The Respess Family and Respess Creek

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just followin' the sign. Out in Panola County, there's a creek with a name that carries a whole family's story in it. Respess Creek.

And if you don't know the name, well, let me set you right. Back in the eighteen seventies, a man named Richard Ormand Respess and his wife Nannie Lois Williams packed up from Harrison County and came here. They put down roots.

And when a community needed a school, the first one built in what folks called the Frog Pond community, Richard Respess gave the land for it. Then he turned around and taught there himself. That community would later come to be known as Liberty Chapel, but Richard was there at the beginning, before the name changed, before much of anything had taken shape.

Richard was born in eighteen thirty-nine and died in nineteen oh six. His oldest son, Charlie O. Respess, born in eighteen fifty-nine and gone in nineteen seventeen, lived right near this very site and ran a general store.

So you had the father building up the community's school, and the son keeping the shelves stocked. A family woven into the daily life of the place. Now here's the part that lands quiet but lands deep.

The family opened up the creek. Just opened it, free of charge, to anyone who wanted to come down and drop a line for perch or catfish. No fee, no fuss.

And people came. And they kept comin'. And somewhere along the way, the way people do, they started calling it what it was.

Respess Creek. The school is gone. The store is gone.

The family that gave the land and taught the children and kept a free fishing hole has no other monument out here. Just the water, still running, still carrying that name. The marker itself was donated by Ethel Respess Duncan, keeping the memory alive one more time.

Sometimes a creek is the longest memory a family gets. This one's doing its job.

What the marker says

In the 1870s Richard Ormand Respess (1839-1906) and his wife Nannie Lois Williams moved here from Harrison County. Respess gave the land and taught at the first school built in the Frog Pond community, known later as Liberty Chapel. His oldest son Charlie O. (1859-1917) lived near this site and operated a general store. During the years that the family allowed free access for perch and cat fishing, the stream became known as "Respess Creek." It is the only reminder of the pioneer family who lived here. Incise in base: Marker Donor: Ethel Respess Duncan