CLORA FRANCES NOLEN HEARD BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH (Created with Perplexity AI)

 HEARD AND NOLEN FAMILY HISTORIES

Clora Frances Nolen Heard

April 29, 1880 – March 15, 1968

Version dated 2026-11-08 7:59 PM CST

Farm Wife, Midwife, Nurse, and Matriarch of the Pitkin Heards

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Clora Frances Nolen as a schoolgirl, when she was a pupil of her future husband, James Addison Heard. (Family collection; Royal Roots, CommunicatingLife2)

Born

April 29, 1880, Pitkin, Vernon Parish, Louisiana

Parents

Merdia Tillus “Til” Nolen (1853–1927) and Maria Theresa Jones Nolen (1858–1936)

Married

James Addison “J. A.” Heard (1870–1946), November 3, 1897

Children

Thirteen (ten sons, three daughters); twelve raised to adulthood

Home

The Heard homestead southwest of Pitkin, beside her parents’ farm

Callings

Farm manager, community midwife and nurse, mother and grandmother

Died

March 15, 1968, DeRidder, Louisiana, age 87

Buried

Sugartown Baptist Church Cemetery, Sugartown, Beauregard Parish

Clora Frances Nolen Heard was born on April 29, 1880, in the piney woods near Pitkin, in Vernon Parish, Louisiana, and died in the hospital at DeRidder, in neighboring Beauregard Parish, on March 15, 1968, at the age of eighty-seven. Barely five feet tall, with flaming red hair, she married her former schoolteacher, James Addison Heard, when she was seventeen. Over the next quarter century she bore thirteen children, raised twelve of them, and ran the homestead farm beside her parents’ land. She was the community’s midwife and nurse and the woman neighbors sent for when someone was dying. She was determined that her daughters would finish college, and they did. Widowed in 1946, she ran the farm in her own way for twenty-one more years. Her granddaughter summed her up as “a woman who looked life straight in the eye and never flinched” (Family record; FamilySearch; Her Family and Life; Heard Cousins).

Two Pioneer Families

Clora was born into two families who had come to the old Sugartown country during the Civil War and had known hard times there. Her father, Merdia Tillus Nolen, known all his life as Til, was born on March 9, 1853, the sixth child and second son of Absolom Simeon “Sim” Nolen and Abidia Obedience “Bedie” Wise. The Nolens traced their line, by records and DNA, to Stephen Noland, born in Maryland in 1682, whose father had come from Ireland (History of the Nolen Family). In 1863 Sim and Bedie loaded their children, livestock, and caged chickens and geese into ox wagons and moved from their farm near Lisbon, in Claiborne Parish, across the war-torn state to Sugartown, then part of Calcasieu Parish. Sim, a Confederate veteran wounded at Missionary Ridge, planted the crops and secured the fences, then rode away in April 1864. On his way home, on April 17, 1864, he was captured near Ten Mile Creek by a band of “home guard” men, or Jayhawkers, and shot. Til was eleven (Blue Branch Cemetery; Murder on Ten Mile Creek).

Clora’s father, Merida Tillus “Til” Nolen, as a young man. (Family collection; Murder on Ten Mile Creek, CommunicatingLife2)

According to family accounts, the family’s troubles did not end there. Bedie’s house was burned, and she and her children were carried off to Alexandria and left there until neighbors came to bring them home. Bedie cleared new ground and split rails to feed her family. Family tradition holds that Til went with her when she brought Sim’s body home for burial near Sugartown, and again when she traveled into Texas to reclaim her husband’s big black stallion from the man who had led the killers. She made her son promise to say nothing that would cause more trouble, “because they had trouble enough.” Til grew up poor, but he built up a large farm near Pitkin and later ran the Pitkin Mercantile, the hardware and dry-goods store. All his life he rode a tall bay stallion said to descend from his father’s horse (Murder on Ten Mile Creek; Her Family and Life).

Clora’s mother, Maria Theresa Jones, pronounced “Mariah,” was born in Arkansas in 1858 and came to Sugartown as a small child with her parents, William Jones III and Caroline Jelks Jones. Her father, once a prosperous farmer, lost nearly everything in the war and died at Sugartown in 1865, when Maria was about seven. Her mother was left with four young children to raise. Poverty did not dim the family’s pride in its Jones and Jelks heritage. Maria and her brother Robert, though denied an education themselves, made sure their children went to school. Robert’s son, Sam Houston Jones, Clora’s first cousin, became a lawyer and was elected governor of Louisiana in 1940 (For William Jones Descendants; Her Family and Life; 64 Parishes, Sam Houston Jones).

Clora’s mother, Maria Theresa Jones Nolen (pronounced “Mariah”), as a young woman. (Family collection)

Maria married Til Nolen at nineteen. Her granddaughter described her as an aristocrat and the matriarch of her family, a woman with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, certain she was right and fierce in seeing that right was done. She prized education, supported women’s suffrage, and wanted her daughters treated equally with her sons. She was outspoken to a fault, and most people either loved and admired her or could not abide her. Clora inherited a full measure of her spirit (Her Family and Life; For William Jones Descendants).

