An Interview with Laura Richard
Interview conducted by: George Hodgkins
Living in Crosby since they were born, Laura Richard and her mother Shelley Cochran share their memories about the changes in Crosby and their Czech connections through Crosby and personal history.
Interview
This interview was made in collaboration with Department of History in University of Houston and Czech Center Museum Houston. The following text is the verbatim transcription of the oral history project.
March 12, 2020
UH Interviewer: So, to recap, we've said that your great-grandparents came from South Moravia and arrived in the 1880s in Galveston, joining an already established group...you said from the same village? Or the same area at least?
Laura Richard: Probably around the same area, yeah.
UH Interviewer: Okay. So what did they do when they arrived here?
Shelley Cochran (Laura Richard’s mother): They became farmers. Cotton farming, mostly.
UH Interviewer: As proprietors, or working on someone else's farm?
Shelley Cochran: I think they were the proprietors.
Laura Richard: That was probably a big motivation to come here, to have their own land. Because there they didn't have any chance to own any.
Shelley Cochran: I don't know how they came to Crosby from Fayette County. I don't know if the railroad had anything to do with it, because we did have the railroad depot in Crosby early on, and there was a cotton gin there also in that little town. So I really don't know why they came from there. Some stayed in Fayette; I know my great-grandfather had a brother there that he would go visit.
Laura Richard: I know a lot of them moved down towards Port Lavaca before they moved to Crosby.
UH Interviewer: Where is Crosby?
Shelley Cochran: Crosby is just about 5 miles north of Baytown.
UH Interviewer: Is that where you're from?
Shelley Cochran: We're from Crosby, yeah.
UH Interviewer: Did you grow up on a farm, then?
Shelley Cochran: No, my dad did.
UH Interviewer: So what did your dad do?
Shelley Cochran: My dad? I'm sure he worked on the farm as he was growing up, and then after he was older he went to business school for a while. Then he was in the Coast Guard during the war, and then after the war he went to work for a Shell Oil refinery...because I was already born and he had to make some money.
UH Interviewer: Did you know your great-grandparents?
Shelley Cochran: For a while.
UH Interviewer: Did they ever tell you anything about life in the old country?
Shelley Cochran: No, not really. They carried on a lot of the traditions, especially with the cooking, the kolache. My grandmother did that. They were very family-oriented people. They had gardens, even after they moved closer to town. Great-grandma Sirocka always had a garden, and chickens. I think for a while they might have had a cow, because I remember she made cottage cheese.
When my great-grandfather drank his coffee, he always poured it into the saucer. I think that's a Czech tradition of some kind.
UH Interviewer: So he drank it out of the saucer?
Shelley Cochran: I think he did that to cool it. I believe when we were in the Czech Republic something was said about that.
UH Interviewer: When you were growing up, what did your older family members tell you about your heritage?
Shelley Cochran: They really didn't tell me a lot. My dad's grandparents, I didn't see them very often. They spoke mostly Czech; I remember Grandpa Holy would come to the door to see my daddy and I'd open the door, and he'd say "Is the boss home?" He didn't speak a lot of English.
My dad's maternal grandparents, after they moved to town, lived right next door. They didn't discuss a lot about the heritage; I wish now they had. I wish I'd known to ask a thousand questions. That grandfather, the maternal grandfather, became a carpenter after he left the farm.
UH Interviewer: That's your dad's maternal grandfather, correct?
Shelley Cochran: Yeah. Frank Sirocka, if you want a name.
Laura Richard: He was the first one born in Texas, in America...He was the youngest of the brothers, the baby.
Shelley Cochran: So the others were born in Czech? They brought all of them. I didn't know that.
Laura Richard: I think there were some that died between him and George or Yuri; there's quite a bit of time between their births. Other family records show people dying between those years, for some reason. But he was the youngest of those siblings, and the only one born here.
Shelley Cochran: Grandma Sirocka, she had more German in her.
Laura Richard: Yeah, she was a Clawson, but her parents were Kovar, so she was probably like half German. And Anna Kovar, she was born in Horeci, Czechoslovakia, and she came when she was 20, I believe.
