Old Memories from Oklahoma to Oregon

As I grew up, I often attended gatherings were older folks would sit around and reminisce about how things used to be. Here is an old story from the Church of the First Born in Oklahoma:

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A Story Told to Brother Jack Robinson

by Brother Hobart Hays

My father, Brother Dave Hays with his family, was travelling from around Mehan going west to Homestead, Oklahoma, when late in the afternoon he stopped at a store in Langston to get a few groceries for he planned to camp down the trail a ways to eat and spend the night.

While he was in the store another wagon pulled up and the people in it was planning on about the same thing as my father. They met in the store and sort of got acquainted and they decided to camp together that night.

The next morning both families headed west. My father and the other man walked along beside the wagon and visited and my dad talked to him about religion. I was just a young lad then and this other man had a son about the same age as I was so we played together along the way. Later we came to the place where we were to go to Homestead so we told them all goodbye for they were going west to Leedy, Oklahoma.

Sometime later the Homestead Brethren received word that a Brother’s house burned down in Leedy. The Homestead Brethren  took up donations, bedding, and furniture, and my dad and I took it by wagon to Leedy. Other Brethren from Vici came and they all decided to stay and help rebuild the Brother’s house.

The man that we met at Langston lived just down the block from where the house had burned down and he came down to work on the house also. When the Brethren decided that they would like to have a meeting, he offered them his house to have the meeting in. Later he was baptized, his son that I played with was later baptized, also, his name was Brother Andrew Myers, who married Sister Mae Moore. They lived for years in Sapulpa, raised their family in the church there.

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And now a walk down memory lane in Oregon. This picture features the elders from the Oregon City Followers of Christ congregation in 1975. The occasion was the sixtieth birthday celebration of Carl Westerburg.

Carl is in the middle wearing a yellow shirt.  The man on the far right is Glenford Lee.