A Childhood Near Slabtown

Clora was not Til and Maria’s first child. An infant sister had been born and died on February 27, 1879, and was buried in the Old Campground Cemetery east of Sugartown, the burying ground beside Sugar Creek where Methodist circuit riders had held camp meetings, and where Maria’s father lay. Clora arrived fourteen months later, on April 29, 1880, the first of her parents’ children to survive. Her grandmother Bedie had died at Sugartown only three weeks earlier, on April 6, 1880 (Family record; Old Campground Cemetery; History of Sugartown; For William Jones Descendants; Murder on Ten Mile Creek). The census taker who came that summer found the new baby in her father’s household in the Fifth Ward of Vernon Parish, where Clora would spend her whole life (Family record).

Seven more children followed. Of Til and Maria’s nine children, four were buried in the Old Campground as infants or toddlers. Their small stones stand together there, inscribed “Only sleeping” and “Gone but not forgotten” (Old Campground Cemetery; History of Sugartown). The family remembered that Maria lost four babies and raised three daughters and two sons (Her Family and Life). As the oldest, Clora grew up helping with the younger ones:

Child of Til and Maria Nolen	Born	Died
An infant sister	Feb. 27, 1879	Feb. 27, 1879
Clora Frances	Apr. 29, 1880	Mar. 15, 1968
Pinkrow	Apr. 23, 1882	Aug. 30, 1884
Sarah Delilah (Mrs. William Curtis Miller)	Apr. 18, 1885	Dec. 23, 1923
Merida Philip	Jan. 15, 1888	June 25, 1961
An infant brother	Oct. 17, 1889	Oct. 17, 1889
Mildred Suzie	May 4, 1892	1924
Robert Marshal	May 29, 1895	Jan. 25, 1953
An infant sister	June 3, 1899	June 3, 1899

Clora’s first appearance in the records: the 1880 census of the Fifth Ward of Vernon Parish, taken June 17, 1880, lists Tillus M. Nolen, farmer; his wife, Maria; and their infant daughter, Clora. (Family collection)

Clora was just seven weeks old when her name was first written into the public record. On June 17, 1880, the census taker for the Fifth Ward of Vernon Parish wrote down the household of Tillus M. Nolen, farmer; his wife, Maria, twenty-one, keeping house; and their baby daughter, Clora. In the household just above theirs lived three young Nolens, Richmond, Ephraim, and Simeon, almost certainly Til’s younger brothers, the “Uncle Rich” and “Uncle Eph” of family memory, left on their own when their mother, Bedie, died that April (1880 U.S. Census; Murder on Ten Mile Creek).

Clora’s grandmother Abidia Obedience “Bedie” Wise Nolen, widowed in 1864, who died at Sugartown three weeks before Clora was born. (Family collection; Murder on Ten Mile Creek, CommunicatingLife2)

Clora grew up on her father’s farm near Slabtown, the settlement that later became Pitkin. The family had Methodist roots; in later years, with no Methodist church in Pitkin, her own children attended the Baptist church (Her Family and Life; Biography of J. A. Heard). Through her Nolen grandmother she was kin to a wide web of families in the region. Her sister Sarah Delilah married William Curtis Miller, and their Miller children shared the name of the Miller cousins on the Heard side, so that her son Meredith liked to say, in a “Believe-It-Or-Not” of his own, that he had two first cousins named Cecil Miller who were not related to each other. Meredith was eventually proved wrong. Family research later confirmed that the two Miller groups were kin after all: Delilah’s children, through their Nolen grandmother Bedie Wise Nolen, and the children of Emma Frances Heard and Samuel Nathaniel Miller both descend from Joseph Medford Miller (1755–1826) and his wife, Ada Gilbert Miller (Heards & Nolens and Their Miller Kin).

A Schoolgirl and Her Teacher

Clora Frances Nolen as a girl, with friends, all in long white dresses, before a canvas tent. (Family collection)

In the 1890s a young schoolteacher from Dry Creek, James Addison Heard, came to teach at Blue Branch. He had trained at John McNeese’s normal school in Lake Charles and taught at Dry Creek and Rosepine as well. Teachers then boarded with local families, and for a time Addison lived in the home of Til and Maria Nolen. Clora, red-haired and small for her age, was one of his pupils (Heard Cousins; Biography of J. A. Heard). Among her school keepsakes she saved a tintype of her teacher, taken when he was about twenty-five and she about fifteen (Biography of J. A. Heard). A treasured photograph from these years shows Clora as a girl with three friends, all in long white dresses with dark sashes, standing before a canvas tent (Family record).

James Addison Heard as a young teacher, from a tintype Clora kept among her school keepsakes. He was about twenty-five, and she about fifteen. (Family collection)

Maria Nolen, who had little patience with most people, was fond of the young teacher because he was an educated man. She told her grandchildren she wished she had an education herself, so that she might say what she wished to say without offending people (Her Family and Life). On November 3, 1897, Clora and James Addison Heard were married. The marriage is recorded in Calcasieu Parish. She was seventeen and he was twenty-seven (FamilySearch; FamilySearch, J. A. Heard; Heard Cousins). To the end of his life she called him “Addison,” or more often, “Mr. Heard” (Heard Cousins).

