BISHOP AND MARY POWELL, at left, were responsible for saving a stone house built in 1881 for his great-great-grandfather, Rich Coffey, center. It had been destined to be bulldozed and left at the bottom of the Ivie reservoir. The house still looks much as it did when it was built in 1881, though it was moved to a rocky hilltop well above the Ivie reservoir’s high water line. Coffey would have to have the TV antenna explained to him, of course. The visitors are part of a group from the Tom Green Historical Society.

Pioneer Rock House Moved
From Site of Ivie Reservoir

LEADAY — Rich Coffey was one of the earliest settlers on the Concho River, for a time a neighbor to John Chisum before that famous cattleman moved his operation to New Mexico.

After his original pecan-log house was flooded in 1878, Coffey made arrangements with a builder named Jonathon Cook to construct a one-and-a-half-story rock home for his family. That house, complete with an old-fashioned open dog run in the center, was finished in 1881. The date is etched into stone beside the front door.

The house came near falling victim to another flooding a century later. For a time it was destined to be bulldozed to make way for construction of the Ivie reservoir. It was saved by Coffey’s great-great-grandson and wife, Bishop and Mary Powell. They were aided by the Texas Historical Commission and others who recognized the historical significance of the structure.

They had it moved stone by stone and reconstructed half a mile away on top of a rocky hill well above the lake’s high-water line.

Coffey’s home was part of the old Leaday community, all of which vanished beneath Ivie’s waters. A few other Leaday landmarks were moved to preserve them, including the historic Day ranch house and the Leaday cemetery.

In his time, Coffey was well-known in Concho, Coleman, Runnels and Tom Green counties. A Georgia native, he came to Texas before the Civil War and lived for a time at Weatherford, farming and freighting. He rode with Sul Ross in the Pease River raid which resulted in the recapture of Cynthia Ann Parker in December 1860. He later said, "That woman didn’t want to be rescued."

In 1862 he brought his family and his livestock to a long-vanished settlement named Pickettville, near present-day Ballinger. After a time he moved to the confluence of the Colorado and Concho rivers, where he remained the rest of his life, farming and raising livestock.

He also freighted and traded in salt. In J. Evetts Haley’s biography of Charles Goodnight, he tells of an incident in which Goodnight and four cowboys were on their way home from a cattle drive into New Mexico. A little east of Horsehead Crossing they saw a cloud of dust and assumed they were in for an Indian fight which they were likely to lose.

To their great relief, they found the dust was being raised by a six-yoke ox team and, as Goodnight told it, "a wagonload of the biggest watermelons you most ever saw."

Rich Coffey was on his way to the Juan Cordona salt lake on the Pecos. The watermelons were to be sold to Mexican freighters who came there to load up with salt. It was Coffey’s custom to carry salt back to Weatherford and sell it.

In those days people did whatever it took to make a living, even to freighting watermelons into Indian country.

Travel tended to follow the rivers as much as possible. Coffey’s farm was something of a crossroad for people who had come west along the Colorado and continued west along either the Colorado or the Concho.

Indians were still very much a threat until the military defeat of the Comanches in 1874. Powell says one family story concerns a time when some medicine show people stopped at the Coffey place. They were sitting around a campfire visiting when Coffey heard an owl hoot. He told his guests they had better get to the house. "That wasn’t an owl," he said.

He lost a herd of cattle and one cowboy to an Indian raid on the Concho. A son, John Wright Coffey, was wounded.

At a hearing a government attorney kept pressing Coffey to tell whether the raiders were Comanches or Kiowas. Coffey said, "They didn’t leave a calling card."

He eventually won a small settlement of about $600 from the federal government because these were supposedly reservation Indians and theoretically under government control.

Coffey started a post office in 1879. He was a Coleman County commissioner and sat on the first grand jury convened in that county.

He died in 1897 at the age of 74.

One of his sons, Fog Coffey, was a widely-known character in towns along the Concho and Colorado rivers. Powell said he once was shown the original bar out of the old Zappe Saloon in Ballinger. On one occasion Fog Coffey rode his horse into the saloon and shot holes in the bar. Not one to tolerate over-regulation, he reacted to a new anti-gun ordinance by dragging his pistol into town at the end of a rope. He explained that he was living up to the law. He wasn’t carrying the pistol, he was dragging it.

Rich Coffey would probably recognize his stone house today despite a few changes. The dog run was boarded in during the 1920s and remains so. Amenities Coffey probably never visualized include indoor plumbing, electricity, and outdoors a television antenna.