Biography of Sarah Jane Jones
by Freeda (Townsend) Hodges

Born July 24, 1907 of the flesh. Born of the spirit at age 16. Served the Lord with steadfastness in the ways she understood that she should for the rest of her physical life. She read the Holy Scriptures to her children as they sat on the floor around her, in effort to pass her faith on to them. June 21st 1977, she went to be with the Lord, leaving us with memories and faith.

Sarah Jane (Jones) Townsend was born July 24, 1907. She was the second child, but the first daughter of Elihu and Bethanie Francis Jones. She was born in the home on the farm where she was also raised. The farm was located South of the Strawberry Schoolhouse about a mile and a half.
At age six, Sarah started school at Minnow Creek School (now in bad state of decay) later at age 14 her parents transferred her to Strawberry School where she completed eight grade. In those days an eight-grade education was considered a good education. One could if one chose take a normal test and become a school teacher at that point.

Being the second child and the first daughter of a family of 14 children in those days was not easy. Life became an uneventful, even dull thing, consisting mostly of a lot of hard work. Children were taught early to work in the fields and to help around the home in caring for the younger siblings.

As soon as she was old enough, Sarah became not only a farm hand on her father's farm but a helper about the house as well.

Household work consisted of cooking breakfast early in the morning for the entire family, milking the family cow(s), washing dishes, making a fire in the wood burning range for all the cooking, water heating for cleaning purposes etc., cooking dinner (their main meal was at noon), washing dishes, helping in the fields till supper, doing dishes, bathing younger brothers and sisters and getting them to bed.

Family wash day was another of Sarah's jobs. For this she carried water from a spring about two hundred yards from the house (until a well was drilled), heated it in the iron kettle over an outside fire, rubbing the clothes on a rub board with the help of lye soap, which Sarah also made by cooking animal fat and lye in the same iron kettle outside on an open fire soon after butchering time.

At age of 16, Sarah met the Lord and accepted him into her life and he became the true Lord of her life. She placed her membership in the United Baptist Church, which met, in the same Strawberry School-house, where Sarah earned her education.

Being a devout Christian, Sarah spent the rest of her life doing whatever she could to further the cause of Christ. One of the first jobs she did was to serve as secretary of the Sunday school at Strawberry. Later she taught the card class.

When Sarah was 24, she came down with the typhoid fever. For the first time in all her otherwise healthy life, Sarah had trouble regaining her strength. Even up to the time when she became the bride of Frank R. Townsend at the age of 26, she tired very easily.

Sarah chose to have her wedding at the home of her parents, and to have her grandfather, Rev. Fee Gregory Jones to officiate at her wedding on February 11th 1934. After the ceremony, she moved all her belongings into the house already occupied by Frank.

In November of that same year, on Thanksgiving day (the 29th) she gave birth to a baby girl, whom she and Frank named Freeda Ray. The birth was a difficult one, the baby being in the breech position. Again Sarah's health suffered.

It was just about two weeks later, that Sarah suffered the loss of her father. Sometimes many years later, one would occasionally find Sarah in tears at the memory.

By this time the depression years were hitting hard in the area, work was scarce, and there was little or no market for farm produce. The word came that there was a living to be made working as sharecroppers for E. P. Coleman in Southeast Missouri. So Frank and Sarah packed up their belongings and moved to Matthew's Missouri, where they stayed for about two years. During their stay there, on June 4th 1936, Sarah again gave birth, this time to a son whom they named Leon Olen. Frank and Sarah both were unhappy in Missouri, the ways of the life of a sharecropper was strange to them. So again they packed up all of their earthly belongings and moved again to Arkansas, into the house were Sarah had spent most of her younger years.

It was during the months that they were living in that house that Sarah again had a child, May 29th 1938, Lura Juanita was born. Within a few months Frank and Sarah moved again into the house where they lived when they were first married.

April 3rd 1946 was the date and Nina Janice, the daughter that completed Sarah and Frank's family. This time Sarah did something very different, she went into the hospital in Clarksville to have the baby.

Sarah and Frank also accumulated a bit of land during the years. A favorite saying of Frank, "Forty acres for each kid."

Sarah's health became progressively worse for some years, until most of the children were gone from home. In spite of this, she helped to teach her children, and encourage each one until he had finished High School. She expected great things from her children, and was always just a little disappointed that each one became just an ordinary person.

In 1955 Frank and Sarah moved with their children to a small rental home by the airport at Clarksville, where they lived for about a year and a half, until their son had almost completed a new home for them across the road from the airport. They lived there until January of 1961, when they moved with Nina, the only child left at home to Wentzville, Missouri to help Leon care for his oldest son, Gary. Leon had been widowed when a car-train accident took the life of his first wife Dorothy, and orphaned their small son. Sarah and Frank continued to live with Leon for a little over two years until Leon remarried to a young lady named Cynthia Kay Morris. Then Sarah and Frank took Nina and moved back to Clarksville, where Sarah lived until her death.

In March of 1966, Sarah entered Sparks Memorial Hospital in Fort Smith Arkansas, where she underwent a Radical Mastectomy of the left breast, the beginning of her long fight with cancer. About three months later, before she fully recovered from the surgery, she lost her husband, Frank on June 15th 1966. He died in the Veterans Hospital in Little Rock Arkansas. She had his funeral in the Cox Funeral Home in Clarksville Arkansas, and had him buried in the Minnow Creek Cemetery.

Sarah had a series of cobalt treatments three different years and surgery twice more as her war with cancer progressed, she also took certain hormone tablets, and chemo-therapy etc. for several years.

Sarah continued to live alone and take care of herself in the house built by Leon until about three weeks before her death, when she entered the hospital for chemo-therapy and a test. She came home for about four days, then had to return one final time to the hospital where she left from to go be with her Lord on June 21st, 1977.

As she requested, her funeral was held in the Cox Funeral Home and she was buried beside Frank in the Minnow Creek Cemetery, on June 23rd, 1977, just one day before the 11th Anniversary of the death of Frank.