s/o Lawson MacKell Grice and Sarah Jane Banther Grice.
J.R. "Tom" Grice was born in McDowell Co, North Carolina, near Old Fort. He grew up in Gilmer Co, in the North Georgia Mountains where he met and married his beloved Rachel Cochran.
Growing up down in the holler of the Blue Ridge meant he had all the skills necessary for survival in those hills including how to convert a small mountain corn crop into liquid gold for sale on the Atlanta market.
Ready for change, after Federal agents began cracking down on moonshiners, James R. Grice, and his wife and chldren moved to Palo Pinto County Texas, about 1896, living where Possum Kingdom Dam now stands down on the Brazos River, and where he "converted", and was Baptized at a Revival Meeting.
They were moving through Port, Washita County, Oklahoma around 1900, and stopped to add an eighth baby to the family. His parents came out to Port from Georgia to join them, where so many Georgia friends had landed.
J.R. Tom Grice was a freighter, hauling supplies from Elk City, Sayre, and Cordell sometimes using two wagons hitched together and pulled by stout teams of Jacks. One Mammoth Jack sired many mules for him to train and sell. Read his account about freighting with those wagons in Oklahoma Pioneers and Indians WPA interviews. The children herded the cattle, and picked cotton to help out. The family lived just about 1/2 mile east of Port, where there was a slight draw and formerly, a stream.
In 1903, he filed on a homestead claim in the Oklahoma Panhandle, 4 miles west of Guymon, and the family moved there in a covered wagon in the raw March of 1904, with oldest son, Jim, driving their cattle to the claim.
Rachel got sick on the way, caught a fever and died within two weeks after arrival. They took her back to Port where the folks were, and she was buried, in Port Cemetery, close to Sentinel, Okla. Grandma Jane of Port, also died in two months of fever, and heartbroken Grampa Lawson Mackell moved to the Panhandle to file on a homestead adjacent to his son James R. Grice, with another son, Lawson Ross Grice living within a few miles.
J.R. Tom had other siblings who moved to the Panhandle: older brother Will Grice lived here and ran a laundry. Wash Grice, a fiddle player came through this area and then to Colorado where he pastored a Nazarene church and ran a photographic studio. Widowed sister, Nancy Jane, came to the Oklahoma Panhandle with her young son, and met her cattle buyer husband from Nebraska.
J. R. "Tom" Grice lived as a widower for 15 years, farming, raising one of the first wheat crops in Texas County, raising cattle, horses, and mules, and young-uns and doing seasonal work for the Anchor D Ranch in exchange for firewood, and still doing some freighting with his wagons and teams of mules, and helped haul the first cotton crop to the gin in Guymon, while the older children helped raise the younger ones. Tom Grice had in hand the Blue Back Speller that he had learned his ABCs from, and he used it to teach all his children to read the Bible and other things too. He had a set of shoe lasts, and when cold weather approached he'd pick up some leather he'd saved by and begin making shoes for his kids for the winter, beginning with the older ones who had to do the outside chores. Evenings by the fire, he'd be the cobbler, making pairs of footwear for all his brood. Some of his near neighbors who were friends were the Bonners, Hambys, and Camps.
Anna Jones Tebo had lived in Guymon, Okla and when she moved back to Kansas with her Jones family, "Tom" Grice twitched his big mustache side to side and took a train to Eureka, to marry that "smiley Methodist gal who could cook and sing" and moved them back to the Panhandle in a Pioneer "Yours, Mine and Ours" with 16 children to their credit. He claimed, "She makes me happy. We been runnin' short on that." J.R. and Anna were members of the First Baptist Church, grew a fruit orchard, and at home, Anna played the pump organ she had bought on payments, and was a midwife. They would often attend several churches on Sunday, for when the Baptist church let out, they'd stop by the Methodist to see her friends, and get in on the last hymns, or if folks were still at the Nazarene where Will attended, they might go in and join him.
J.R. Tom Grice had a Percheron stallion and a Hambletonian mare and he raised fine horses for pulling the buggy. He raised some greyhounds he liked to take hunting, and woe to the son who messed with his hounds! That wasn't allowed. The greyhounds helped him secure meat for the table in those lean dirty thirties.
Lean times call for unusual measures. Tom would kill a rattlesnake and cure it's skin, using a special stretching process to make the snake appear bigger than it had been 'in person', and he'd sell those 'whopper skins' to folks passing through Guymon. At various times, a person could earn bounty money by proving how many rabbits or coyotes they'd shot, since anything decimating the needed vegetation was a problem in the Dirty Thirties. It was a lean time, and Tom and his boys would be chopping soap weeds to feed to the cattle to keep their "backbone offen their bellies". He took Merlyn Tracey under his wing, him being the age of Gordon and Charles, and called him an 'almost son' as he was often there.
Tom would work around his homestead singing "O Happy Day, that fixed my choice, on Thee my Saviour, and My God."
The Grice clan has spread around this part of the country becoming a valuable part of the Panhandle growth over the last hundred years, a family that includes farmers, cowboys, ranchers, teachers, preachers, singers, writers, county workers, truck drivers, housewives, mule-skinners, missionaries, insurance agents, librarians and artists.

Spouses: He married Rachel Elizabeth Cochran 28 Nov 1886.
He and Anna Melinda Jones married Apr 6, 1919 in Eureka, Kansas, she was the widow of Pinckney Kirkpatrick, and then of John Washington Tebo.

Children in the First Family with Rachel:
Jim, Mary, Lizzie, Ida, Ella, Mac, Joe and John.
Anna's children: Lucile and Ruby Kirkpatrick,
Ted and Melvin "Pete" Tebo
Children in Second Family of Tom and Anna:
Mary Alice, Gordon, Charles, and Anna Jean.