Parker County Today April 2016 | Page 45

our events: SHAW-KEMP 36th Annual Shaw-Kemp Open House sure to have the Nebo hills crawling with history hunters and fun seekers alike STORY AND PHOTOS BY MEL W RHODES were quite utilitarian. “When we bought that in 1975, we were (still are) in the propane business — Texas Propane — running that; so it didn’t matter what we made down there.” Then one day, she discovered that the structure that had fallen into neglect and been repurposed as a barn was in fact the original 1856 doublepen, cedar-log cabin built by T.J. Shaw, an expert carpenter. Shall we call it love at first sight? “That cabin just stuck in my head!” Mary said, as if discovering it had bumped her onto a new course. It was in her husband’s head as well, but as a place to stack hay, not a restoration project. “I told him what I wanted: to fix that cabin up and get a marker for it,” Mary said. One day in 1980, Mr. Kemp announced that he’d built his barn and the cabin now was Mary’s to do with as she pleased. Big smile from Mary. “We finished the restoration on the cabin later that year and in 1982, dedicated it with a historical marker APRIL 2016 PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY At 88, Mary Kemp is sharp as a tack and generally ready to talk turkey, provided the turkey is local history — she can spit out dates and names with the best of them. Mary came by these history bits quite naturally growing up in the Mt. Nebo Community south of Weatherford. These days Mary is Nebo Valley, and if it’s on the map, she’s kept it there. For three and a half decades s he has hosted the Shaw-Kemp Cabin Open House, an afternoon of frontier frolic and dress-up fun and entertainment in and around Miss Mary’s patchwork town standing in the shadow of Nebo Mountain. This year, the 36th for the gathering, the date is slated for the afternoon of Saturday, April 9, 1-5 p.m. The Shaw-Kemp Open House story began, of course, with pioneer Thomas Jefferson “T.J.” Shaw and wife Louisa Ann who arrived in the area from Tennessee around 1854. Shaw’s first cabin stood a mile west of the Shaw-Kemp Cabin and currently is part of Log Cabin Village in Fort Worth. It was in 1856 that Shaw built the log cabin Mary fortuitously came to own many years later. She’d grown up on an adjoining property, a child of the Great Depression. She remembers dresses made of feed sacks, being poor but not knowing it, and many kindnesses from the Shaw family. “I grew up a fourth of a mile from it [the cabin],” Mary explained. “Our land (Carnes) joined their land; but we only had a hundred acres — they had 400 acres ... .” According to Mary, Shaw’s daughter — Molly Staggs — saved her family when she allowed her father to work the land as a sharecropper. The families remained close and decades later Mary had a surprise. “In 1975, Mr. Acme Shaw, one of the last Shaw’s to be there on the ranch, was dying,” Mary recalled. “He called me and he said, ‘Mary Estelle, I’m going to die within two weeks, and I want you and your husband to buy my ranch.’ I said ‘Mr. Shaw, how in the world, I don’t even know what kind of money you’re talking about.’ He said ‘you don’t have to worry about it, I’ve got all the plans made, they’re already worked up. You go see Sam Pickard and J.W. Ford and they’ll have them ready.’” Mary and husband V. Kemp, Jr. signed the papers, made the payments and Mary “loved the place.” But she did not know the log cabin was there, hiding behind a dusty veil of desuetude. And she had no burning desire to reclaim the place for Parker County history, etc. That was yet to come. “No, no, no,” she said. “We had a hundred head of cattle on it. It was just a neighboring place. At that time that land joined my land.” In other words, her designs on the property 43