The Charles Arthur and Orilla Luella Hughes Family Organization
| CHARLES ARTHUR HUGHES HISTORY PAGE 4 Mesquite Flat The second year we bought land in Mesquite, although Bunkerville old timers urged us to buy there, saying Mesquite would never amount to anything. We bought our first land from John Hancock. Jim moved into a tent where Sylvan lives now and Father built a two-room lumber house, with lumber hauled from Delamar, just a block south. Father died in this home. Streets were laid out but nearly the whole place was mesquites and sandknolls, we spent lots of time clearing land. The ditch was small, and didn't go below the wash. At first we called the town Mesquite Flat, but Brother Johnson, who was the presiding Elder, said he wanted them to leave off the Flat, to call it just Mesquite.
At first I was about the only boy here. When we first moved to Mesquite the Abe Woodbury and John Hancock families each had three children. Lapriel Waite, Cora Leavitt and Carmelia Hardy were just learning to walk. Carlos and Rose Knight, Charlie and Rene Hardy, Jessie and Dorie Waite, and Dan and Amy Dutton were just young couples. We still went to Delamar during the summers. One spring when we went back out there, the road was covered with a big snowbank of drifted snow and we shoveled it off so they could haul lumber from the mill. We used charcoal to blacken our faces, but toward night my eyes began to smart and burn and I was snow blind and in great pain. My eyes were inflamed and I stayed in a dark room with tea leaf poultices on my eyes for a week before I could see again. I was sure happy when my eyes were better and I knew I could see all right. In Mesquite I went to school in the one room of Charlie Hardy's house (Aunt Rene was the teacher) and later in a tent near the old schoolhouse with Bell McArthur Bunker as the teacher. I was sixteen years old and had what was at that time considered a third or fourth grade education. Go to Another Son is Born (Page 1)
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