Amanuensis Monday: Melvin Van Every and Cotton in the El Paso Valley - 1917

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

I continue my project to transcribe family letters, journals, newspaper articles, audiotapes, and other historical artifacts. Not only do the documents contain genealogical information, the words breathe life into kin - some I never met - others I see a time in their life before I knew them.

Today I transcribe two newspaper clippings. One my great grandfather's obituary from 1929, and a letter to the editor one of his daughters, Minnie Van Every Benold, wrote in 1965. Both discuss my great grandfather's role in growing cotton in the El Paso valley.

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El Paso Times, May 28, 1929, page 14 

MELVIN E. VAN EVERY, 60, died at Garfield, N.M., Sunday. Services will be held at 4 o’clock this afternoon at the chapel of Kaster & Maxon the Rev. W. Angie Smith officiating. Burial will be in Evergreen cemetery.

Mr. Van Every was one of the pioneer residents of the lower valley and was engaged in cotton growing and ginning. He was the builder of the first cotton gin in the valley.

He is survived by his widow, Mrs. Josie Van Every, three daughters, Mrs. Minnie Benold and Mrs. I.T. Herrin, both of El Paso, and Miss Myrtle Van Every of Kansas City, Mo., also by one son, Dr. S.O. Van Every of Kansas City, Mo. Pallbearers will be selected from the W.O.W. of which he was a member.

El Paso Times, Feb 12, 1965, p.4. 

Dear Mr. Hooten: I have just read your request for information as to who raised the Valley’s first cotton. I think I know!

My father, M.E. Van Every “scouted” for good cotton land in 1917 from South Texas to California and bought land two miles below Fabens. There he cleared and ditched the land for irrigation in time to plant cotton for the spring of 1918.

Louis J. Ivey was his good friend and may have experimented before, but all had decided the summers were too short. My father contended that some seasons were not and planted 11 acres, from which he harvested 14 bales, taking the cotton somewhere over in Texas for ginning. He then built a cotton gin in Fabens or Tornillo.

This set the Valley “on fire” and the farmers turned their alfalfa and wheat fields and orchards into cotton patches! He sent letters and telegrams to us, begging us to move out, until we did in 1919 to take charge of my uncle’s farm who was to ill to farm.

This is the story of how our family came West. That year we made enough on our cotton to buy a car and put $1,000 in the bank. Cotton was 39 cents a pound, the highest since the Civil War. I believe this to be the true story of cotton here.

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Notes:

1) My great grandfather and Louis.J. Ivey were both mentioned in a 1919 article on El Paso cotton growing.

2) An obituary I previously transcribed from May 29th states he was 66. 66 is the correct age.

3) Minnie's letter clarifies that my great grandfather scouted out land in El Paso while his family remained in San Marcos, on the opposite side of Texas. Minnie, the eldest child, was 33 in 1917. His youngest child, my grandmother, Myrtle, was only 17 in 1917.

4) Minnie is the same great-aunt who wrote a series of letters to the Houston Post as a child for their Happy Hammers children's section.