Buried Treasure						

by Will  L. White


Five miles southwest of Lamesa, Texas, sits an 80-acre farm plot on which my 
father, Aubrey Floyd White, raised dry-land cotton, corn, maize and other 
products. A dirt road once ran down the west side of that property and onward 
about one mile to the Ballard school house. We lived in the Ballard community of 
Dawson county. Today, no road exists there. The nearest point on most maps is 
the community of Patricia (now on farm to market road No. 349). Patricia had a 
cotton gin. Not much more.

In 1938, in the southeast corner of our farm, my father and mother had built a 
small farmhouse with their own hands for $340. They got the materials cheap. 
Some were gifts from family, friends, and  neighbors; others they scavenged or 
obtained anyway they could.  They actually won third  place and a $l00 prize 
sponsored by a national farm magazine. 
I believe it was either Farm Journal (which still exists)  or Country Gentleman 
(which does not) . The contest was to see who could build the nicest farm house 
with the least amount of money.

About 30 yards southwest of the front steps of the house my folks  had dug an 
earthen cellar. Everyone had these cellars to retreat from tornadoes and the 
more frequent dust storms that blanketed and darkened the sky, especially 
during the days of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.

The cellar was also a place of retreat, but also of storage. One kept  homemade 
canned fruits and vegetables and other goods there to keep them cool. In the 
southeast corner of that cellar, a rectangular hole in the dry west Texas dirt which 
measured about 8 by l2 feet, was a steel-banded trunk with a hump on top, the 
seagoing variety with a simple lock. Inside, my parents kept most of the personal 
treasures of their lives--photographs, letters (including those professing love), 
post cards, newspaper clippings, trinkets, broken costume jewelry, and other 
bric-a-brac. The trunk was seldom opened and never discussed. 
Not that it was a secret treasure chest....

In 1940, my father received a spiritual "call" to become a Methodist preacher. 
Within a few weeks, Aubrey and Jewel Henderson White packed up a Chevrolet 
they had bought two years before, and loaded a two-wheel trailer with essential   
belongings from the house. I was just past 8 years old. With my brother, Ronald 
Floyd, age 2, and me in the back seat, they drove 150 miles east to Abilene, 
where we would start a new life and my father would enter McMurry, a   school 
for preachers, and preacher's   kids. One memory I have of that trip is that near 
Loraine, a small   town west of Sweetwater, we almost   had a serious accident. 
One wheel was coming off the heavily over-loaded trailer and if it  had, it 
probably would have caused a serious accident. Fortunately, another motorist  
passed us and called our attention to the wheel. My parents saw the narrowly 
averted   danger as another sign of God's will   that they were doing the right 
thing.

When we left Lamesa, my father left the farm, including the cows and other 
animals, in the care of my maternal  grandfather, Frank Henderson, and the farm 
was eventually rented and then sold to a neighbor. But before we rolled  off down 
that dirt road, my parents did one other surprising and symbolic thing: Taking 
nothing from the cellar except food, Aubrey and Jewel filled it in with loose sand. 
I don't know why they did this, except perhaps the cellar had eroded and was 
otherwise deteriorated. But that seems  unlikely somehow.. 

I think it was a symbolic gesture of turning away from an old life and turning 
toward a new calling and future--down another road with final destination truly 
unknown.

But I do know one thing: the family trunk was buried along with our past lives.  

And it is still there. 

Note: My brother Ron is eager to create a family archeological 
expedition, find the location in what would now be an open field,
and try to unearth the trunk.