John Ardis Cawthon

Background

Cawthon was born in south Bossier Parish to James Alexander Cawthon (1878–1961), a native of the McDade community, and the former Maggie Mae Dance (1878–1968), originally from nearby Webster Parish. He was named for a family friend, John Houston Sibley, and the Reverend H. Z. Ardis, a pioneer Baptist minister who had taught at the early Mount Lebanon College in Bienville Parish. He hence shared his father's initials, "J. A." He was first home-schooled by his mother, who had attended Athens Academy in Claiborne Parish. From the fifth through the eighth grades, Cawthon attended the one-room school in the Koran community of south Bossier Parish. The family then relocated to Doyline in south Webster Parish, where John Cawthon completed high school.

James and Maggie Cawthon married in 1905 in Athens in southern Claiborne Parish. Cawthon had a brother, James Dance Cawthon (1915–2011) of Shreveport, who taught briefly at Springhill High School in Springhill in northern Webster Parish before he began a long career in the accounting department of the United Gas and Pennzoil companies. James Dance Cawthon, who served as the business administrator for a decade of the First Presbyterian Church of Shreveport, also did some historical writing which was published by the North Louisiana Historical Association. Cawthon had two sisters, Maggie Lee McIntyre (1911–2007) of Doyline, a state social work supervisor from 1935 to 1976, based in Minden, and Miss Annis Ella Cawthon (1909–1999), a former educator in Springhill. In 1950, Annis Cawthon was elected president of the Webster Parish Classroom Teachers Association. She later taught mathematics at Louisiana Tech from 1959-1974. Cawthon's parents and sisters are interred at Doyline Cemetery. All of the Cawthon siblings graduated from Louisiana Tech.

Cawthon studied English and history and received his Bachelor of Arts in secondary education from Louisiana Tech in 1934 and his Master of Arts from Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge in 1938. He taught in Webster Parish high schools during the 1930s at Cotton Valley (1934–1935)) and Sarepta (1935–1939). In the 1939-1940 year, he taught at the A. E. Phillips Laboratory School on the Louisiana Tech campus, recruited for that position by Professor Phillips himself. From 1940-1942, Cawthon was a member of the faculty at Northwestern State University (then known as Louisiana Normal) until he was conscripted at the age of thirty-five into the United States Army during World War II. He served in Europe in the Education-Orientation Division of the armed forces. In 1974, some three decades after the event, he wrote the article, "A School Teacher Gets Drafted," in North Louisiana History.

After the war, Cawthon returned briefly to Northwestern and then left to study for his Ed.D. (since recognized by the National Science Foundation as equivalent to a Ph.D.) at the University of Texas at Austin. His major professor, J. G. Umstattd, had worked with him during the war at the Biarritz American University in France.

Historical publications

In 1944, Cawthon, while still in the Army, published in the since defunct Mississippi Valley Historical Review the American Civil War article "Letters of a North Louisiana Private to His Wife, 1862-1865."

In 1955, Cawthon wrote for the Arkansas Historical Quarterly the article entitled "George W. Dance", a biography of one of his own kinsmen, George Washington Dance, a native of Oglethorpe, Georgia, who spent his life primarily in Claiborne Parish just south of the Arkansas state line. Cawthon writes: "Referred to as poor whites from the hills, by the plantation owners on the big rivers, George Dance and his kind were not considered worthy of historical record. . . . The unpretentious George Washington Dance, however, wrote news articles for the Claiborne Parish weekly newspaper and compiled a history book. He expressed amazement at the progress of a wonderful nation, which he and his neighbors believed they had helped to produce."

In 1948, Cawthon and the former Elenora Albrecht, a native of Mission Valley in Victoria County some 135 miles west of Houston in South Texas, received their Doctor of Education degrees from UT at Austin, some twenty-four hours after they had wed at her Lutheran Church in Mission Valley. Elenora had also studied under Dr. Umstattd subsequently assisted Cawthon in the preparation of his 1965 book The Inevitable Guest: Life and Letters of Jemima Darby, based on letters by friends and relatives in North and South Carolina to Miss Darby, John Cawthon's great-great-great aunt.

Another Cawthon work of local history, since out-of-print, is Ghost Towns Of Old Claiborne, which notes the lack of information available on the ghost town of Russellville, named the seat of Claiborne Parish in 1828. The parish government is now based in Homer. Cawthon's relative George W. Dance said on the moving of the courthouse: "When the courthouse moved, the glory departed. The village is now an old worn-out field."

Here is a listing of other Cawthon articles, written after his retirement from Louisiana Tech and published in North Louisiana History, formerly The Journal of the North Louisiana Historical Association:

Cawthon's last work is entitled "E. H. Bolin, School Man of Webster Parish," Louisiana History in Vol. 15, No. 1, Winter 1984: 41-48. Bolin was a school board member from Doyline and the father of future State Representative and Judge James E. Bolin.

For most of his career at Louisiana Tech, Cawthon was the secondary education department head. The John Ardis Cawthon Scholarship Fund in the Louisiana Tech University College of Education is named in his honor.

Elenora A. Cawthon

Elenora Albrecht Cawthon (December 6, 1917 – June 1, 2014, who was of German extraction, was the daughter of Lillie Lassmann and Otto H. Albrecht. From 1955 to 1988, she was the Louisiana Tech placement services director, though the position had various titles over the years. From 1972 to 1973, she was the president of the National College Placement Council. She was a president of the Ruston Business and Professional Women Club.

She attended Patti Welder High School in Victoria, Texas, and graduated in 1936 from the two-year Victoria College. She received her three degrees from the University of Texas in 1938, 1939, and 1948, respectively. Elenora and John Ardis Cawthon married in 1948, spent the summer of that year at Louisiana Tech, and then accepted faculty appointments from 1948 to 1954 at Arkansas Tech University in Russellville, Arkansas. (Coincidentally, he had written about the ghost town of Russellville, Louisiana.) John Ardis Cawthon was an education professor at Arkansas Tech, and Elenora was the director of teacher education there. One of his first publications there was "The Curriculum: Secondary Schools" in The Encyclopedia of Educational Research.

The couple returned to Ruston in 1954 to accept their terminal faculty appointments. They lived in a white house on the edge of the Tech campus. Elenora remained in the house for fifteen years after her husband's death. At the age of eighty-one in 1999, she returned to Mission Valley to become a working cattle rancher, which had also been her father's occupation.

In 1984, Mrs. Cawthon deposited their family and professional papers dating back to 1827 to Louisiana Tech Special Collections. In 1994, Mrs. Cawthon completed an oral history about the careers of her husband as well as herself for Louisiana Tech Special Collections. Elenora Cawthon was also an appointed member of the Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors, having served in that capacity after her retirement from Louisiana Tech. In 2003, she was honored by Tech with its "Distinguished Service Award."

Elenora Cawthon last resided in Victoria County, Texas, where she was active in the Lutheran Church. She had also been the organist at St. Paul Lutheran Church when she lived all of those years in Ruston. Daughter Elisabeth Albrecht Cawthon Saunders (born 1957) is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington in Tarrant County. Elisabeth is married to John Stephen Saunders (born 1954), and the couple has two children. They reside in the Dallas suburb of Coppell. Eleanor died in Carrollton, Texas, at the age of ninety-six.

John A. and Elenora A. Cawthon are interred at Mt. Zion Lutheran Cemetery in Mission Valley, Texas.