Book-ends: A novel brewing between them. Letha Crossman with her granddaughter, Dana, in 1955 at Gypsy Camp near Siloam Springs, Arkansas.

Letha Crossman was born in 1898 near Blackwell, Oklahoma. She grew up the eldest daughter in a family of twelve children, on a farm outside Waynoka, Oklahoma. She became a teacher and first taught in one-room schoolhouse in Woods County, Oklahoma in 1919. In 1920 she taught in Western Oklahoma with her husband. In 1940, she moved to Ponca City teaching at Woodlands Elementary School.

Towards the end of her teaching career, Letha began writing a novel she called “Sandhill House” based on her family experiences, starting with a trip the summer of 1907 in a covered wagon across the prairie with her mother and four siblings. She submitted it to one publisher on whom she had pinned her hopes, and when it was rejected, shelved it.

When she died in 1968, the manuscript fell to her granddaughter, Dana, who eventually revised it using the title “Mama Grace” and found a publisher to print it for the 2007 Oklahoma Centennial Celebration.

In real life Grace had ten living children and two that died.  The novel condenses the family you see here into the first four children (Letha, 4th from the left) and the last two (Victor and “Poppy”).

After the birth of their tenth child, Papa traded the homestead for property in Waynoka. With help from visiting relatives, he then expanded the property's originalthree-room house into the ten-room house shown here, which he eventually traded in on equity for the farm in Siloam Springs.

.