LOCATION: Texas: Big Spring, Van Horn, Mexico
PERIOD: 1925-1944
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Homer Hardin (1902-1985); Virgil Hardin (1902-1992); April Johnson (1907-1986); June johnson (1907-1988); John Farley Hardin (1927-2020); Henry Adams Hardin (1928-2015).
Twin brothers, Homer (1902-1985) and Virgil Hardin (1902-1992) married twin sisters, April (1907-1986) and June Johnson (1907-1988). This was 1925 in west Texas. However, their forebears had come a long way to get here.
They had come from the northeast, across the Appalachian mountains. They came from the Atlantic seaboard and before that, from Ireland and Scotland. They took up land and built one-and two-room cabins and left them unpainted. Married among themselves, produced children, and added more rooms as needed, and did not paint them either.
Their descendants planted cotton and corn in the bottom land and in hidden hollers made whiskey from the corn and traded or sold what they did not drink. Some went still further west into Texas, where they found life freer, but harsher.
These were the Scots-Irish, who were accustomed to moving on when times got rough, starting over, and creating new lives in the unsettled frontier. Rejecting civilization as represented by lawyers and bankers, and above all, any form of government.
In the case of the Hardins and Johnsons, after they married, they enjoyed about four years of prosperity before the Great Depression hit Big Spring, Texas. And like generations of Scots-Irish before them, they took all their belongings and went looking for a better life with a cow and two pigs.
They were heading to El Paso, the largest town in their region, but did not make it. Circumstances forced them to stop in Van Horn, Texas, a little northeast of El Paso.
Here they started over and made a hard-scrabble subsistence life there. However, once they were old enough, the two oldest boys, John and Henry, decided to strike out on their own and try their luck further west. Repeating the same generations-old pattern of their people.
HOMER AND APRIL, VIRGIL AND JUNE
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)
May of nineteen and twenty-five;
Them Hardin twins married the Johnson girls,
Homer and April, Virgil and June.
The world was their oyster, their love the pearl.
First few years were happy and carefree,
Both couples were with children blessed.
Then the Depression hit Big Spring;
They loaded up two wagons and they left.
Dusk that first day one wagon broke down.
A bent old man came limping up the road,
“They’s worse weather a-coming;
Hard weather. Be foretold.”
That night high winds, driving rain;
Hail bounced upon the ground like small pale eggs.
The women sought shelter under a wagon;
The horses moaned on the trembling legs.
It was peaceful in the morning after the storm,
The women began collecting their scattered goods.
Their food was all ruined, so Virgil took the gun:
Headed to a small stand of cottonwoods.
The horses were skittish, the wagons soggy,
Virg had got a rabbit; they ate, then headed out.
April and June started singing from a hymnbook;
Despite what they’d been through, they remained unbowed.
When they started out they hoped to make El Paso,
But only got as far as Van Horn.
Homer and Virgil scouted around,
Found some land they thought might make a decent farm.
They built two cabins, side by side;
Added more rooms with each new child.
No matter how hard they worked each year,
On that harsh land, fortune never smiled.
The two oldest boys were growing restless,
In the summer of 19 and 44.
They were old enough to have an adventure,
But still too young to be called off to war.
They left with no warning, well before dawn;
Crossed the Rio Grande, and rode still further west.
At dusk they eyed the sun in its setting;
The western sky a bloody red.
© 2025 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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