Shelley Cochran: My grandfather, my dad's dad, his name was Adolf Holy. He went by A.C. Holy. He likes to play the polka music on the radio, and he spoke a lot of Czech. He grew up speaking Czech a whole lot; it was probably his primary language, really.
My paternal grandparents left the farm when my aunt died; I was just a baby. They lived out in the country, and after she died, my grandmother didn't want to live there anymore. I think back in those days they didn't have funeral homes, and I think they had my aunt's body in the house, so my grandmother didn't want to stay there anymore. That's why they moved to Crosby.
My grandfather went to work for construction people; he worked for Williams Brothers Construction. They did road construction, and that's how he died. He didn't hear very well, and he went to work on a freeway when it was very foggy, and he didn't hear the car coming, and he was hit and killed instantly. That was about in '67 I think, or '68.
UH Interviewer: When did they leave the farm, the '50s?
Shelley Cochran: No, they would have left the farm in the '40s. I was born in '44; she died when I was 16, so they probably left in '45 or '46 to move closer to town.
UH Interviewer: Let's move on to your life. You were born on the farm and moved into town shortly afterwards?
Shelley Cochran: I was born in Galveston during the war, but we went to my grandparents' a lot from Galveston when I was a baby.
UH Interviewer: You grew up around a lot of your extended family, as well as your immediate family?
Shelley Cochran: Oh yeah, the Sirocka grandparents lived right next to us, and these were 50 foot wide lots, so it was right close. Sirockas and their daughter lived next to them, and then across the street were my dad's mother and daddy, the Holys. That's how we referred to them, and still do today: grandma-next-door, and grandma-across-the-street.
UH Interviewer: You went to school in Crosby?
Shelley Cochran: Yeah.
UH Interviewer: Okay, tell me in your own words how you would describe your early life.
Shelley Cochran: Well, it was a good life. I was the oldest of four; I folded a lot of diapers over the years, being the oldest of four. It was good having family so close to us; we always had somebody right there. It was just a normal life, really. Of course, growing up in such a small town, everyone knew everyone, and the saying was "don't talk bad about somebody because someone listening might be their relative."
It was a small school; there were only 49 of us that graduated my senior year. Everybody knew if you did something and the parents of other kids saw it they were gonna tell your parents that you did it...it was a good time. We were almost growing up more like brothers and sisters than classmates. We had a very close feeling.
UH Interviewer: What's the age and gender distribution of your siblings?
Shelley Cochran: There's five years between me and my brother, almost eleven years between me and my sister after him, and then thirteen years between me and the last sister. We were very spread out.
UH Interviewer: When did you graduate high school?
Shelley Cochran: '62.
UH Interviewer: Did you go to college immediately after that?
Shelley Cochran: Yes, we went to Lee College and Baytown Junior College, and then we went to the University of Houston.
UH Interviewer: What did you study there?
Shelley Cochran: Education. I was a teacher. I didn't finish my degree until after my youngest child started kindergarten, though; I stayed home with those three. And then I went to University of Houston at Clear Lake and finished my degree.
UH Interviewer: So, clearly there's some intervening things that happened there. Where did you first meet your husband?
Shelley Cochran: First grade, that's the truth. We had our first date when we were juniors in high school. Don't write this down, but I picked him out in the sixth grade.
UH Interviewer: Well, it's still going to be recorded.
Shelley Cochran: Okay, that's fine, it's the truth. Anyway, we stayed together from then on. We didn't marry until '65 when he graduated, or was about to graduate, from University of Houston. Then we had our family, three kids; I didn't space them as far apart as my parents. They did all the regular things: the dance program, the baseball, the band; they were very active in high school.
UH Interviewer: So you all continued to live in Crosby?
Shelley Cochran: Yeah.
UH Interviewer: Do you still live there?
Shelley Cochran: Yeah, it's a great place. Crosby has grown tremendously. You wouldn't recognize it from days ago.
UH Interviewer: I'd be interested if you want to talk about that a little more. Since you've lived there a long time, I'm sure it's changed a lot.