The Homestead Beside Her Parents

Their first child, Thomas Pink, was born nine months after the wedding, on August 25, 1898. The census of 1900 found the young family in Ward 5 of Vernon Parish, close to the Nolens (Family record; Heard Cousins). Addison and Clora took up a quarter section of land by homestead, adjoining her parents’ farm and within easy walking distance of it. Addison’s 160 acres on Campbell Branch, southwest of Pitkin, were recorded in 1906 (Fletcher, Leesville Leader; Heard Cousins; History of the Heard Farm). Soon after taking up the land they began a large house for their growing family. The nearby settlement was still called Slabtown, and it took the name Pitkin only when the railroad came through in 1905 and 1906 (Biography of J. A. Heard; Vernon Parish Tourism, Pitkin).

Addison taught school for some years more, but a teacher’s pay could not keep pace with a growing family. He went into the timber business as a surveyor, timber buyer, and woods foreman, chiefly for the Pickering Lumber Company, work that often took him away from home (Heard Cousins; Her Family and Life). That left the farm to Clora. In her granddaughter’s words, she “ran the Heard farm, primarily with labor birthed from her own body” (Her Family and Life). The censuses of 1910, 1920, and 1930 place the family in Police Jury Ward 5 of Vernon Parish (Family record).

Between 1898 and 1922 Clora bore thirteen children, all at Pitkin (Family record; FamilySearch):

	Child	Born at Pitkin	Died
1	Thomas Pink “T.P.,” “Skipper”	Aug. 25, 1898	1980
2	Francis Hewell “France”	Dec. 23, 1900	1993
3	Adeline Theresa “Addie”	Nov. 8, 1902	1995
4	Archie Glenn	Feb. 11, 1904	1989
5	Rufus Addison	Dec. 19, 1906	1982
6	Jesse Burkett	Nov. 19, 1908	1986
7	Simmie Nolen	Aug. 31, 1910	1989
8	Myrtis Lee	Aug. 8, 1912	1995
9	John Tilus	Sept. 15, 1914	Oct. 19, 1914
10	Vera Ruth	Dec. 12, 1915	2012
11	Meredith George	July 25, 1918	1992
12	James Alton	Sept. 30, 1920	1993
13	Lindsey Leroy	Oct. 31, 1922	2016

She was forty-two and Addison fifty-two when Lindsey, their youngest, was born in 1922. That same year their first grandson, Hewell, was born to France and his wife, Bessie (Heard Cousins). Clora had borne eleven children before the Nineteenth Amendment allowed her to vote. Her granddaughter thought it remarkable that a woman who could not vote until she was forty held such firm views on what women could do (Heard Cousins; Her Family and Life).

In so large a family, each new baby was given an older brother or sister to look after it, and a special bond grew between the little one and the sibling who “mothered” it. Myrtis Lee was especially close to France, who had been her “Nanny” as she grew up. When Clora was expecting again, she promised ten-year-old Myrtis Lee that she could “look after the new baby when it came,” and Myrtis Lee could hardly wait.

When Clora’s labor began, the other children were rounded up and taken to their grandparents’ home until the baby arrived. Myrtis Lee hid instead. From the next room, she listened to her mother and her grandmother Nolen as the birth went on. When the baby, a little boy named Lindsey, was born, Grandmaw Nolen placed him in his mother’s arms. Then she sternly told her forty-two-year-old daughter, already the mother of twelve, “Clora, enough is enough. This foolishness has to stop” (Family recollection).

Four of Clora’s children with the family automobile: Vera, Glenn, Myrtis Lee, and Simmie. (Family collection)

Midwife and Nurse

When anyone in the community was ill, Clora was called in to care for them. She was also the local midwife, bringing her neighbors’ babies into the world as she had brought her own. She knew a great deal about quarantine, contagion, and the prevention of disease. When Myrtis Lee came down with typhoid, Clora traced the illness to a bad well and closed it. She isolated her daughter and sterilized everything the sick child touched, and none of the other children caught it (Her Family and Life).

She was also the one called in to tend the dying and the dead. She closed many eyes, and she washed and dressed many bodies for burial, and she never regarded this as anything but natural. She had only disdain for people who avoided or denied the unpleasant parts of life. If someone said something foolish, she would look at them with a mixture of pity and scorn and say, “Aw pshaw.” As her granddaughter put it, “You did not want to speak nonsense, lies, nor bull-shit to Maw Maw Heard” (Her Family and Life).

For her own children and grandchildren she practiced a highly effective form of preventive medicine. She kept a cabinet of the most vile-smelling, vile-tasting remedies known: castor oil, milk of magnesia, purgatives, and equally dreadful cough and fever medicines. Everyone, she held, needed a good “cleaning out” from time to time, and a minor complaint brought out the bottles. The children in her care quickly learned not to have minor illnesses. But a child who was truly sick or in pain met a different grandmother, all sympathy and tender care, with paregoric or a hot toddy of good Irish whiskey. Decades later her granddaughter Frances wrote that the smell of a hot toddy still brought back her grandmother’s image, “and feelings of warmth and security” (Her Family and Life).

