Dollie Harriet Crider 1871-1955
    "Dollie's Story"

    In telling the story of her birth she said,
    "they named me Dollie because I was as tiny as a little doll."

    Born 10 March 1871 , she weighed 2 and 1/2 pounds, and Grandma Prichard
    kept her alive in a shoe box surrounded by heated bricks.

    My first memory of my grandmother was trapsing along beside her to the little post office building in Lake Victor, just about a two block walk. It was on one of those trips that she taught me to "school hop." No small feat for a woman her age!
    I can remember sleeping with her on visits as a child. Both of us almost folded up in her feather mattress as she told me scary stories about raiding indians handed down from Grandma Prichard.
    She told me of once crossing the Colorado River on her white horse during a big storm, and the river rising fast. She had been across to help nurse a sick family when caught by the storm, but she had to get home to her children.
    She kept a trotline in the river all the time. Once she caught a catfish weighing nearly a hundred pounds.

    Of all her "real life" stories, I remember one very well. She said it taught her a lesson she never forgot: One day she slipped into the house and took an apple that was in the cupboard. When asked by her mother if she took the apple, she stubbornly denied it. After receiving a severe spanking from her father, he sit her down before him and said, "now Dollie I want you to understand, the spanking was not for taking the apple, the apple was yours anyway, the spanking was for the lying!"

    She loved lacy linens and hankies which she put away and never used, and she collected fancy little perfume bottles. I have one that I found half buried in the dirt where the house use to stand in Lake Victor.

    She dearly loved Roy Acuff, and would sometimes sing his "Grey Speckled Bird" for me. When he came on the radio, she'd say "sssh, Roy's singing."

    Dollie was born in Travis County Texas to John and Harriet Crider. Her mother died when she was born, and she was raised from birth by Thomas and Rosannah Prichard.
    She grew up in the little town of Bluffton in Llano County where the Pritchards settled about 1875.
    The fact that Dollie married James Herridge under the name Dollie Crider would indicate that she was not legally adopted. However, The Prichards, a couple whose only child had died an infant, raised her as Dollie Prichard, and she was a young teenager when she learned she was not their child.

    She had an older ¹sister called Lisa or Lizzie who also lived with the Prichards for a short while, later to be taken by her father, John Crider, and where those two Criders went from there is a mystery. Dollie was so young that she only vaguely remembered her sister, and was to see her only once more in her lifetime, when she came to see her once after she was grown. Her sister's married name was Jennings, and she had several children. No one alive today remembers hearing her husband's given name or where they lived.

    Evidently the Criders and the Prichards were friends or possibly relatives. As in their keeping the older child until called for by the father would indicate, and somewhere Dollie learned a little of her background either from the Prichards or from her sister's visit.
    She knew that her parents were with some kind of circus or carnival show out of Indian Territory, and were traveling with this show in Texas when she was born. She was told that her mother was indian, and Dollie had the very dark hair, and features of the Native American to bear this out. She was a very attractive young woman even into her fifties.

    Left a young widow with six children and pregnant with the seventh, she lost her first husband to Typhoid Fever in 1906. Dollie and James had seven children, and Dollie raised them all through hard times, mostly in the cotton fields around Bluffton.
    Their children were:
    Walter James Herridge, Willie Armour Herridge, George Thomas Herridge, Bettie Elizabeth Herridge,Bessie Ann Herridge, Myrtle Rosie Herridge and Maggie Elvie Herridge.

    Dollie was a widow for nine years when she married Jordan Wyatt, III on 11 April 1915 in Burnet.
    Together they had two children: Verlie Dorine Wyatt and Lowell Curtis Wyatt.     View Photograph

    Dollie died on 2 January 1955 at the home of her daughter, Bettie Garrett. She is buried in the Bluffton Cemetery.

    See Also: Thomas and Rosanna Prichard | James Herridge | Bluffton

     

    NOTES:

    ¹"Lizzie" JENNINGS nee CRIDER was born probably about 1865, Her name may have been Mary Elizabeth.
    She married a JENNINGS between 1880 and 1890, they had several children, and lived in Oklahoma and/or Texas.
    JOHN CRIDER probably re-married,and I have reason to believe he was still living as late as 1920.
    If you have information re: descendants of this JENNING family please let me know.