O. C. Falls Blacksmith Shop
The town’s last blacksmith drove a new Buick, had a summer weekend home on Glass Club Lake and the first TV on Church Street.
“Everybody in the neighborhood went to see it,” said Bird Old III. “He’d built an antenna in the back yard joining ours. She was in the house tuning the set hollering directions out the window while he turned the antenna with a pipe wrench.”
Otis “Monkey” Falls was “a rich man for his day.
“He was a volunteer fireman,” Mr. Old said. “When he was Mt. Pleasant’s mayor his single issue was building a modern fire department.”
The family came from Tennessee where Madison Falls was born in 1837 and was the first of three generations of blacksmiths. Otis Falls’s shop was in the horseshoe bend of Cotton Street, which ties into Washington on the south end and Industrial on the north.
Madison came west in 1882. He settled in Independence County, Arkansas that April on 160 acres of land acquired through the Homestead Act. He raised cattle and opened Falls Blacksmith Shop in Cushman.
His 15 children scattered the family name from Arkansas into Oklahoma, then south across the state line into north Texas counties along the Red River at Honey Grove and Paris.
His son Monroe, Otis’s father, lived in Mt. Pleasant when Madison died at 88 on July 10, 1924, “after an illness of only a few hours.
“He leaves over 100 grandchildren, 75 great grandchildren and a host of friends who join in sympathy with the bereaved one,” reads his obituary.
Born in 1905, Otis Falls was elected by the Mt. Pleasant Fire Department volunteers as their chief in 1949.
He remained as Chief through 1958 when the volunteers bought “an emergency truck, two walkie talkies, a resuscitator and boat,” said R.L. Jurney’s History of Titus County Texas, 1846-1960.
