John Ardis Phipps

See biographical notes for James Henry Phipps and Elizabeth Leighton taken from a memorandum by Joe K. Phipps written June16, 1997.

According to John Ardis Phipps, he " inherited" the family of his parents upon death of his mother in 1892. His father had disappeared about1890 and would not be seen again for 18 years."By that time John Ardis had managed less than 16 months of formal classroom education. Had helped to see his older brother, Henry, through Tulane Medical School had started youngest brother Elmer, on his academic trail; had seen his older sister Mary Lena, advance their mother's profession beyond teacher-missionary to teacher-ordained minister to the Indians of Oklahoma; had become an ordained Methodist minister himself, a teacher, husband, father, and had seen the two younger sisters-- the twins Annie and Emma -- married and settled in their own homes. A younger brother, Billy, had died at age three. Another younger brother, Josh,lived to young manhood, then died of "galloping consumption" on the West Texas plains.

"John Ardis had completed his first year at Westminister College, Tehuacana, where he was made dean of the college during his second year.In graduating the next year he would be chosen president: the first of two terms he would serve in that capacity.

"It was the summer of 1910. John Ardis was 34. His wife 10years younger. That is when an old man - obviously made old by life, not by time - knocked on the door. Ida Phipps answered.

"He said: 'I'm looking for John Phipps.'

"She said: 'This is where Mr. Phipps lives. I'm Mrs. Phipps.'

"He said: 'Well, I'm his papa.'

"Mother told me the story the summer before she died. She was in a story-telling mood that summer. And she wept. A lot of weeping, too, when the old days were talked of.

"'He was a nice old man,' she said. 'Not an ounce of trouble.He played with the children. He was one of the children. He ran errands for me. He wiped the dishes. But he really wasn't all there. Sun-stroke somewhere or other, we figured.

"'It was a heavy load. One big kid and three little kids and another waiting to pop out. I never really carried children well anyway. But that summer it was really bad. So hot. And the child always squiring. I could almost hear it crying.'

"Lawlis was not due until October. Could I ever make it?"

Then one day she grew worried. "Papa' loved to take letters to the railroad station to mail them. He had been gone for some time. She went out to the porch to look toward the depot. And that's when she saw him. A freight train had pulled in. Apparently right behind him. Now he was down on his hands and knees, crawling beneath the undercarriage, heading homeward,looking up, seeing her, smiling broadly, supported on two knees and one hand, waving the free hand toward her.

"'Hurry!' she cried. 'Hurry, Papa. The train'll start rolling any minute andrun right over you..' He just waved again. Grinning. 'I thought I was going to faint,' she said to me. 'I'm going to lose this baby right here and now,' I thought. That night she told her husband: 'This can't go on.' She saw tears forming. 'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.' The next morning John Ardis drove by himself to Rusk where the nearest State Hospital was located.He got back home after dark. Mother packed Poppa's old, worn bag that night. 'We need to get an early start, Poppa,' John Ardis said. The old man rubbed his hands and grinned, obviously thinking - 'On the road again . . .'"

So James Henry Phipps entered the hospital at Rusk. Later he would be in the state hospital in Norman OK, would be buried in the Evans family plot in Holdenville OK.

Throughout his career as an ordained minister in the Methodist and

Presbyterian churches, John Ardis Phipps was widely respected for his ability to get congregations to build new churches. In 1905 when he was serving the

Methodist Protestant Church in Blackwell, LA, he built a church. His infant daughter Eva, and his mother, Elizabeth Leighton, were buried in the churchyard in Blackwell.

Joe K. Phipps thinks his father built the church he served in Corsicana. He pastored there from 1906 - 1909. Two of his children were born in Corsicana, Lalia on 19 April 1907, Ardis on 27 Aug 1908. After Corsicana, John Ardis attended Westminister College in Tehuacana, and also preaching, from 1909-1912. William Lawlis Phipps was born there 16 October 1910. He was named for one of JAP's teachers. John Ardis served the Methodist Church in Hugo, OK from 1912 - 1916. In Hugo his son Wilbur Harris Phipps was born 8 May 1914. From July 1916-July 1920 John Ardis became the pastor of the Methodist Church in Paris,TX. His son John Junior Phipps would be born there on 23 October 1916.