Shelley Cochran: Yes. We used to have a little Dairy Dream ice cream place. Now we have I think three Mexican restaurants, two Chinese restaurants, an Applebee's, Baytown Seafood. I mean, it's amazing: we have Dairy Queen, Wendy's, McDonald's, Popeye's. It's just exploded over the last several years. It's really grown, but it still maintains its tight-knit community aspect.
UH Interviewer: So you wouldn't say it's been absorbed into the ever-growing urban sprawl of Houston?
Shelley Cochran: Right. It's kept its hometown, small-town nature.
Laura Richard: Even though Josh Reddick lives there now.
Shelley Cochran: Right. Well, George Foreman lived in Huffman just a few miles away...So it's a good town. The community is very interested in the school, maybe particularly because our football team did so well the past few years. That's a draw, we're a big football community.
UH Interviewer: What schools are in the town?
Shelley Cochran: We now have five elementary schools and one high school.
Laura Richard: They used to have kindergarten in one building, first and second, third and fourth, kind of spread out. Now they've put first through fifth on campuses, and I think next year they're doing kindergarten through fifth. So now that they've gone that direction there are several elementaries.
Shelley Cochran: Crosby just about three or four years ago was able to move towards community schools. For a long time, from the late '60s during integration, we were under a major court order and we had to go to court anytime we wanted to build a school or anything, but finally they released us from that just a few years ago.
I taught school for 23 years; I taught 4th grade at Newport Elementary. We have a big subdivision called Newport; a lot of people refer to it almost as its own town, but it's not. It's in Crosby.
UH Interviewer: So you were a teacher for a long time, how would you say the educational landscape changed over the course of your career?
Shelley Cochran: Well, we don't have time. That STAAR test, the big state-wide standardized test, has just about mandated the teaching in the schools to this day.
UH Interviewer: When was that introduced?
Laura Richard: It was introduced when I was in high school; we were the first ones to take the test. It wasn't called STAAR, of course; it's changed its name over the years. Since then, it's just expanded. If you went to school in Texas, you know.
UH Interviewer: I did not, but I had a similar experience.
Shelley Cochran: I still substitute teach. I enjoy that, and I still enjoy working with the kids. But yeah, the state test has really dictated the courses, and everything about education, just about. People would be surprised at the security involved with that test. It has to be locked up in a room, and if you leave the room, you've got to lock everything up, and if a child gets up to go to the restroom, you've got to hold their test. You've probably been through all of that yourself as a student.
UH Interviewer: I've taken plenty of standardized tests in my life, yeah. So what was teaching like before the STAAR?
Shelley Cochran: We were a little more independent. They gave us the elements we were supposed to teach, and then we taught them. We didn't teach so much to the standardized test; we had more flexibility and we could broaden things out.
Laura Richard: You could teach it how it needed to be taught to those students.
Shelley Cochran: Exactly. They're almost scripted, today, in what they had to teach; we had more freedom.
Laura Richard: Laura taught reading, so she went from more of a literature-based style or curriculum to bullet-point teaching, almost.
Shelley Cochran: Yeah. Now you have to aim at the different aspects of reading: main idea, fact and opinion, etc. They're teaching concepts that children are not ready for yet at their age; that is a major problem.
UH Interviewer: So you said your teaching was more based around literature before; what kind of books did you use to teach?
Shelley Cochran: Back then we had reading textbooks that the state adopted; now they hardly use textbooks for reading. It's mostly printed passages, and answers the standardized test-style questions.
Laura Richard: Y'all had class sets of novels that y'all read, right?
Shelley Cochran: Yeah, we did, we did. I always used The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Tuck Everlasting, and James and the Giant Peach (one of my favorites), and then at Christmas The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. I love that story, the kids love it. And Sideways School is Falling Down, Sideways Stories from Wayside School. I read them every day twice a day, I should have it memorized.
UH Interviewer: So you mentioned racial integration. When did you start teaching?
Shelley Cochran: I don't know. Two or three years after Michael started kindergarten.
Laura Richard: '83 or '84?
Shelley Cochran: Probably something like that.