Education for Her Daughters

Clora had a distinct philosophy about her children’s futures. She hoped her sons would seek an education, but she would see to it that her daughters finished college. Men, she held, could do quite well in the world without advanced schooling, but education was a woman’s best hope for a good life. She kept her word. All three daughters finished college, and two of them earned graduate degrees (Her Family and Life; Biography of Myrtis Lee Heard Jackson). Addie became a teacher and an outstanding girls’ basketball coach, whose girls’ team won a state championship in 1923. Myrtis Lee earned her degree at Louisiana Tech and a master’s degree at LSU, and Vera followed her sisters to college (Her Family and Life; Biography of Myrtis Lee Heard Jackson).

Her sons did well too. T.P., whom she always called Pink, served in the First World War, went on to LSU, and became the university’s first athletic director. France and Burkett settled in Ruston, where Burkett spent his career at Louisiana Tech. Glenn left LSU to join the Army and made it his career. Addison drilled all the children in arithmetic until they could do complex calculations in their heads. Education was held in the highest esteem by both the Heards and the Nolens (Heard Cousins; Archie Glenn Heard; Biography of Myrtis Lee Heard Jackson; Thomas Pinkney Heard).

Clora’s own mother did not always approve of where education led. When Myrtis Lee chose nursing school in the early 1930s, Grandmother Nolen, who held the old view that nurses were little better than loose women, refused to speak to her. Clora, Addie, Myrtis Lee, and Vera, their granddaughter observed, all had many of Maria Nolen’s traits, and some of them may have come down to later generations (Her Family and Life).

Sorrow and Fire

The family had a good life, “far from wealthy, but … never in need,” but sorrow came. Their ninth child, John Tilus, named for Clora’s father, was born on September 15, 1914, and died on October 19 at one month old. He was buried at Sugartown, where Clora would one day lie (Family record; Heard Cousins; Sugartown Cemetery). She never stopped grieving for him. In the last days of her life, fifty-four years later, she still mourned her lost baby and spoke of seeing him again in heaven (Heard Cousins).

The early 1920s brought more losses. Clora’s sister Sarah Delilah Nolen Miller died at Pitkin on December 23, 1923, and her youngest sister, Mildred Suzie, died the following year (Family record). Then, around 1925, the family home burned. The older children had left home, the middle group were at school, and Clora had taken the four youngest boys away for the day when Addison, working in the field, saw smoke rising from the house. He went back into the burning house again and again, carrying out the family’s belongings, until his hair caught fire and his face and hands were burned. Sparks from the house then set the pile in the yard ablaze. All he saved was the mantel clock (Heard Cousins; Her Family and Life).

The family rebuilt across the field. The “New House,” believed finished in 1926, was a smaller frame house in a double-shotgun plan, with two front doors and a wide porch. One door opened onto the living room, dining room, and kitchen; the other onto the front bedroom, where Clora and Addison slept with the youngest children, the middle bedroom, and the sleeping porch. Bricks from the old house went into the new fireplace (Heard Cousins; Her Family and Life).

The “New House,” built across the field after the fire of about 1925, where Clora lived the rest of her life. It still stands at the heart of the Heard farm. In 2024 the house, was lovingly painted and refurbished by Clora's Great grandson, Jason Rhine.  (Family collection)

Clora’s father died on May 30, 1927, and was buried at Blue Branch Cemetery in Pitkin. Til was the owner and operator of the Pitkin Mercantile, and he and Maria had moved from their farm into a new house in Pitkin in the 1920s. After his death the store was set up as a family corporation so that his children could be shareholders. Near Til’s grave stands the memorial stone he placed for his parents, Sim and Bedie (Blue Branch Cemetery; Heard Cousins; Murder on Ten Mile Creek). Maria survived him by nine years. Although her husband had left his land and businesses to his widow and sons, Maria gave her daughters equal shares of the estate (Her Family and Life).

The memorial stone Til Nolen placed for his parents, Absolom S. and Obedience Wise Nolen, at Blue Branch Cemetery in Pitkin, near the graves of Til and Maria. (Murder on Ten Mile Creek, CommunicatingLife2)

The newspaper account of the Easter reunion at Grandmaw Nolen’s home in Pitkin. (Family collection)

One Easter Sunday in the 1930s, Maria welcomed the whole family to her Pitkin home. Her three living children, Clora, Robert, and Merida, came with their families, along with twenty-two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. It was the first time the family had all been together in eight years, the newspaper noted, and in that time they had lost some loved ones and gained others. Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Heard brought nearly all their children: T.P. and his family from Baton Rouge; France and his family and Burkett and his wife from Ruston; Rufus from New Orleans; Addie from Rosepine; Myrtis Lee and Vera; and Simmie, Meredith, Alton, and Lindsey. Only Glenn, then stationed with the Army at Fort Clark, Texas, could not come (Nolen family reunion; Biography of Myrtis Lee Heard Jackson).

