"Wonderful Changes Have Taken Place"

This 1931 article is not about Milam County - but it is an interesting perspective on a

changing Texas...

Wonderful Changes Have Taken Place

By R. A. Pearson, Perryton, Texas

Frontier Times – March 1931

Published by J. Marvin Hunter

I have lived in Texas and Oklahoma over fifty-eight years, and will give a sketch of some

things I have observed. I have never cut any great figure in anything, only doing my

part in pushing the Pearson name on towards the top in number, there being fifteen

children born to us. So you see we have not been idle. But this is not what I started

out to write about.

The great change of the country is the most interesting of all subjects to us. I was

raised between plowshares, and mostly a single plow at that. I have lived to see farming

methods change from a little six-inch turner, and sometimes a little shovel not much

bigger than my hand, drawn by on horse, to our ten-foot one way plow drawn by 15x30

tractors.

Our mode of travel is just as wonderfully changed, if not more so. From where we are now

living on a main road leading out of town, it seems like there is a motor vehicle passing

on an average every minute. But it does not stop with that. They are passing over us

like hawks. I have said for forty years or longer that the time would come when motor

power would junk the horse, but I did not expect to live to see it. In this section it

is almost complete. You can’t hardly give a horse to anyone. Such seems very commonplace

to the young people, though to us old folks it is wonderful, and we can hardly get used

to it. In our younger days when you wanted to interest a man you could do not better

than talk to him about fine horses. But now, what does the average young man in this

part of the west know about a horse? He knows that have a head and a tail, and that is

about all.

What would this progressive age think of a man traveling through the country in an old

tar pole wagon with a yoke of oxen to it? There are number of other things ahead of us

to think and wonder about. I have always been a dreamer and I am still one, so I am

wondering if within fifty years our highways will not be in the air instead of on the

earth. Also, what effect the flying machine will have on the railroads. My dreams may

be too long off, just as they were about the change of farming methods but we are moving

today by leaps and it is impossible for us to know what tomorrow will bring. There is

one thing sure, and that is there will be more poor folks. It used to be that all

inducement possible was held out to prevent the poor from going in debt. The inducement

now is in the other that the young people cannot resist it, and also many of the older

ones. The result of all this is that unearned interest is consuming the labor of the

poor people.

All credit for this article goes to
R. A. Pearson and Frontier Times