Eugene Stanton believes he knows David and Rachel Moores well.
The Moores lived before, during and after the Civil War in a plantation near his own home at Bowie Hill.
When he was a child, Stanton played in the Moores' abandoned plantation home. He slept nights by its fireside, searched its grounds and heard ghost stories about it that engendered his interest in history.
But it was only when he accidentally ran upon a box of 300 pages of letters David and Rachel had written each other that the mansion's history became part of his own.
"I was in my 50s, and I began learning about David and Rachel and the home. I started looking for their gravesites all over Cass County and couldn't find them."
One day he was tramping around an overgrown Harrison Chapel Cemetery on private property near Redwater, still looking for David and Rachel. There, he had found David's parents, Charles and Mary Harrison Moores.
"A pickup truck pulled up and out jump four or five guys with weed cutters and mowers who began cleaning up the cemetery. I asked who hired them," Stanton recalled.
"A lady named Ames who owns a health food store on Richmond Road in Texarkana," they said.
"I dropped everything and went there immediately." Stanton said.
When he rang her front door, Stanton was overwhelmed.
"I met this beautiful 72-year-old lady, Ida Lou Moores Ames. I mean she was beautiful," he said.
Stanton quickly explained he was a historian trying to find out about David and Rachel Moores' home and locate their graves in Cass County.
"Uncle Dave!" Ida exclaimed, inviting him in. He found huge pictures of David and Rachel, perhaps two by three feet in size, looking at him from Ida Lou's big-room walls.
"They aren't in Cass County," Ida Lou said. "They're here in Texarkana. At Rose Hill Cemetery."
"She loaded me up in her Lincoln Continental and took me over to Rose Hill," Eugene said.
On the way, Ida handed him a paper box filled with letters between David and Rachel from the 1850s to his death in 1892.
"I had located David's parents Charles and Mary Harrison's graves in Harrison Chapel Cemetery," Stanton said. "And they are memorialized with an historical marker. But I really found something when I came upon David and Rachel's letters and then their resting place. I'd been in their home, around the fireside where the letters were written. I'll never forget."