The families of Clora’s two late sisters were there too. W. C. Miller came with Delilah’s children, among them N. C. Miller of Iota, Cecil, Herman, Robert, and little Leverne. Mildred’s husband, H. E. Gardener, came from Beaumont with his wife and Mildred’s children, Marjie, Audrey, and Hugh Jr. In all, thirty-nine members of the family gathered that day. The paper called the Nolens one of the pioneer families of Vernon Parish and remembered the late M. T. Nolen as one of its most active and progressive citizens, missed in both business and social circles (Nolen family reunion).

Maria died at Pitkin on November 15, 1936, and was buried beside Til (Family record; Blue Branch Cemetery).

MawMaw’s Farm

Her children called her Mama. Most of her grandchildren called her MawMaw, though some called her Grandmaw, and her farm was the center of their world. She liked to say, “Addison and I managed to have 13 children, and raise twelve of them; but all that dozen together could only give us 24 grandchildren” (Heard Cousins). The oldest grandchildren, who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s, told the younger ones that MawMaw had run the farm like a CCC camp, with plenty of real farm work. By the time the younger cousins came along, they said, it had become more like a summer camp for children (Heard Cousins).

She planned the work, gave the orders, and supervised the workers, who were her children and grandchildren. There were always milk cows, led home each evening by a bell cow; in Frances’s day her name was Polly. Clora washed the udders, milked into buckets she scalded in boiling water, and no cow ever kicked her bucket more than once. She skimmed the cream and churned it into pale, almost white butter. She saved the buttermilk for Addison, who liked it with crumbled cornbread for supper, and for her famous biscuits. Nothing was wasted. She made clabber, which some grandchildren loved and others would not touch (Heard Cousins).

Her geese killed snakes and gave down for pillows and feather beds. Frances still sleeps on a pillow her grandmother made from that down. To stop the snakes that robbed her nests, MawMaw put china doorknobs among the eggs; a snake that swallowed one could not crush it, and died. But china doorknobs were valuable, and MawMaw had no intention of letting a snake escape with one of hers, so dead-snake hunts were required: the grandchildren were sent out to find the remains and bring back the knob. She sold her extra eggs at the Pitkin Mercantile, and this “egg money” was her own. She knew which hens were laying and which were slacking, and the slackers became Sunday chicken and dumplings. She could catch, kill, scald, and pluck a hen before the rest of the flock had finished the corn she had scattered (Heard Cousins).

Most of her recipes were sweetened with the farm’s own cane syrup rather than sugar. On school days she banked the coals in her wood stove after breakfast and put in a pan of the farm’s deep-red sweet potatoes, so that the children came home to a baked potato dripping with butter. She made sweet potato pies for the holidays. Her one extravagance was watermelon. The Heards raised acres of melons and brought them up to the house in the wheelbarrow. With a curved butcher knife more than two feet long, MawMaw would slash a melon open with one stroke and lift out the heart in two halves for two waiting grandchildren (Heard Cousins). Nothing went to waste. The “rhines,” as the family called them, were carried to the chicken yard for her chickens, geese, turkeys, and ducks, and whatever the fowl did not eat went to the pigs. The knack for melons stayed in the family: her youngest son, Lindsey, grew “Sugartown” watermelons that regularly took first prize at the Beauregard Parish Fair (Lindsey L. Heard).

Christmas at the farm meant cousins and stories, and above all MawMaw’s breakfasts: fried quail the uncles had shot the day before, stewed squirrel, sugar-cured ham with redeye gravy, butter-browned slices of sweet potato, fig and pear preserves, ribbon cane syrup, and biscuits. Long after she had an electric range, she kept the old wood stove in the kitchen for baking. In the evenings the family gathered around the living room fire to chew sugar cane and throw the pulp into the flames. MawMaw served eggnog, which was strictly for the adults. When the house was full she made the beds up sideways, so four to six children could sleep crosswise under her quilts (Christmas at the Farm).

She and Addison were always the first ones up, stoking the fires and warming the house before the children stirred. On cold nights she warmed bricks by the fireplace and wrapped them in flannel to take the chill off the feather beds (Heard Cousins). When a fishhook went through the hand of her granddaughter “Sister,” and Addison began sharpening a straight razor at the kitchen table, it was MawMaw who told him not to cut it out. When two of the grandchildren slipped off on a moonlight outing with their young uncle Lindsey, it was a very upset MawMaw Heard who met them on the porch (Stories from Sister).

The farm was the family’s gathering place for weddings as well as holidays. On November 23, 1938, Myrtis Lee married Wilmer Henry “Jack” Jackson at her parents’ home in Pitkin, with her father giving her away (Biography of Myrtis Lee Heard Jackson). Clora’s granddaughter Frances, born the next year, was named for her grandmother, for her uncle France, and for her father’s grandfather Francis Marion Adams (The Names of My Life).

A Strong-Minded Widow

Addison died at home on the morning of December 20, 1946, after a long illness. The family always believed that the skin cancer that took his life began where his face had been burned in the fire. He lay in his casket before the fireplace in their front bedroom while neighbors came to pay their respects. After services at the Baptist church in Pitkin he was buried at Sugartown (Family record; Biography of J. A. Heard). Clora was sixty-six. She survived him by more than twenty-one years (Family record).

