I’LL GET INTO ALPINE BY TELLING A STORY.
My great-great-great-great-uncle or however many greats he was, was a captain in the Confederate Army. His name was William Langston. I named my son Willie after him. William Langston Thornton. Sounds kind of dignified, right?
William Langston—whose brother James Langston was my however many greats-grandfather—was from Alabama, and he had a sweetheart before he went into the Civil War. They loved each other madly. She was a great gal and wanted nothing more than to marry this man and have a family with him. But William was about to go into the Civil War and he didn’t want to marry her, even though she was the love of his life.
“I’m not going to make you a widow,” he said, “because I don’t know if I’ll come out of this thing.”
In one of the battles, he was injured. The polite way to say it is that he suffered a war injury that prevented him from having children. The not-so-polite way to say it is he had his nuts shot off. I think maybe the whole rig, you know what I mean? But when he got out of the war and came back home, she still wanted to marry him.
“The most important thing in the world to you, your dream, was to have children and a farm and raise a family,” he said. “I can’t do that.”
She said, “I don’t care, I love you, I want to marry you anyway.”
“I’m not going to do that to you,” he said, “because you will at some point, someday, meet someone, marry them, and have a family. I’m not going to ruin that for you. I’m not worth being married to because I can’t give you a family.”
So William left and became a drifter. He drifted through Texas and ended up in this place called the Chalybeate Valley. I’m not sure how the French might pronounce it, but the way they say it in Arkansas is KU-lee-bet.
So William Langston got to the Chalybeate Valley, and he stood on top of this hill that overlooked the valley. That hill is now a roadside park with one or two picnic tables and maybe one of those stone grills where you could barbecue something if you want to. He was looking over the valley there when he wrote a letter to his brother, James Langston.
I’ve seen God’s country, he wrote. I’ve seen the most beautiful little valley in the world. I plan on homesteading here and you should come too. So his brother moved his family there, and that valley became Alpine, Arkansas.
When my son was born in 1993, I thought it would be nice to name him after a guy who could never have kids. Here’s this name, William Langston, a name that ended there in the Chalybeate Valley, so I named my son William Langston. But one way or the other, that’s how my family came about in Alpine, Arkansas.