Stone Gardens: A tragic 1939 farming accident in rural Leflore County claimed a 14-year-old victim

Murrel Virgil French

In the "Stone Gardens" series, we return to these quieter markers--the ones that do not belong to chiefs, colonels, or celebrated outlaws, but to the children and laborers whose lives were cut short by the tools and materials of their time. Murrel French’s grave is one of them.

At the foot of Soap Hill, along Poker Bend Road in the quiet bottomland near Williams in Leflore County, , a simple stone in French Cemetery carries a line that stops the eye: “Killed in a Black Powder Explosion.”

Murrel Virgil French was just fourteen years old when the accident took his life.

Born March 29, 1925, in LeFlore County, he was the son of John E. French and Emmer (Emma) Miller French. John, born August 1860 in Texas, had come into the old Choctaw Nation country with the restless movement of families across the Arkansas-Oklahoma line

 He first married Mary B. Laxton (1865–1903), then wed Emmer, born January 12, 1882. Together they raised a large family on the land that would become their burying ground: Ben (an infant who died in 1905), Beulah Ellen, Alfred E., Elza, Clyde, Dortha L., Murrel Virgil, Mary Ann, and Edna M., among others.

Infant graves and unmarked stones for other little ones already dotted the family plot by the time Murrel arrived.

The Frenches were not prominent industrialists or mine owners. They were the kind of people whose names appear in local cemetery trustees’ lists and family association charts rather than headlines--farmers and laborers in a county where coal seams, timber, and hardscrabble agriculture defined daily life.

 Black powder was ordinary in that world: used for blasting rock, clearing stumps, opening small cuts, or work around the edges of the coal fields that still employed men across eastern Oklahoma in the late 1930s.

On October 21, 1939, something went wrong with that powder. The exact circumstances--whether Murrel was helping clear land, assisting with a small blast, or simply present when a charge detonated--have not survived in newspaper accounts that are easily found today. What remains is the stark notation on the stone and the family memory preserved in the cemetery record: a fourteen-year-old boy killed by black powder.

He was buried among his people in French Cemetery. His father John died four years later, on September 30, 1943 (or September 20 by one family reckoning), and was laid beside Emmer, who lived until October 26, 1952. The same ground holds Mary B. Laxton French, the infant Ben, little May Ann, and other Frenches who never left the ridge and bottomland around Soap Hill.

There is no elaborate monument, no public memorial, no mine-disaster plaque that lists Murrel’s name among dozens. He was a boy of the ordinary rural South in the Depression years—old enough to work alongside the men, young enough that the loss must have hollowed the house on Poker Bend. The stone’s blunt phrase does the only work required of it: it marks the place, records the suddenness, and refuses to let the manner of his death be forgotten.

Black powder, a common explosive of the era, claimed him at fourteen. The family cemetery still holds him at the bottom of Soap Hill, where the notation on the stone continues to speak across the decades.