Her children’s first concern was for their mother. They agreed that whichever of them would come home and live with her would inherit the house and land at her death. Simmie and his wife, Bobbie, tried it, but after a few years they moved to Baton Rouge. Glenn and his wife, Bertha, tried as well, and in time moved to a house of their own nearby on Bertha’s family land. As the family history puts it, “Grandma Heard was a strong-minded lady” (History of the Heard Farm). Glenn, retired from the Army, still came to see his mother every day, helped wherever he was needed, and for many years helped her manage the farm (Archie Glenn Heard).

The census of 1950 found her in Vernon Parish, a widow and the head of her own household (Family record; FamilySearch). She went on running the farm and welcoming the grandchildren. In August 1959 she was among those gathered at First Baptist Church in Logansport to see her granddaughter Frances married to Charles Freeman (54th Anniversary). A Social Security record issued in Louisiana in 1965 lists her as Francis N. Heard of Pitkin (Family record).

“Mrs. J. A. Heard Celebrates Her 80th Birthday,” Easter 1960. (Family collection)

In the spring of 1960 came a milestone. On Easter Sunday, April 17, 1960, twelve days before her eightieth birthday, the family filled the Heard home in Pitkin to celebrate. Eleven of her twelve children were there, among them Burkett and France from Ruston, Meredith and Simmie from Baton Rouge, Alton from Corpus Christi, Rufus from Shreveport, Vera and Addie from Beaumont, Lindsey from DeRidder, and Glenn from Pitkin. Myrtis Lee and Jack came from Logansport with Jackie, and Frances and Charles Freeman came from Natchitoches. Nolen and Miller kin came as well: the Walter Nolens, Merdia Nolen, Mrs. R. M. Nolen of DeRidder, W. C. Miller and his family, and others. Besides her eleven children, fourteen grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, and many friends came to honor her (“Mrs. J. A. Heard Celebrates Her 80th Birthday”).

MawMaw Heard with some of her grandchildren by the front gate of the Heard home. (Family collection)

Nine of Clora’s children in later life. Seated: France, Vera, Addie, Myrtis Lee, Simmie, Meredith, and Glenn; standing: Lindsey and Alton. (Family collection)

Her Last Summer

In the summer of 1967, her last, her granddaughter Frances Ruth, Frances’s husband, Charles, and their two daughters, Jackie Lee and Denise, spent two weeks at the farm with her. Charles was on active duty with the Army Reserve at nearby Fort Polk and could join them only now and then. MawMaw was getting the farm ready for her absence. Her granddaughter Barbara Ann was expecting her first baby in Beaumont, and MawMaw was going there to help. She was cheerful and eager to be “needed” again in the care of a new baby. It was clear that she was preparing the farm for a long stay away, with no set date for her return (Family recollection).

She put them all to work. They cleaned out the smokehouse, which had long since become a general storage room, and then the pantry and every closet in the house. At eighty-seven, MawMaw could still leave Frances tired and panting (Family recollection).

She took special care in cleaning and oiling her rocking chair. The rocker had its place on the front porch, where she rocked while she shelled peas or churned butter, or simply rocked and watched to see who was driving down the road. It had been made for her, with short legs, as she had, so that her feet rested firmly on the floor. It was wide and roomy enough to hold two children comfortably in her lap. Before she left for Beaumont, she made sure it was safely stored inside (Family recollection).

Today that rocker sits invitingly in the guest bedroom of Frances and Charles Freeman’s home. On the wall behind it hangs the tinted portrait of Clora’s mother, Maria Jones Nolen (Family recollection).

Her Death and Legacy

MawMaw was in Beaumont to greet the arrival of Barbara Ann’s first baby with joy. The new little one brought happiness and renewal, and Clora loved simply holding her great-granddaughter. But she was not as strong or as resilient as she thought (Family recollection).

When she began to have small strokes, known as transient ischemic attacks, she knew exactly what was happening. Rather than go to an emergency room, she insisted on being driven from Beaumont to DeRidder to see her own physician. He put her in the hospital at once, but there was no way to stop the clots that were forming and blocking the flow of blood to her brain. She told the family that she did not want to live crippled and handicapped after a stroke, and that she was ready to go. Then she closed her eyes and proceeded to die (Family recollection).

Even in dying, she preferred to be in control. To the end she faced the truth squarely, and she did not flinch or turn away. But for her Christian faith, the closing lines of William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus” might have been written for her: “I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul” (Family recollection; Henley, “Invictus”).

Clora Frances Nolen Heard died in the hospital at DeRidder on March 15, 1968, at the age of eighty-seven (Family record; Family recollection; History of the Heard Farm). She was buried beside Addison in the Sugartown Baptist Church Cemetery, near the grave of the baby son she had mourned for more than half a century, and less than a mile from the graves of her grandparents Sim and Bedie Nolen. The Heard stone bears the Masonic emblem on his side and the words “Frances Clora, 1880–1968” on hers (Family record; Sugartown Cemetery; Murder on Ten Mile Creek).

