2-833-260 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Loula Cotten Williams is pictured here with her parents and siblings in Madison County, Tennessee. She would later relocate to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she and her husband, John Wesley Williams, owned and operated the Dreamland Theatre. Located on Greenwood Avenue, the theatre showed live musical and theatrical performances in addition to silent films. It was destroyed in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. All of the people are identified and labeled using black ink. Tom Cotten and Sallie Cotten sit in the middle with their daughters sitting and standing around them. The girls are identified as (left to right): Myrtle (seated), Carrie, Mildred, Loula, Elizabeth, and Susie (seated). A small boy identified as Ernest Cotten sits on a small stool in front of Tom and Sallie. Written below the image is “The Cotten Family 1902.”