DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker on the Millie Porter House tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, out here in Wheeler County, there's a house that carries a story bigger than its walls. Built in 1914 by Mr. and Mrs.
J. M. Porter — and friend, that house was put up by people who had already lived a life before they ever drove the first nail.
Let's start at the beginning. The Joneses — Mr. and Mrs. J.
R. Jones — came to the Mobeetie area back in 1886. Settlers.
The kind of folks who showed up before the country was quite ready for them. They brought their family, and among that family was a daughter named Millie, born in 1877. As a child, little Millie wasn't sittin' on a porch waitin' for history to happen to her.
She was out helpin' herd sheep. That detail right there — a girl workin' alongside the animals, learnin' the land — that's the seed of everything that comes after. Millie grew up, and she married a man named J.
M. Porter. Porter was an ex-cowboy — which tells you something about the kind of man he was and the kind of life he'd already put behind him.
After marryin' Millie, he settled down and ranched near that very spot in Wheeler County. Together they raised six children in that 1914 house. But here's where the story gets genuinely remarkable, and I want you to pay attention, because this part earns every word.
Millie Porter, who as a girl had herded sheep across the Panhandle, attended Fort Worth University. Then — and hold on now — at seventy years old, she enrolled at the University of Oklahoma. Seventy.
Most folks that age are content to let the world come to them. Millie was still goin' to the world. And she wrote.
She wrote two books that the marker calls valuable histories — and that word, valuable, is not thrown around lightly on a historical marker. The first: "Put Up or Shut Up." The second: "Memory Cups of Panhandle Pioneers." Those titles alone could stop a conversation cold. One sounds like a dare, and the other sounds like exactly what it is — a woman who lived through something pouring it into a cup and saying, here, drink this, don't let it spill.
Millie Porter lived until 1957. The house she and J. M. built in 1914 still stands as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.
She herded sheep, married a cowboy, raised six kids, went back to school at seventy, and wrote the history down so none of it would get lost. If that's not a Texas life worth pullin' over for, I don't know what is.
What the marker says
Built 1914 by Mr. & Mrs. J. M. Porter, pioneer settlers; Porter, an ex-cowboy, ranched near here after marrying Millie, daughter of Mr. & Mrs. J. R. Jones, 1886 settlers in Mobeetie area. Millie (1877-1957) as a child helped herd sheep; she attended Fort Worth University as a girl, University of Oklahoma at 70. She wrote valuable histories: "Put Up or Shut Up" and "Memory Cups of Panhandle Pioneers". Mr. & Mrs. Porter had six children. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1968