The Heard stone at Sugartown Baptist Church Cemetery: James A., 1870–1946, and Frances Clora, 1880–1968. (Family collection)

Her will left the old mantel clock, the one thing Addison had saved from the fire, to no single child. Instead it passed from home to home, so that each of her children could display it in turn. Every grandchild remembers it standing in their parents’ house. It survived the fire of 1925 and, in the summer of 2020, tornadoes that destroyed the homes where it was then kept (Heard Cousins).

Her death also raised the question of the farm. Her twelve living children did not want to see it broken up, and her eldest son, T.P., conceived of a family corporation to keep the land together. The Heard Land Corporation was organized that year, with twelve shares for the twelve children. More than half a century later the land she and Addison homesteaded beside her parents’ farm still belongs to their descendants (History of the Heard Farm; Biography of J. A. Heard).

The Heard family home, as maintained and refurbished by Clora’s children and grandchildren. (Family collection)

From 1988 to 1995 two of her granddaughters, Sara Jolie Allardyce Rhine and Frances Ruth Jackson Freeman, published a family newsletter, We Heard, for the descendants of James Addison and Clora Frances Nolen Heard, who by then numbered more than a hundred across six generations (Christmas at the Farm; Her Family and Life). Her maternal line runs on as well. The mitochondrial DNA that came to her from Maria Jones Nolen, Caroline Jelks Jones, and Elizabeth Merritt Jelks still passes from mother to daughter among her granddaughters’ descendants (Using DNA).

Clora Frances Nolen Heard lived from the years just after Reconstruction into the space age. She was born weeks after the death of a grandmother who had survived war, murder, and exile, and she grew up in a family that valued pride, learning, and plain speech. She ran a working farm through two world wars and the Depression. She nursed her neighbors, delivered their babies, and prepared their dead, and she sent all three of her daughters through college. She mourned her lost son to the end of her life, yet the grandchildren who slept crosswise in her feather beds remembered her above all for warmth, security, and her biscuits. Her granddaughter’s portrait still fits: a woman who looked life straight in the eye and never flinched (Her Family and Life; Heard Cousins).

References

Short titles in the text refer to the sources below. Family photographs are from the Heard family collection unless otherwise noted.

