Neil Haven Klock

Neil Haven Klock, Sr. (November 9, 1896 – August 10, 1978), was a sugar planter from Cheneyville, Louisiana, who represented Rapides Parish from 1940 to 1944 in the state House of Representatives during the administration of Governor Sam Houston Jones. He served alongside T. C. Brister of Pineville and W. H. Smith.^[1]

Klock was a son of John Charles Klock (1843-1921). One of Klock's older brothers, Ernest Lorne Klock (1879-1967), an engineer, had worked in the sugar industry in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, where he built a railroad, golf course, a large estate, a school, and housing for workers and became friends with President and Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo and the aviator Charles Lindbergh. By 1940, the brothers were operating the Edgefield Plantation in Cheneyville, a 300-acre sugar and cotton and 200-acre cattle operation. The Klocks owned the local bank and the Meeker Sugar Refinery in Meeker in Rapides Parish.^[2] In 1987, the Meeker refinery was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Klock's first wife, the former Olive Ruth Cloud (1899-1926), a native of Kurten in Brazos County, Texas, died in Rapides Parish of typhoid fever at the age of twenty-seven. She was the daughter of William Elisha and Sedonia Griffith Cloud. Klock had two daughters from this five-year marriage, Doris Ruth (born 1922) and Katherine Sedonia Klock (born 1926).^[3] Olive is interred at the Bryan City Cemetery in Bryan, Texas.^[4]

In 1927, Klock married a young woman named "Flora B.," whereabouts unavailable, presumed deceased.^[5] Klock has a surviving son, Neil, Jr. (born February 1937), a 1960 engineering graduate of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge,^[6] who resides in Alexandria, the seat of government of Rapides Parish, with his wife, the former Sarah Pottinger (born June 1941).^[7]

Along with several other family members, Klock, who died at the age of eighty-one, is interred at the Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery in Cheneyville.^[8]