In his 2008 book, “On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting For,” Mr. Perry writes of the simpler, slower rural lifestyle that, with its focus on family, hard work, church and “core decency,” incubated his conservative values.

Image Rick Perry in a high school yearbook photo from 1966. Credit... Jim Young/Reuters

His childhood hometown was simple and slow, although Mr. Perry’s metabolism almost always revved at a higher gear, friends said.

From the time he was 7 to his graduation at 18 , Mr. Perry attended school in a one-story building framed by mulberry trees on flat land where the whoosh of the wind is interrupted only by chattering blackbirds. Opposite the school sat the Methodist church, now shuttered, that the Perrys attended every Sunday. There was also a Baptist church.

And that was Paint Creek, where, for better or worse, everybody knew everybody

else’s business.

“If I misbehaved in class, Mom would find out about it before I got home,” Mr. Perry wrote, and his father would get the news on returning from the fields. “Dad believed in the pain principle. His leather belt was usually the delivery method of choice.”

Mr. Perry’s ancestors moved to Haskell County after his great-great-grandfathers fought with the Confederates in the Civil War. Interviewed for a local history called “Putting Paint Creek on the Map,” the governor’s grandfather Hoyt Perry said his family sank roots near the red clay banks of the creek in 1889.

“When I can first remember this land, it was all prairies with just a few mesquite,” Hoyt Perry said. “This whole country was covered with prairie dogs. I used to catch me a few and make pets out of them.”

Hoyt Perry said he farmed with mules on a ranch owned by another family. His son Ray, the governor’s father, became a tenant farmer, too, until he acquired some acreage of his own and combined it with leased property. Cotton, wheat and grain sorghum were the crops that could be coaxed from the dry land.