UH Interviewer: Okay. So that was well after the initial integration; when did the court order start?
Shelley Cochran: I think probably toward the mid-60s. We married in '65, and my older sister was in high school, and there were riots and things happening. That's why we wound up under that court order. My parents moved her to Deer Park, where she lived with my stepmother's niece, and went to school there, because of the riots.
UH Interviewer: So integration was well underway by the time you started teaching.
Shelley Cochran: Yeah, it was established.
UH Interviewer: What's the racial makeup of the school you taught at?
Shelley Cochran: I couldn't give you percentages. It was more white than black, but now our Hispanic community has overtaken the black community.
UH Interviewer: So how effective did you feel like the integration policies were at providing an equal education for everyone?
Shelley Cochran: We did fine in our school. The teachers got along well, we respected each other, we took care of the kids. We just taught children, didn't matter what color they were. We did fine after things settled down and got established the school was good.
Laura Richard: Yeah, my first grade teacher, Ms. Bell. I'll never forget her. She was a black lady, and I didn't know any different. Our principal, Mr. Tanner, I remember he was kind of intimidating. He was a large guy, and he was the principal. I remember once we got called to the office because something happened on the playground. I think these boys must have been teasing us or something. He was getting to the bottom of it. But I remember being scared going to the office. But he was so nice.
Shelley Cochran: She was a good little girl.
Laura Richard: At least at that time.
Shelley Cochran: She would have been scared. So now when I go up and sub, I'm subbing for teachers that were my students.
UH Interviewer: I guess you would have seen a good proportion of the population coming through your class at some time. Do you think a lot of them stayed in Crosby?
Shelley Cochran: I don't know, probably half and half. We've had a lot of Crosby graduates that have gone on to do great things. We've had brain surgeons, we have people in the space program. It makes me feel really proud that our little town has produced some really awesome people out into the public.
UH Interviewer: What are the primary industries in Crosby?
Shelley Cochran: A lot of grass farms are there now, that's a big thing. There's a little plant there called KMCO. If you remember during Harvey, the plant that blew up? That was Crosby. People were out of their homes for weeks.
Laura Richard: She was on vacation.
Shelley Cochran: Yeah, we were at Niagara Falls. Anyway, I would say that's the most industry we have there, and then there's the little community businesses. We have a lot of those.
Laura Richard: It's just so accessible, especially because of the new highway now, which makes it very easy to get to Houston.
UH Interviewer: Would you say you've noticed a change in the number of community businesses over your lifetime?
Shelley Cochran: Oh, yes. Crosby has moved further down 2100 South. Where there was a pecan orchard, there's now a Walmart.
Laura Richard: They still have their little cottage-type businesses there, though. We have an overpass now; that was a big deal because of the traffic. We're a really big thoroughfare to get to that highway to go to Houston from north, south, and east, and that train traffic caused a lot of problems. So Texas built an overpass.
That caused a lot of stress, because that's in the old part of town. That part of town is still there, and they've made it very cute with specialty shops, antiques, and things. So it's still a cute little area.
UH Interviewer: So how much do y'all know about the history of the town?
Shelley Cochran: See that book? That's 200 years of it.
Laura Richard: This was just published by somebody from Crosby, Jody Fuchs, and it goes back all the way to 1823. A guy named Humphrey Jackson first settled the site. The Jackson part is still there today.
Shelley Cochran: It's a major Czech settlement. So many Czech names there. When my husband and I went to Prague last September, a lot of the streets were the names of people in Crosby. There was a Sirocka Street.
Our high school principal's last name was Prochazka, and his family came from Czechoslovakia. When we were in Prague, on a mission trip, one of the preachers who helped us there, his last name was Prochazka.
Show him the Indian page. To me that shows really how far back it goes, to the Indian settlement. I didn't realize the Indian settlements were so close; they were on the bayous, I think. My uncle, my dad's brother, only four years older than me, went on the banks of the bayous and collected a lot of arrowheads. I remember he had a big picture frame with those arrowheads lined up in it. He must have had fifty or sixty arrowheads he collected on the bayous. I'm sure they're all gone now.
