William Green Deloach

William Green DeLoach, farmer and diarist, son of Emmanuel P. and Elizabeth (Bowden) DeLoach, was born in Ellenville, Georgia, on February 1, 1880. The family moved in 1887 to Parker County, Texas, where William attended Post Oak School at Millsap. On January 14, 1903, he married Sallie Edna Newton in a dugout near Duke, Oklahoma. Six children were born to them. During his early years DeLoach lived in numerous locations in northern Texas and Oklahoma, where he farmed or worked at odd jobs. He made two trips to the Texas plains before settling there permanently. In 1899 he worked as a cowpuncher on the Two-Buckle Ranch in Crosby County, and in 1913 he moved his family in a covered wagon to Emma, also in Crosby County. After three years he moved on to other opportunities before settling on a farm near Sudan in 1925.

While farming in Crosby County DeLoach started a diary, on March 28, 1914. For the next fifty years he made lengthy daily entries that record the farming operations, weather, economic conditions, and family and community affairs of Emma, Ralls, and Sudan. When he was not at home he did his daily recording on a tablet and later transferred his writing verbatim to the diary. His last entry was March 28, 1964. This unique personal record is a history of the average farmer's everyday life in West Texas during the transition from ranching to farming and on into the era of modern agribusiness.

In 1914 DeLoach built perhaps the first cotton sled used in Crosby County, and in 1917 he built a sled for harvesting feed that was versatile enough to be adapted to tractor power in the 1940s. In 1936 he designed a collapsible chicken coop and took a model to Washington, D.C., seeking a patent, but lack of time and money prevented his obtaining it. He served as secretary-treasurer of Sudan Bull Circle No. 2, a group of farmers who in 1928 cooperatively purchased a registered bull to improve the bloodline of their cattle. When federal farm programs were implemented he was worried that only large farmers would benefit. In 1936 he agreed to serve on the Cotton Committee in Sudan with the single intent of protecting the interests of small farmers.

DeLoach was a lifelong Baptist; he helped organize the Friendship Union Church in 1928 and later served as secretary-treasurer. He was a Democrat and Mason and belonged to the Woodmen of the World. He retired from farming in 1952 and died on April 1, 1967; he was buried in Sudan. His diaries are now in the William G. DeLoach papers, housed in the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University.