she said. “It was awful. We played with him all the time. His name was Dwight Thomas.”
She can also remember traveling with her parents by wagon to the Letona community in White County to visit her dad’s brother. It would take three days to get there, with the family stopping to camp along the way.
“It was our vacation after the crops were made,” she said. “It would take us three days to get there and three days to get back.”
When she was in the fourth grade, her parents moved to Conway. Her father was a foreman on the road crew that built Highway 64 from Vilonia to Conway. She attended school there in a one-room school on German Lane. They moved back to Vilonia after a while.
When she was in the ninth grade, she skipped school one day and married her late husband, Quince Coker. The couple was married 64 years before his death in 1995.
“I was 15 and he was a little older,” Coker said. They had known each other for several years and attended church together. “I ran off from school and we went to Conway and got married. We were married by a Mr. Montgomery.”
She “sent word” to her parents that she had married.
It wasn’t that uncommon for that day and time. That night, she said, they went to his sister’s house to spend the night.
“From one person and another, we were given 18 hens and two roosters,” she said. Wedding showers weren’t like today, she added.
The couple worked as sharecroppers for a few years. During WWII, they went to San Francisco to work in the shipyards, leaving their two children, Gerald and Polly, behind with their grandparents. Her husband had been turned down by the military. In California, he worked as a welder and she worked as a tacker for about four or five months. They made enough money while there, that they could return to Vilonia, pay off their 80-acre farm and purchase a team of mules.
“We had a good life after that,” she said. “Things got easier.”
In the years to come, the couple would also purchase a couple of grocery stores, service station, a barber shop and a café. Some of which, they operated themselves. Other businesses they rented to others. She generally ran the grocery store. The grocery store, she said, was among the first to have a phone in the Vilonia area.
“I took applications for people to sign up for telephones,” she said. “People would even come up here from El Paso to sign up.”
She said her husband was a good provider for his family. He would buy and could sell anything.
At one time, the couple operated a rodeo arena on the weekends. He also worked as an automobile salesman in Conway for 24 years.
Coker’s granddaughter, Polly, describes her grandmother as a sweet and kind lady with a giving heart. An example, she said, during the 2011 tornado, you couldn’t see her house for the downed trees. A big tractor/trailer rig was blown off the road and ended up in her yard. Her grandmother, at 96, invited the stranger from Missouri to spend the night in her storm cellar while he waited on his wife to come and pick him up. The next morning she prepared him a big breakfast.
Coker tells the story behind her cellar. Over the years it has provided shelter for many friends and family members. Her husband sold some cattle to have it installed at her request. That’s the way he was, she offered.
Coker said she will embrace turning 99 with a party. She said she figures she may have a few more years to live, but she isn’t worried about dying.
She said her husband said on his death bed, “I am going to heaven and I will be the one at the door to let you in and I will love you like I always have.”
Contributed on 1/22/17 by hawkinsdonna
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Record #: 1171601