John A. & Ethel (Miller) McCaleb

Across the Fence 



By:Arvord Abernethy 

I recently met Crea and Grace McCaleb on the street and Crea was carrying a picture. Of course I had to ask about it and he said that it was a picture of his mother made shortly before his dad put her in jail. 

This got my curiosity up so, I went out to the McCalebs to get the full story. Crea told me about his people living in Tennessee when they heard of the opportunities in Texas. His widowed grandmother with three sons and two daughters came and settled at Indian Gap. Crea’s father, John McCaleb, remained in Tennessee for a time. He later decided to come to Texas, so he got a job on the Mississippi River to make some money and to get closer to Texas. He worked with a crew that built large rafts of willows and other trees and then floated them down to where the river was eating into a bank. Here they would anchor the raft and then cover it with rocks until it sank. 

John did this work until they came to Greenville, Mississippi, where he bought a saddle horse and then rode to Hamilton. He farmed at first on Washington Creek, which is out, the other side of Indian Jap. Then he became Deputy Sheriff under Press Kinsey and served there until he himself was elected sheriff in 1906. 

Here is where our story of the picture Crea was carrying comes in. The George Millers had a blacksmith shop in the rock building where the Luker Studio is now. It was a two story building then and the Millers lived in the upstairs part. They had a fair young daughter by the name of Ethel and she began getting the attention of the new sheriff. They were married in January of 1907, and since one of the requirements of the sheriff was to live in the living quarters of the jail. John took his new bride to jail. Some pranksters got out an injunction against John for putting of the Miller girls in jail without a just cause. 

Their first child, Dixie, was born there in jail. When she applied for work at the Oak Ridge Atomic Bomb plant during the war, she had to do a lot of explaining as to why she was born in jail. 

After John served two terms as sheriff, he built a home on what we call McCaleb Lane and did some farming and served for 13 years as night-watchman for Hamilton. But it was never necessary for him to put Ethel in jail again.