1. Family record. Family record and chronology supplied by Frances Ruth Jackson Freeman, Ph.D., to the Heard and Nolen Family Histories project, November 2026 (birth, parents, siblings, census residences 1880–1950, marriage, children, deaths, burial, Social Security record).
2. FamilySearch. FamilySearch Family Tree. “Clora Frances Nolen (1880–1968),” ID L5J6-HK2. Includes the Louisiana Parish Marriages index (Frances Heard) and the 1950 census (Clara Heard). https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/L5J6-HK2/clora-frances-nolen-1880-1968
3. FamilySearch, J. A. Heard. FamilySearch Family Tree. “James Addison Heard (1870–1946),” ID K2NC-G8P. https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/K2NC-G8P/james-addison-heard-1870-1946
4. Sugartown Cemetery. LAGenWeb, Beauregard Parish. “Sugartown Cemetery List and Photos.” https://lagenweb.org/beauregard/cems/sugartown.html
5. Old Campground Cemetery. LAGenWeb, Beauregard Parish. “Old Campground Cemetery List” (inscriptions recorded by Jane P. McManus, March 18, 1998). https://lagenweb.org/beauregard/cems/oldcampground.html
6. Blue Branch Cemetery. USGenWeb Archives, Vernon Parish. “Blue Branch Cemetery” (inscriptions). http://files.usgwarchives.net/la/vernon/cemeteries/bluebr.txt
7. History of Sugartown. LAGenWeb, Beauregard Parish. “History of Sugartown, Beauregard Parish, La.” https://lagenweb.org/beauregard/history/history11.html
8. Fletcher, Leesville Leader. Fletcher, Stanley. “Visions of Vernon: Vernon Parish’s Founding Families, Hayes – Hewitt.” Leesville Leader, June 9, 2021 (Heard entry). https://theleesvilleleader.com/2021/06/09/visions-of-vernon-vernon-parishs-founding-families-hayes-hewitt/
9. 64 Parishes, Sam Houston Jones. 64 Parishes (Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities). “Sam Houston Jones.” https://64parishes.org/entry/sam-houston-jones
10. Vernon Parish Tourism, Pitkin. Vernon Parish Tourism Commission. “Pitkin.” https://vernonparish.org/about-us/communities/pitkin/
11. Biography of J. A. Heard. Heard and Nolen Family Histories. “James Addison Heard: Teacher, Timberman, Homesteader, and Patriarch of the Pitkin Heards” (biography), November 2026, and the newspaper clippings in the family collection on which it draws.
12. Biography of Myrtis Lee Heard Jackson. Heard and Nolen Family Histories. “Myrtis Lee Heard Jackson” (biography), November 2026, including the clippings “Easter Reception at Grandmaw Nolen’s Home” and the “Elizabeth” social column, family collection.
13. Her Family and Life. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “Myrtis Lee Heard Jackson – Her Family and Life.” CommunicatingLife2, January 31, 2014 (written 2012). https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2014/01/myrtis-lee-heard-jackson-her-family-and.html
14. Heard Cousins. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “A Salute to My Heard Cousins and Our Wonderful Family.” CommunicatingLife2, May 31, 2021. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2021/05/to-my-heard-cousins-but-especially-for.html
15. Christmas at the Farm. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “Christmas at the Farm: Memories Within Memories” (from the family newsletter We Heard, 1988–1995). CommunicatingLife2, December 2020. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2020/12/christmas-at-farm.html
16. Stories from Sister. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “Stories from Sister” (from We Heard, vol. 2, no. 2, October 10, 1990). CommunicatingLife2, December 23, 2020. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2020/12/stories-from-sister-between1988-and.html
17. Archie Glenn Heard. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “Heard Family Heroes — Archie Glenn Heard.” CommunicatingLife2, December 17, 2020. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2020/12/heard-family-heroes-archie-glenn-heard.html
18. History of the Heard Farm. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “History of the Heard Farm 1898–2024: A Short History of the Heard Land Corp.” CommunicatingLife2, September 21, 2024. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2024/09/history-of-heard-farm-1898-2024.html
19. Murder on Ten Mile Creek. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “Murder on Ten Mile Creek: The Saga of Absolom Simeon Nolen & Obedience Wise Nolen.” CommunicatingLife2, June 5, 2020. Source of the Nolen photographs reproduced here. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2020/06/murder-on-ten-mile-creek-saga-of.html
20. History of the Nolen Family. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “The History of the Nolen Family of Louisiana: The Ancestors and Descendants of Absolom Simeon and Obedience Wise Nolen.” CommunicatingLife2, June 7, 2020. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-history-of-nolen-family-of-louisiana.html
21. 1880 U.S. Census. 1880 United States Federal Census, Vernon Parish, Louisiana, Fifth Ward, Enumeration District 43, p. 28, enumerated June 17, 1880, household of Tillus M. Nolen (indexed as “Clora Nolan”). Image in the family collection.
22. Nolen family reunion. “Easter Sunday … Pitkin, La.” Account of the Nolen family reunion at the home of Mrs. M. T. Nolen. Newspaper clipping, mid-1930s, family collection (“Easter Reception at Grandmaw Nolen’s Home”).
23. “Mrs. J. A. Heard Celebrates Her 80th Birthday”. “Mrs. J. A. Heard Celebrates Her 80th Birthday.” Newspaper clipping, April 1960, family collection.
24. For William Jones Descendants. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “For William Jones Descendants.” CommunicatingLife2, March 2019. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2019/03/for-william-jones-descendants.html
25. Heards & Nolens and Their Miller Kin. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “Heards & Nolens and Their Miller/Mueller Kin” (updated March 15, 2021). CommunicatingLife2, December 2018. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2018/12/heards-nolens-and-their-millermueller.html
26. Lindsey L. Heard. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “Lindsey L. Heard — A Collection of Memories.” CommunicatingLife2, June 2019. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2019/06/lindsey-l-heard.html
27. Thomas Pinkney Heard. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “Thomas Pinkney Heard — Pink, Red, T.P., Skipper.” CommunicatingLife2, June 2011. http://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2011/06/thomas-pinkney-heard-pink-red-tp.html
28. Heard & Nolen Ancestors. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “Heard & Nolen Ancestors: With DNA Summary and Evaluation for Accuracy.” CommunicatingLife2, January 2021. Source of the Nolen–Jones family tree chart. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2021/01/heard-nolen-ancestors-with-dna-summary.html
29. Using DNA. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “Using DNA to Understand Our Family History.” CommunicatingLife2, March 2018. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2018/03/using-dna-to-understand-our-family.html
30. The Names of My Life. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “The Names of My Life.” CommunicatingLife2, August 2011. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2011/08/names-of-my-life.html
31. 54th Anniversary. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “54th Anniversary Bittersweet Memories.” CommunicatingLife2, August 18, 2013. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2013/08/54th-anniversary-bittersweet-memories.html
32. Royal Roots. Freeman, Frances Jackson. “Royal Roots — Heard, Jackson, Lindsey, Cox, Hewell, and Hicks Families.” CommunicatingLife2, January 2015. Source of the portrait of Clora Frances Nolen as a schoolgirl. https://communicatinglife2.blogspot.com/2015/01/royal-roots-heard-jackson-lindsey-cox.html
33. Family recollection. Recollection of Frances Ruth Jackson Freeman, Ph.D., supplied to the Heard and Nolen Family Histories project, November 8, 2026: the family names Mama, MawMaw, and Grandmaw; the older-sibling caretakers; the birth of Lindsey Leroy Heard in 1922; MawMaw’s last summer at the farm in 1967 and the history of her rocking chair; and her final illness and death in the hospital at DeRidder in 1968.
34. Henley, “Invictus.” Henley, William Ernest. “Invictus.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51642/invictus

Heard and Nolen Family Histories · Compiled for Frances Ruth Jackson Freeman, Ph.D., November 2026 · Version dated 2026-11-08 7:59 PM CST · Created using Perplexity AI