Loyd Luther Smith
Loyd Luther Smith was born on 13 August 1912 in Sevier County, Arkansas, in the country around Lockesburg. Sevier County sits in the southwest corner of the state, against the Oklahoma line, and its living came from cotton, timber and small farms. He grew up there and was still there at twenty eight.
When he registered for the draft, aged 28, he gave his address as Rural Route 1, Lockesburg. In the box for his employer he wrote "Self". The person who would always know where to find him was Mrs. Ruby Smith, his sister-in-law, on the same rural route. He signed the card "Loyd Smith".
He was taken into the Army at Oklahoma City on 21 November 1942, during the Second World War. A later hand wrote across the top of his draft card "Discharged from U.S. Army 10-16-43", so his service ran just under a year. He left as a private, and his bronze grave marker says so: "PVT US ARMY, WORLD WAR II".
On 21 December 1946, four days before Christmas, he married Ora Delane Fennell in Sevier County, Arkansas. The license had been taken out on 16 December. Ora was 25 and came from the Valliant country of McCurtain County, Oklahoma, just across the state line, where her parents Thomas Marion and Minnie Belle Fennell farmed.
The couple settled on the Oklahoma side. On 13 April 1950 the census taker found them in Fowler township, McCurtain County, in the timber country west of Slim. Loyd was 37 and spent his week hauling logs for a sawmill, forty hours of it in the week before the count, working for a private company. Ora was 28. In the house were their twin sons, Lonnie and Johnie, both born in January 1950 and not yet three months old.
The neighbors on that page were sawmill families, several of them Smiths from Arkansas. Next door lived Roy and Velma Scott; Velma had been born a Smith in Arkansas in 1910. With the Scotts lived two widowed Smith men from Arkansas, Joe, 51, and Roy, 42, and three nephews of the household, Cloie Loy, Donold and Edward. Roy Smith was cutting lumber at a sawmill too. On the other side lived Oliver L. Smith, 22, also born in Arkansas, and his wife Myra.
Loyd and Ora spent the rest of their lives around Valliant and Mound Grove. When Ora's mother died in 1956 the obituary listed her daughter as "Mrs. Lloyd Smith, Mound Grove". Loyd died at Valliant on 3 August 1993, nine days before his eighty first birthday. He is buried in Moran Cemetery at Valliant, under a double headstone he shares with Ora, with a pine tree cut into his side of the stone and a small oval portrait of the two of them set in the flower vase between their names. Velma and Roy Scott lie in the next plot.
Sources
If Loyd Luther Smith is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "Loyd Luther Smith (1912-1993)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/loyd-luther-smith-1912-1993-07510a.