UH Interviewer: So you visited the Czech Republic recently; was that your first time? What did you think?
Shelley Cochran: Yeah, first time. It was awesome. It was a mission trip, but it was basically fact-finding. We didn't build anything or paint anything. We visited churches, and we visited outreach-type organizations trying to help people with their drug habits, or unwed mothers. They need a lot of help over there. We didn't realize it, but the Czech Republic is the most atheistic nation in the world today. We had no clue.
We went to an English-speaking church (well, the pastor spoke English), and there were like sixteen of us in the group. We went to the Sunday morning service, and he said we doubled his attendance that day. There are so few Christians over there. It was an amazing trip, though. It was through the Methodist church.
UH Interviewer: Would that be the same denomination your ancestors belonged to?
Shelley Cochran: I think a lot of my ancestors might have been Catholic.
Laura Richard: On the Holy side they were Protestant. But I believe the Sirocka side was probably Catholic. They interchanged churches here, maybe based on what was available.
Shelley Cochran: I know my mother and daddy were married in the Methodist church. So apparently by the time he was grown they had become Methodist.
UH Interviewer: So what does your husband do?
Shelley Cochran: He's retired now. He was an electronic engineer. He worked with data acquisition systems. He programmed the controls for the Riverwalk in San Antonio, or it was through his company. He worked for Foxboro.
Laura Richard: Almost everywhere we go he has some type of regulation system going on.
Shelley Cochran: He even did a big thing in Japan and Singapore. Spacecraft was his first job (the company was called Spacecraft). We lived in Alabama for three months; we lived there while he was working on the space program. It might have been one of the Apollos, I can't remember which one it was.
UH Interviewer: Where did he go to college?
Shelley Cochran: The University of Houston. Lee College first, and then UH. We have three children: Laura is our oldest, although she's not that old, and then two sons. They're all college graduates; they all have degrees.
UH Interviewer: Did the sons stick around in Crosby?
Shelley Cochran: One son is still in Crosby, the other son is in Spring. Laura is a...you'll have to tell him your title...
Laura Richard: She doesn't know what I do.
Shelley Cochran: She's a LSSP, but she's more than that; a Licensed Specialist in School Psychology, and she has a Master's degree. Right now she's coordinating a program in the Beaumont School District, she's implementing a program for them for social and emotional learning. The first son is a chemical engineer, and he's working for a company in Houston that deals with brine, saltwater brine, that they use to flush out storage tanks.
The youngest son has his degree from Lee College, although right now he's not using his degree at all. He and his brother-in-law co-manage his mother-in-law's business; they cut up steel. They send out crews to cut up barges and refinery things. They're all over the United States with that.
So, I don't know what kind of information you need...
UH Interviewer: Well, as you probably ascertained from our conversation at the beginning, I don't really either, so I'm just going for everything I can get.
Shelley Cochran: I wish I had more history for you.
Laura Richard: Well, we can go through some of this information. So, this is the book that was just published by Jody Fuchs. It's about Crosby, but it has a lot of stuff in it about our family. We can look at the timeline, since you were interested in when people came to Crosby.
So Frank Sirocka came to Crosby by 1897, and he came from the Victoria area. The Holies and the Clawsons were there in 1910 at least.
Shelley Cochran: Are the Kovars listed?
Laura Richard: No, because Anna Kovar came with her siblings to America. Her dad died, and her mother and older brother stayed behind, they didn't come to America. The Clawsons...he was German, and his wife was Czech, but he was called "The Czech" even though he wasn't Czech. But he spoke it so well, and maybe helped a lot of Czech people who didn't speak English? He had a cotton gin, a really big cotton gin.
Later on, the Sirockas at least tried to have a saloon in town. The problem was that back then there was a law that you could only have a saloon for every 500 people, and there was already a saloon in the town. So there was a court case in Houston about it. I think they didn't get the saloon at first, it took a long time, so instead they operated still. They had a black-market business going on, I guess. When someone found out about it, I think that's when they got sued. They had a saloon, the Sirocka saloon, at least in 1907.
UH Interviewer: Do you happen to know the name of the court case? Is it in the book?
