The Mystery of the Bargsley Family Plot solved

The voice on the recorded message came through slow and steady.

“My name is James S. Bargsley,” the voice informs me. “I’m 88. That was my family in your story about the 1922 tornado.”

I hold my breath. “The Mystery of the Bargsley Family Plot,” published earlier this year, had produced an actual Bargsley.

Quick math confirmed that “Jim” could not have witnessed with his own eyes the twin twisters that had killed 13 Austinites and flattened the Bargsley homestead in what is now Southwest Austin.

Yet he had stored up compelling memories, not just about the tornadoes.

“They talked about how horrible it was,” Bargsley told me in the tidy Cedar Park house he shares with his wife, Mary Helen Kennard Bargsley, whom he had met at Prewitt Creameries on West Fifth Street more than 60 years ago. “When we’d get a bad storm, everybody’d go down to the storm cellar and stay down there till it passed.”

Sarah Bargsley, the matriarch killed in the storm, was his father’s grandmother. Her family, along with Harper, described as a “negress” with one name in newspaper reports, farmed corn and raised chickens on 100 acres near Brodie Lane.

“They’d talk about how many people were killed and how much was torn up,” Bargsley says. “The house was annihilated. Nothing left of it. Barbed wire gone through trees. The livestock all dead.”

He showed me pictures of his great-grandmother with two men, one presumably his father, before a board-and-batten farm house. Another image showed Harper, her hands worn with hard work, while a third revealed the post-storm devastation, including dead livestock.

“That had been our land since the 1860s,” Bargsley says. “My parents married the year after the tornado. I don’t know where they were that day.”

Nearly nine decades in Central Texas

Bargsley, born in 1924, lived in the Deep Eddy area on Lake Austin Boulevard when it was called Dam Boulevard with his father and mother. Her parents, the Smiths, lived next door.

Bargsley’s father, Earnest W. Bargsley, was a city policeman, but his mother, May Smith Bargsley, thought that riding motorcycles was too dangerous, so he switched to driving the trolley to and from downtown.

Earnest’s father was William Bargsley, a butcher on Congress Avenue and deputy sheriff. He was the son of old John Bargsley, the farmer buried in the family plot inside today’s Longview Park.

John’s wife was Sarah, killed in the tornado with her daughter, Ada Lena Bargsley, who would have been Jim’s great-aunt.

They were part of the 19th century migration of “holler folk” who followed the Appalachians down to the Ozarks and eventually the Texas Hill Country.

When Bargsley turned 5, his father developed tuberculosis. (Family lore suggests he caught it drinking moonshine with his father, who also contracted TB.) For years, Earnest was confined to the family’s backyard cottages until he died.

“I never really got to know him,” Bargsley says.

His maternal grandpa, James E. Smith, was a city blacksmith. He kept the family going, keeping his cash out of banks during the Depression.

“He hid it in the garage in a metal box because he was afraid to put it in the bank,” Bargsley recalls. “Eventually, he saved enough to buy land in Oak Hill. Paid cash for it. Twelve dollars an acre. Built a house and drilled a well.”

While Bargsley attended Oak Hill School during the 1930s, the family chopped wood for heat and cooking, raised cows for milk and butter, and used kerosene lamps because there was no electricity.

At age 63, his Grandpa Smith died of a heart attack. His mother had a small income from the Works Progress Administration. The folks at Oak Hill Baptist Church helped out, too, especially after a fire burned down their main house.

“They got us back on our feet,” Bargsley says. “People were so nice to us.”

His mother saved enough for a battery radio that brightened up the house they shared with their extended family.

“We were sitting there one Sunday morning, getting ready to go to church,” Bargsley recalls. “That’s when we heard that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.”

War and beyond

“All my buddies were talking about joining the Navy,” Bargsley says. “We thought: ‘Why don’t we just join the Navy to keep the Army from drafting us?’”

By December 1941, he was taking a school bus down to Austin High School. His little brother Johnny Bargsley couldn’t do all the chores on his own.

“You had to have consent if you were 17 years old,” he says.”Finally, I got my mother to sign the papers.”

Bargsley trained in radio and gunnery schools, but dive bombers made him deathly sick, so he served as a radioman on the USS Fowler, shepherding merchant vessels through the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. He transferred to the USS Bassett in the Pacific Theater, carrying Navy frogmen — precursors to SEALs — training for an expected invasion of Japan.

In July 1945, he was copying code from Washington, D.C., when he learned that two torpedoes had taken down the USS Indianapolis far from any other U.S. vessel. The Bassett immediately steered in that direction.

“We got out there after dark,” he says quietly. “Men were floating in the water. We used searchlights to find them. We just knew we were going to be blown to bits.”

Bargsley says his crew fished out 152 men. Altogether, only 317 of the Indianapolis’ 1,196 crew members survived.

“They had been in the water four days and five nights, no food, no water, sharks were eating them up,” he says. “In one more day, they’d all been gone.”

Back home, his mother had remarried. His aunt on Kinney Street took him in. He studied accounting and took a job at the Texas Department of Transportation, where he worked for 31 years.

“I was never the big guy, the chief,” he says. “But I always did what I was supposed to do.”

Mostly from Austin, his wife was living in Corpus Christi when they met at the creamery.

“She had long black hair,” he remembers. “I thought she looked real sweet.”

They’ve been together 63 years and raised three sons in Crestview. The boys worked at the Minimax. One died in July. He would have been 60 in November.

Jim saved one final surprise. A fourth tombstone, small and plain, sits in that now famous family plot.

“Mrs. Jack Arrington, 1804-1901,” he smiles about yet another long-lived relative. “She was Sarah’s mother.”