125th birthday
For members of the Longnecker (Longenecker) family
Rebecca May Ice was born on November 7, 1899. Today is her 125th birthday.
She was my great-great grandmother, an ancestor of my maternal grandmother, Billye Lou Longnecker.
Rebecca — affectionately known as “Beckie” — was born in Indian Territory, most likely in or near the town of Alluwe (now a drowned ghost town) in what is now Nowata County, Oklahoma. Her parents, Trammel and Mary Ice, were originally from Indiana.
At the time of her birth, this land nominally belonged to the Cherokee Nation. The tribe occasionally leased land to members of other tribes or white settlers (including the Lenape, founders of Alluwe), but during this time period the U.S. government was systematically abolishing communal tribal property rights and reclassifying land in Indian Territory as “unassigned” — and therefore open to homesteaders, like the Ice family. After the discovery of petroleum wells nearby in the early 1900’s, Alluwe quickly transformed from a small farming community into an oil boomtown.
In March of 1915, at only fifteen years old, Beckie married an oil field teamster named Guy Kay Hall. Their first child, a daughter named Belva May Hall, was born almost exactly nine months later in December of 1915. They would go on to have a total of eight children together.
The family stayed in Oklahoma until 1922, when they made the first of many, many moves over the next three decades in pursuit of oil field jobs. They lived in about thirteen or fourteen different places across Arkansas, Illinois, Oklahoma, and Texas until finally settling down for retirement in Graham, Young County, Texas. Beckie was widowed when her husband suffered a heart attack in 1972. After her husband died, Rebecca and her grown children organized regular family reunions at the nearby Possum Kingdom Lake.
Beckie passed away on April 22, 1984 there in Graham; she was eighty-four years old. Her funeral was held at the Oak Street Baptist Church and she was buried next to her husband in Pioneer Cemetery. At the time of her death, she was survived by 29 grandchildren, 23 great-grandchildren, and 1 great-great-grandchild.
Rebecca May Ice was a devoted wife and mother who worked hard to maintain a happy, respectable home no matter where life took her. She was loved by her family and remembered fondly by those who knew her. Happy 125th, Beckie.