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It was in the fall of the year, the beech mass was heavy, bruin was heavy with the resulting fat, and the weather warm. The dogs and children irritated him, he waddled toward them as they moved toward the house, and the bear got hotter all the while and less able to rush his tormenters. His dispatch, the Nations family reported, was taken care of with ease, and there was no necessity to haul the carcass to the place where the bear hams were to be cured and the bear grease rendered.
The great flocks of wild pigeons which at one time migrated from one place to another in this country gave another creek its name. There are those living here who remember their parents telling them how the wild pigeons roosted in the trees on Pigeon Roost Creek in such numbers that large branches were broken off hardwood trees.
Other creeks named after early settlers were Walkers Creek, King Creek, Beene Creek, Sloan Creek, and other smaller ones.
Rising within the city limits of Magnolia and running through its residential part, paved over in places, and making its way through a concrete aqueduct in yet another, is a small branch, which, however, the writer has seen in his childhood flood a 20 acre area and swim a horse at its East Main Street crossing. This was then near the boundary of the town, but is now near the center of the city. School children today give it no name, and neither did the generation of the writer; but earlier townsmen knew it as Tanyard Branch and the first maps of the town so designate it. Between where the stream crosses South Calhoun Street and Haynesville Street (U. S. Highway 79 south of Magnolia) someone operated a tan yard many years ago. Some parts of the wooden vats were still in evidence early in this century. The hides used by the tanner were of local origin, and the leather produced was made up into work shoes and harness by local artisans. Leather goods of better quality were imported via Camden on the Ouachita.
There were many former community centers, church sites, store locations, school buildings, post offices and other social and economic institutional nuclei which exist now only as memories and names on old maps.
