Miss Dorothy’s School of Music was Gray Rock’s last enterprise
Above photo, Miss Dorothy Long’s pooch, Annie could sing. Anybody who spent time at Miss Dorothy’s School of music learned something.
From East Texas Journal, November 1993
By Hudson Old, Journal publisher
Gray Rock, Texas – Whoever in Franklin County can’t sing or at least hit a C-cord on the piano never stood still around Miss Dorothy Long enough.
Miss Dorothy Mae Long’s school of music, established in 1948, was the last commercial enterprise
in Gray Rock, Texas, that once was a thriving 19th century town.
Matter of fact, whenever Franklin County was created in 1876, the first big political fight was between Gray Rock and Lone Star, Lone Star being the town site that’s now Mt. Vernon.
Each community wanted to be the county seat. Mt. Vernon won out and a decade later, when the railroad by-passed Gray Rock, the county’s future growth came along the railway.
According to the deal they read at the unveiling of the Texas Historical Marker at the Gray Rock Cemetery, population 411, the earliest unmarked graves may date from the “1840s, when the nearby town was settled along a frontier highway.”
The marker went up in 1975 and being the remaining town dignitary, Miss Dorothy was on the program to unveil the marker. She saved the program. She saves everything.
Besides losing the county seat brawl and missing the railroad, the community endured a typhoid epidemic.
Her senior year in high school, a tornado swept through, wrecking things, including her family home place. She can cut through the years to the very night of the storm.
Her mother had just come home after surgery. Clouds bloomed in the sky early in the evening as her father drove her to the high school for a Spanish program.
After they came home that night, the rain began, driving rain with hail, winds that whipped against their white frame home on the hill, a home with porches, swings, and profusions of flowers.
It was the home her father, Grey Rock old-timer Thomas Sidney Carpenter built. Mr. Carpenter had married Lilly Simpson, sister and heir to Henry Simpson. The legend on Henry’s about the time he and the sheriff fenced off the town of Mt. Vernon to hold the cattle they shipped in by rail.
Henry and Lilly’s daughter, Nona, Miss Dorothy’s mother, got Miss Dorothy’s music career going.
Family piano shipped from Chicago to Jefferson riverport
“She was a fabulous piano player,” Miss Dorothy recalls. “On Sunday afternoons, people used to stop out around the house to listen to her playing the piano her father brought home on a wagon from the old riverport at Jefferson. “My father, Sterling Price Williams, was a farmer from Delta County who moved to Grey Rock. He wasn’t trained musician, but he was a fabulous singer, so our family was always musical.”
Nona, incidentally, was the musical student of Mrs. Bertha Lilienstern, but before we got the whole story traced back to Adam and Eve, Miss Dorothy got sidetracked telling me about the tornado.
“The rain let up for a moment, and then we heard it,” Miss Dorothy said. “It was exactly like hearing a train coming, and even though we’d never heard a tornado before, we all knew what it was.
“Daddy had us move into a corner of one of the rooms and then it began — the house was moving and flying apart all around us. There wasn’t anywhere to get away from it — we were in the middle of it.
“We had neighbors around then, and in the quiet after the storm I remember the men calling across the night, hollering from home to home — who needed help, who was okay,” Miss Dorothy said.
Legendary Coach “Catfish” Smith was the Mt. Vernon’s High School coach then, so the morning after the storm, he loaded up the school’s ag class on a flatbed truck and drove them out to help haul remains of possessions to shelter.
The piano that came on a paddle boat to the port at Jefferson was among the things that survived the storm.
So has Miss Dorothy, a woman at whom life has chunked stuff.
Within two years of the storm, her father was dead. Her marriage was brief and sad. She centered her life around raising two children, caring for an invalid mom, making ends meet tending a double band full of cattle, and teaching music.
She worked with the elderly and homeless through the North East Texas Opportunities organization.
That outfit wanted her because she’s got a single-spaced, two page, civic-spirited resume that would explain why she was named Franklin county’s woman of the year in 1989.
To the majority of people who knew her, she was Miss Dorothy the music teacher, the woman who for nearly 50 years has conducted afternoon music lessons. And lessons about life. And how to make branched fruit.
” I was 12 and my sister was 14 when we started going out to Miss Dorothy’s School of Music after school,” said Amy Greer.
“Anybody who grew up talking about life and making plum jelly at Miss Dorothy’s kitchen table has an understanding about keeping perspective,” Amy said.
Miss Dorothy knew things we need to learn — like making herb vinegar with tarragon, oregano, parsley, dill and garlic — a major answer in life if regular pepper sauce gets dull on your greens. She grew all that in her herb garden.
“I studied music and jelly making at Miss Dorothy’s School of Music until after high school,” Amy said. “We baked cakes on birthdays and to this day if I wanted to make brandied fruit, I could. Her home’s was one place in my life that I could go back and sit at the kitchen table and talk about anything.”
There’s a magic about music and jelly.
