Stone Gardens: River Valley farmer, grocer, and pastor did in tragic fall from family hayloft onto a pitchfork in 1920

William Lafayette “W. L. Fate” Coppak was born in 1853 in Morgan County, Alabama, the son of Ellen Derrick and an unnamed Coppak father whose first name has been lost to time.

Everyone just called him Fate.

In 1874, at age 21, he married Mary Jane Holmes. Over the next fifteen years they brought seven children into the world while farming the red-dirt hills of northern Alabama and worshipping at Rock Creek Baptist Church, where Fate was already preaching on Sundays

when the regular pastor couldn’t make it.

In 1887 the whole family pulled up stakes and headed west in wagons to Arkansas. They settled at Southern Home, a little crossroads six miles west of Waveland in southern Yell County, right on what is now Highway 309 between Havana and Blue Mountain.

Fate and Mary Jane opened a country grocery store and blacksmith shop, worked their farmland, and kept preaching.

Another son, James L., was born after they arrived.

There was only one problem: another Coppak family lived nearby (probably cousins), and the rural mail carrier kept mixing up everybody’s letters. To end the confusion, Fate walked into the Yell County courthouse one day and legally changed the spelling of the family name from the old Alabama “Coppock” to Coppak.

From that day forward, every deed, tax record, and church roll in Arkansas carried the new spelling

.Life was hard but steady. The store did well, the blacksmith shop stayed busy shoeing mules, and Fate rode the circuit preaching revivals and funerals whenever a church needed him. He never drew a full-time salary as a minister, just taking whatever was in the collection plate and called it the Lord’s provision.

.On November 5, 1920, everything ended in an instant.

Fate, now 67, was up in the loft of his barn pitching down loose hay for the stock. He stepped on an uneven spot, lost his balance, and fell twelve feet straight onto an upturned pitchfork below. The tines went through his abdomen.

He died almost immediately.

They buried him two days later in County Line Cemetery, a quiet hillside graveyard that straddles the Yell-Logan county line just east of Sugar Grove.

Mary Jane lived another nineteen years and was laid beside him in 1939.

Of their seven children, only three lived to old age. John Martin died in 1917, Roxie at 16 in 1900, and little James L. at 15 in 1904. The surviving daughters—Martha Emberson, Pherbia Starr, and Della Grissinge.. All stayed in the area and raised big families of their own.Today,

if you pull off Highway 309 and wind up the gravel road to County Line Cemetery, you’ll find Fate and Mary Jane’s stones side by side under a cedar tree. The inscription is simple:

Rev. W. L. F. Coppak

1853 – 1920

Mary J. His Wife

1855 – 1939

Every now and then an older local will still tell you, “That’s the preacher who changed his name over mixed-up mail… and died on a pitchfork.”

In the hills of Yell and Logan counties, that’s all the epitaph a man needs.ghting for others.