Laura Richard: Yeah, it should be. Let me see if it's in the index...it was a big article, let me see if I can thumb through and find it.
UH Interviewer: It's fine, I can probably find a copy of the book if I need it. So that just came out?
Laura Richard: It did. Shelley got it for us for Christmas. It's a pretty expensive book...This is John Clawson here. He was the bookkeeper at the Crosby State Bank. The bank building is still in the town; it's an antique store now. This is a picture of him and the bank teller in the bank building.
Shelley Cochran: You should come to Crosby. Did you ever go to the San Jacinto Monument?
UH Interviewer: Yeah.
Shelley Cochran: Well, just continue north and Crosby's about ten miles north.
Laura Richard: Okay, here's the part about the saloons. This is a picture of the inside of the Sirocka saloon, about 1916. Here's the article.
Article text [read by Laura]: A contest is filed. A saloon-man is named as the contestant. hearing of the Charles Dubard contest set for today in the county court. The application of J.A. Clawson and Joe Sirocka, who are distantly related by marriage, for a liquor license authorizing them to open a salon in Crosby is being contested by C.M. Matthews, a saloon-man of the same town who claims to be the owner of the property upon which the applicants propose to open for business.
In the contest, it is alleged that the applicants were not engaged in business on February 20, 1909, nor did they succeed anyone in business, and that they are now engaged in the salon business in Crosby...as many persons as the law permits on the basis of one place for every 500 inhabitants of a town or precinct.
Laura Richard: So that was in 1909, or later. It says here:
Caption [read by Laura]: Clyde Johnson, and John Clawson, upper right photo, were part owners of the Sirocka saloon, where they served a home brew called White Mule Corn Liquor in addition to some local beers. The beer and drinks that patrons didn't finish were poured into a trough out behind the saloon. The trough was part of Mr. Sirocka's barn and pigpen. He kept a pig in the pen that would finish off all the drinks drained into the trough. The pig staggered about almost every day but Sunday.
Laura Richard: So that's a cool story.
Shelley Cochran: I bet that pig was tender.
UH Interviewer: Yeah, I wonder what it tasted like.
Laura Richard: Here's another one that says someone's liquor license was revoked. I don't think that's our family's saloon though. So that's that part.
The schools were community schools, because they lived on farms and didn't have a lot of cars at the time. So here are pictures of the schools...this was in 1897, the Crosby school. It was on a street that was close to town. I think back in the day the farmers sort of looked down on the town people, but then about the '40s and '50s, when they moved to town, it was the place to be, from hearing them talk back in the day.
Shelley Cochran: We also had several dairy farms, at least two or three, in the town.
Laura Richard: You can see in this picture from the 1890s: this is the town school kids, and this is the town school. You can see it's a big difference from today; in what the kids looked like, and their school looked like. It was usually a little building, and the kids are all in overalls rather than the little cute dresses.
Then they built a big school for the town, around 1910. The younger kids still went to little area schools, I think they had four or five, and they put on dramas...This is a picture of a play program for Cinderella.
Shelley Cochran: A while ago, I mentioned we had a principal whose name was Prochazka. One year he attempted to teach a class on the Czech language, but we didn't get very much done because he was the principal and he was out of the class half the time.
Laura Richard: This is a picture of the Clawson school; it was the Clawson school because it was on the Clawson's farm. Maybe they built it especially for the school? They hired their own teacher, and pretty much all the families were their relatives or neighbors.
Shelley Cochran: It was probably a community project.
Laura Richard: Let's see. In 1925 they built a high school. This is a picture of their first school bus, from 1925.
Shelley Cochran: I think they had one that was older than that. I'm not sure, though.
Laura Richard: Back then, like Shelley was saying, her teacher, that taught Czech, wasn't he also the principal, and the bus driver, and the janitor, probably.
Shelley Cochran: I don't think he was the janitor. Uncle Louis [Adelong?] was the janitor. But he was out of class most of the time.