John Ardis pastored the Methodist Protestant Church in Cooper,TX from July 1920 - July 1922. His youngest child, Joe Kenneth Phipps, would be born in Cooper May 23, 1921. In 1922 John Ardis moved his wife and seven children to his new pastorate in Wortham, TX. Joe Phipps says there was an older frame church building when his father went to Wortham. It was replaced by a new brick church, as JKP puts it, happily endowed when oil was struck."

From July 1924- July 1926, John Ardis served as President of Westminister College, the Methodist school in Tehuacana TX he had attended earlier, 1909-1912. Originally the huge four-story limestone college building in Tehuacana (now on the National Register of Historic Places) had been the seat of Trinity University, a Presbyterian institution of the"northern" branch of that denomination. Trinity had moved on to Waxahachie where it remained until the World War II era when it was again relocated to its present seat in San Antonio. While John Ardis headed the Tehuacana college his wife,Ida, served as Librarian. On 3 October 1925 John Ardis and Ida's oldest child, Ava Mozelle Phipps would become the bride of Willie Wood Tucker of Wortham in a ceremony performed on the steps of the President's Residence on the campus of Westminister College, Tehuacana.

From July 1926-July 1928 John Ardis established his family in Greenville TX while serving as President of the Methodist Protestant Church SouthConference for the State of Texas. His duties required him to travel throughout Texas and attend conference meetings in places like Washington DC. Joe Kenneth remembers his sister Lalia brought her prospective husband, Joe Boone, to Greenville to be married at the Greenville residence on Caddo Street in either August or early September 1927. The ceremony was performed in the living room. Lalia was a teacher in Currie TX.

In the period 1928 - 1930 John Ardis was recruited by Brother Baker of the Presbyterian Church, USA. He became a Stated Supply minister in that denomination with his first assignment in Celina TX.

From 1930 - 1934 he pastored three Presbyterian Churches,Kaufman, Kemp, and Maybank.

From, 1934-1937 he served the Chillicothe TX Presbyterian Church, building a new sanctuary there. Joe Kenneth remembers it as "a virtual gem in a Latin mode of gray stucco and red trim, turning an eye-sore on the town's main highway between Wichita Falls and Amarillo into a real beauty spot."

Next, from 1937-1941 John Ardis served the Presbyterian church in Davis, OK followed by service from 1941-1945 Purcell OK.

Following World War II, 1945-1951, John Ardis retired from the ministry and moved to Normal OK where he owned and operated, with Ida, a large rooming house renting to OU students. It became the scene for many Phipps family Christmas gathering in those years. From 1951-1961 John Ardis lived in Houston on Park Place Boulevard in a residence adjacent to the homes of his children Mozelle Tucker and Dr. John Junior Phipps. Ida died 19 December1954. JAP lived until February 1961.

Memo of Joe K. Phipps, Nov 4, 1997 to Robert Robinson:

"I am sharing this with you so that behind the names of John Ardis Phipps, his mother, Elizabeth Leighton Phipps, and yes, even his father (John Henry Phipps) circumstances existed which affected Dad's lifetime attitudes, impacted on his children in ways that can only be remotely traced, and probably be reflected in their children to come.

"Dad, in rare moments with his brother, Elmer, and in my hearing on at least two occasions, would laugh at his sisters, who gloried in their patronym of 'Phipps.' Once when I mentioned a college classmate named Foster V. Phipps, who suggested we trace bloodlines to see if we were related, Dad laughed. 'Idoubt you will find a connection,' he said. 'The truth is, I never knew a Phipps who didn't hang around the General Store, perched on a cracker barrel, laughing and talking and telling tall tales to other old men,and spitting tobacco juice.

"Ever so often, when his wife started getting big with a new child - or maybe two - he would take off for California or Alaska or Idaho or some such place. When the child was up to crawling stage, he's come back home and stay awhile. Then he'd take off again."

"It soon became known to me that Dad was talking about his own father. Everyone knew the story. Nor a family scandal. Just an oft-repeated family event.

"His mother -- Elizabeth Leighton Phipps -- was, to all effect,the real family head and breadwinner. Raised a Methodist from the days when, as a 5-year-old orphan, she had been put in the hands of the "Catholic Sisters" in New Orleans. (Her parents having died on shipboard while moving themselves, Elizabeth and her younger brother, from South Carolina. She apparently saw nothing unusual in her husband's behavior after her marriage.Trained as a missionary-teacher, she had graduated from the nun's care to minister to Caddo Indians near Minden, Louisiana. It was there she settled into marriage with her one and only husband.

