John P. Willis

Opinions presented here are held in all of my roles and capacities, both personal and professional.

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Geek Code

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Site Info

This site is hosted on a Sun SPARCserver 20 running Apache 2.2, Perl 5, and a home-built CMS.

RSS feed generation is done with a BASH script I have implemented, called Syndicator.

This site contains no JavaScript, no CSS, and should render in any HTML 2.0-compliant browser.

Fronabarger Homestead

Sofia • New Mexico • Established 1912

Left: William Edward Fronabarger and Cola Ceton Hall Fronabarger on their wedding day, December 6, 1903.
Right: Fronabarger Homestead, 2002.

In 1912, my great-great-grandparents, William Edward Fronabarger and Cola Ceton Hall Fronabarger, both originally from Tennessee, came to Sofia from Weatherford, Texas in a covered wagon. Receiving 100 acres from President Woodrow Wilson's Homestead Act, they were one of the very few Sofia families who did not come from Bulgaria.

The Fronabargers originally lived in a wooden barn on the property (no longer standing), with hanging blankets as a partition separating them from the livestock. The men of the community helped my great great grandfather build the house pictured. The concrete blocks were poured on-site.

They farmed wheat, beans, and eventually had a fruit orchard. William Edward also built the first Sofia school, which is also standing in a ruined state with no roof. At one point, the Sofia post office (of which Cola was the first postmistress, appointed April 29, 1914) was on this property.

Sofia School Bus (At the "new" Sofia school; not the one built by Mr. Fronabarger.
My great-aunt Marcia Sue, the daughter of my great-grandmother Oleta, is pictured in front of the driver side of the bus windshield.

At one point during Prohibition, my great-grandmother Oleta and her younger brother Bryan overheard the farm hands talking about the money some local people were making with their illegal still, making moonshine. Oleta and Bryan decided to build their own still under the haystack, and ended up catching the haystack on fire. According to Oleta, Bryan took the whipping for it and never hinted to their father of Oleta's involvement.

Bryan and Ray Fronabarger in Sofia

My great grandmother Oleta's older sister, Hazel Pearl Fronabarger, began to deteriorate mentally at puberty. Her parents took her as far as Denver to try for a diagnosis, but there was none to be had, other than what the doctor called juvenile dementia. She was a fine horsewoman and very strong with no fear, but by the time her younger sister, Oleta, was in high school, Hazel had regressed to the level of about a first grader. She could write some but only in a childlike way. She suffered seizures. When Hazel was about 20, Oleta brought home measles--a case of measles that would ultimately take the hearing in one of Oleta's ears. Hazel contracted the disease. Oleta talked of being unable to sleep in the room she normally shared with Hazel because Hazel was so ill, and as she slept on the sofa, she repeated the poem Thanatopsis from memory and hoped that Hazel would pull through. It was not to be. Hazel died of complications of measles.

Hazel Pearl Fronabarger in Sofia

During the Dust Bowl era, my great-grandmother Oleta said that the dust would cover the fruit orchard. They would keep wet rags to put around the windows to keep the dirt out, but they would turn black and dry within minutes. William kept attempting to farm through the dust storms, and contracted dust pneumonia, dying of it in 1936. A few years later, the family moved to Las Cruces, selling the farm to another family.

Remnants of the covered wagon in which the Fronabargers originally traveled to Sofia are still present on the property, mostly buried in the dirt.

The property now belongs to a commercial real estate investment firm in Amarillo, Texas.

Gallery

Lydia Alford on the front porch of the Sofia house

Cola Hall Fronabarger in the early 1950s in Las Cruces, with my uncle Frank Sutherland Perkins III.

Bryan and Cola in Las Cruces in 1961

Bryan, Linda, Oleta, and Ray Fronabarger, Las Cruces, 1980s