Laura Richard: This picture is Shelley grandfather's band. They have a lot of Czech bands; they still have halls that are still operational, like Green Hall. Have you ever heard of Green Hall? It's an old dance hall. In Crosby, they had a hall where they would go and dance, and it was called Bohemian Hall. It's not there anymore, unfortunately.
This picture is typical of what the events would look like, and you can see the entire town is there. This is the [Wozchk's?] wedding. Music was a big deal. I didn't understand why they had photographs of men in athletic wear in the book, but in a Czech-American culture class at the museum they talked about how the [Sokols?] were really big and they did gymnastics and things like that, so I guess they brought that, or attempted to bring that, to Crosby. But being in Texas you're gonna turn into a football player or baseball player.
They had a couple of different bands, not just Shelley’s grandfather's. If you travel towards La Grange, Austin, the Hill Country, you'll still see dance halls.
Shelley Cochran: Green Hall is in New Braunfels, if you know where that is. Close to San Antonio. In Crosby, the American Legion had a big building, the American Legion Hall, and that's where a lot of our social events were held: school events, victory dances after football games, and so on. Every Saturday night they had a dance there, with some band, and people would come from all around. It was known as The Stomp. People would say "Are you going to The Stomp?" and you knew what they were talking about.
UH Interviewer: How did you get connected with the Czech Center?
Shelley Cochran: Laura discovered it.
Laura Richard: Actually, it may have been Tom. No, actually it was Aunt Angie, long ago when they first built it. She told us about it a long time ago, and then...I can't remember if we visited here first. My husband comes here a lot; the ladies in the gift shop used to know him by name.
Shelley Cochran: Four years ago, Laura and her husband, and her dad and I, we celebrated our anniversaries here. It was their 25th and our 50th. They let us decorate, and we had a huge gathering. It was very nice.
UH Interviewer: Yeah, it's a really nice venue.
Laura Richard: It is, it's really nice. So we try to come to their events, and help keep it running, because it is such a nice place, and I think it's relatively unknown.
So these pictures are mostly of families. This is a picture of the Anna Kovar and Clawson farm, and they had a lot of kids; this is a picture of all their kids and spouses on their wedding day. Actually, all of the families pictured seem to have a lot of kids.
They had cows, and I think different people specialized in different things. They had large homes, and I remember some of these places. This barn is no longer there, but now they've used it for the town logo. I think there's a show or something where people come in and remake your town.
UH Interviewer: The whole town?
Shelley Cochran: Yeah, some kind of town makeover.
UH Interviewer: I understand the concept, it just seems difficult when it's a whole town.
Shelley Cochran: I know, I wonder what they do. There's some things I don't want them to change.
Laura Richard: They had some rice farmers.
Shelley Cochran: Yeah, people raised cotton and rice. There's a big canal that runs through Highlands and Crosby, so I'm sure the rice farmers used that. But my people did cotton. I guess rice, cotton, and dairy were the three main agricultural products, and the cotton gin next to the cotton.
UH Interviewer: How big would these farms be? Back then, I'm sure they're pretty big now.
Shelley Cochran: That's a good question. I don't know how many acres they would have been.
UH Interviewer: Do you know how many people they would employ to do the work?
Shelley Cochran: No, I think they did most of the work themselves. I know my grandmother, my dad's mother, a Holy, she had a black lady that worked in the house, so that she could work in the field.
UH Interviewer: So they didn't have any sharecroppers or anything like that?
Shelley Cochran: No.
UH Interviewer: Now are the farms larger and more consolidated?
Shelley Cochran: We don't have any cotton or rice. Now it's just grass, and those are huge.
Laura Richard: Yeah, it seems like any blank piece of land is a grass farm. Otherwise it would be swallowed up by a subdivision or something.
Shelley Cochran: They're building subdivisions in our area.
Laura Richard: Is the University of Houston shut down?
UH Interviewer: Yeah. We're completely off next week and then going to online classes after that indefinitely.
Shelley Cochran: Laura’s daughter is gonna find out right now, actually, it's 3:00. She goes to Stephen F. Austin in Nacogdoches.
UH Interviewer: I'd guess they will shut down, most places are. I know HISD is shutting down, and the Rodeo.