"He immediately took her to Robertson County, TX, near Hearne,where he had grown up. There they settled on land, farming on the halves.There the older children -- up through Mary Lena - were born. I do not know about Emma, Annie and Elmer. But it was from Hearne that the father's wanderings began.

"The family moved back to Northern Louisiana where they had met. That is where Elizabeth had taught the Indians. She was close to Grandma Mims who lived there. Grandma Mims was not a relative but a friend of Elizabeth's parents from Carolina days. She more or less adopted the little children and looked after them.

"Now Elizabeth was making arrangements for land which she farmed with her little brood. Then came a final move. The children were growing up. Having apparently remained a staunch Methodist across the years, she loaded up the kids and moved to Collin County in North Texas, just east of Dallas. Near the small town of Anna was Westminster College -- a Methodist Protestant a Southern split from the larger Methodist Protestant Episcopal Church -- was located. There her children could help to work (illegible)

"I do not know whether any of the children ever actually went to school at Westminster. Uncle Henry, Dad's older brother may have gone there a year or two. Elizabeth died (1892) when John Ardis Phipps was 16. By then Uncle Henry was in his first year of medical school at Tulane. Certainly the other children were too young (to have attended Westminster). Dad may have been taught Hebrew by one of the teachers in exchange for produce from their farm. He told me later that is how he learned Latin and Greek from a lawyer who lived in 'town.' He never mentioned 'Seven Points' which the article (?) says the community was called. When we lived in Celina when I was seven or eight (1930-31) Dad drove through the little settlement on a trip to Greenville. Celina,also in Collin County, is not on my map. Were it there it would be just north of McKinney. When we drove through Dad said: 'That's where we lived last. 'He only mentioned Anna. That where we got our mail. When there was any.

"His mother was buried in a rural graveyard near what later would be formally named Westminster. Note only one "i" as in the Maryland town. But the College name - the appeal of which drew my grandmother to it would become important,[prtamt om pir fa,o;u/ :ater ot wpi;d gove ,u fatjer jos pm;utwp uears pf fpr,a; cp;;ege scjpp;omg after ot\\it was moved to Tehuacana, rough between Mexia and Waco in Central Texas..

Westminster would start my Uncle Elmer and his wife (Minona Rankin) on distinguished careers in education. Aunt Minona became a major author of high school English text books in the 1930s - 1950s Uncle Elmer was Superintendent of schools of North Little Rock Public Schools, Commissioner of Education of the State of Arkansas, a prominent though losing candidate for governor in the mid-1930s. After leaving education he earned his law degree from the University of Arkansas and served for many years.

Aunt Mary Lena was too young to attend Westminster but she did take training in religion and teaching. In the early 1900s she was ordained as a Methodist minister and was awarded a teacher's certificate. Both were required in the days before Oklahoma became a state if she was to follow in her mother's shoes as a 'missionary-teacher' to Indian children then in Oklahoma. The story is clouded about precisely what happened in the years after Elizabeth's death. From remarks dropped by Dad, his youngest brother and his sisters he shepherded back to Northern Louisiana and the sheltering arms of Grandma Mims and Dr. Langino, a presumed earlier swain of their mother. And there the young ones grew up. Dad apparently worked part-time jobs --the longest lasting as a tree salesman. He taught in subscription schools. Ordained a Methodist minister, he preached a little.

In 1903 Dad showed up in Tamaha, Oklahoma -- a teacher and lodger in the home of my mother's parents. A year later, he and my mother married and moved to a small North Louisiana town near Minden. There he had bought house with backing from members of the school board. As a licensed minister, he preached every Sunday there and in communities nearby. He moved his younger twin sisters into the house he now shared with his bride. Mother would later recall that her sisters-in-law -- two months older than she -- were kind of wild. They teased her a lot, ofter reducing her to tears, about what she and John did when the lamps went out.

Every indication is that John, at first, planned on living in that village forever. When Ida gave birth to twins in August 1905. The eldest, Eva, did not survive.

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Birth: Jul. 3, 1876 Bald Prairie Robertson County Texas, USA Death: Feb. 11, 1961 Houston Harris County Texas, USA

Family links:

Spouse:

 Nattie Ida Johnson Phipps (1886 - 1954)

Burial: Forest Park Cemetery Houston Harris County Texas, USA Plot: Sec. 22 - Oak Hill

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Created by: FJReck Record added: Jun 08, 2013 Find A Grave Memorial# 111997985 http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=phipps&GSfn=j...