Ray was 12 years old when his family left SW Missouri to set up farming in Wyandotte, Indian Territory. In just a short time Indian Territory would officially merge with Oklahoma Territory and become a state, November 16, 1907. Land was cheap, but the community was very unorganized and people had a hard time making a living.
Here on the Edge Of The Ozarks the land started to open up, bordering the Great Plains of the midwest. Unlike the hard rocks and clay soils that they had farmed in Missouri they found deeper loam soil with sandstone that could be plowed and cultivated more easily.
Many of the local farmers grew grain like barley, wheat and grain sorghum to sell on the local markets. Prices had become a lot more stable since the Kansas City Board Of Trade had opened the futures market a few years before. Many speculators could buy and sell grain futures, so local farmers had a better idea what their crops would bring at harvest.
What the locals really needed, however was a crop that was unique and could be turned into a more profitable finished product, and Ephriam, Ray's father had an idea. Back when he was a young boy with his father in Arkansas they had grown sorghum for the sugary sap and boiled it down into molasses.
The local sorghum that was grown for grain didn't make very sugary juice when it was squeezed, but with a little snooping around Ephriam was able to locate a cultivar that was perfectly suited for making sorghum molasses. The family grew a big patch and the following summer they harvested and ran their first batch.
The mill was simple – a stone table and grinder with a long pole attached that a horse could draw while walking around in a circle. The sorghum stalks were fed into the mill where they were crushed and the juice ran out into a trough over a big wood fire.
It was hot work but the end result was sweet sorghum molasses, and in those early days when commodity shipments were spotty it was a welcome product on the shelf at the Indian Corner Store.
Ephriam's idea fast turned into a business that lifted the whole area in NE Oklahoma. Local farmers could grow a crop of sorghum and haul it into the mill where Ephriam's family would turn it into molasses. The growers could either take payment in cash or trade it out for jugs of finished molasses.
As the milling business grew so did Ray and his brothers. There were now mining towns close by where families lived in shanties forming little towns like Picher, Cardin and Treece. They rigged a 200 gallon barrel on the back of a horse drawn wagon and filled it with molasses.
It wasn't hard to develop a route through those small towns where people would line up with their own jugs while Ray filled them from the big barrel. The decision to leave Missouri and settle in Wyandotte, Indian Territory ended up being a move that brought a new livelihood to a whole new growing society.
