Graham/Fort Belknap

The weather had broken over Texas allowing us to travel in sub-100 degree temperatures and an actual cool wind to swirl around us from far away Colorado.  Air conditioners could be heard shuttering to a halt throughout Texas. The state  has been suffering under the worst drought since the last historic droughts in the Lone Star State. Rainfall has been recorded in Texas since 1896 and the worst one-year droughts were in 1918 and 1924. Each of those ended the following year with above-normal rainfall ending those droughts. The worst extended drought remains the massive 1950’s event when Texas suffered under drought conditions for 10 years from the late 1940’s until the late 1950’s. We have exceeded the drought numbers during 2011. The water districts are claiming that only historic rainfalls this fall, winter and spring will allow us to water next summer. Time will tell.

We road off into west Texas to check out Graham, Texas and the historic frontier Fort Belknap just north of town. The land around Graham was purchased by the Graham brothers ( Wow, what a coincidence) in 1871 and incorporated in 1877. The town puttered along until first the Chicago, Rock Island and Texas railroad came up from Fort Worth to connect Graham to the rest of the nation then, the cattle industry and the discovery of oil in 1917. The city was the site of the organizational meeting of the group that became the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, created to police ranching and put a stop to cattle rustling. Graham claims, on a downtown mural, that they have the largest town square in America. Graham is also one of only a handful of towns in Texas still to have an operational drive-in theater.

After a brief political struggle with the town of Belknap, home of Fort Belknap, Graham became the County Seat and is on it’s third Courthouse. The current 1932 Courthouse was built using Work’s Progress Administration (WPA) funds and replaced the 1884 Courthouse. The front door facade is now, appropriately, an historic monument behind the current Courthouse. I say that because of a little known event back in 1915 causing the loss of the life of a brave Young County Deputy Sheriff doing his duty to protect the records of the second Young County Courthouse.

 

Deputies Tom Cherryhomes  and Riley Dolliins had been employed by the Young County Commissioners Court to guard the Court House at night until the next scheduled District Court could be convened. There were accusations of government misconduct by the former County Judge Eugene Fryand the Commisioners decided to hire Cherryhomes and Dolliins to protect the records from theft or destruction.

On a dark night on  February 25th, 1915 , Cherryhomes and Dolliins were finishing their evening meal when they heard noises outside. When they went to investigate, they were accosted by four armed men demanding they surrender. Cherryhomes refused and drew his revolver on the four striking at least two but receiving a fatal wound from one of their assailants. The assailants retreated when Dolliins repeatedly fired his shotgun at them.

As Cherryhomes was taken away, other townspeople followed the trail of shoe prints and blood to the home of Judge Fry and found a seriously wounded Pat Carlton and Fry's brother Pete. Seems the Judge had conspired with Carlton and his brother to break-in to the Courthouse to destroy records. Unfortunately, a subsequent trial acquitted all the defendants of the murder of Deputy Cherryhomes. A plaque honoring Cherryhomes is on the grounds of the 1932 Courthouse.
 

The Courthouse also contains a monolitic War Memorial to all the wars up to the present. A common thing to see in Texas is their passion with honoring their war dead. This is one of the longest granite walls of honor I had seen in our travels. I couldn't help but note a similar theme to others we had come across.

Rural Texas has many extended families which, for the most part, never really stray very far from their ancestral homes. So many of these types of memorials will contain successive names of war dead from the same families.

On this wall, we saw several series of Akers, Adams and Armstrongs in several of the panes of granite. The same surnames could be seen across several wars. It was plain to see that many families had sacrificed their young men over the span of wars from the Civil War to the Gulf. It gave one pause to look at.

Graham is like many of the small Texas towns we have visited. The very clean and picturesque downtown still holds empty storefronts and old historic buildings in need of a paintbrush but cool to look at. There wasn’t even a restaurant in the historic downtown. We (well…I) was hungry when we got there and I sought out a jogging resident to point me to restaurant central on the south side of town.

After a very scenic drive south on Elm Street (Texas State Highway 16) through an old Victorian neighborhood, the road opened up to a glut of fast food, restaurants, grocery stores and car care centers. We chose Mi Familia and enjoyed a great meal. With all the Tex-Mex rolling around the state, it was nice to get into a traditional family run restaurant. I got the beef enchiladas and Dianna got the chicken flautas. Very fresh and flavorful. The sweet tea had just the right amount of sugar and, I want to say, I think they even make their own tortilla chips instead of those bland chips most restaurants just pull out of bags and store in heaters to warm them up.  For dessert, we had a Cheesecake Chimichanga. Wow! It kind of reminded me of sall the fried stuff we saw at the Texas State Fair. Fried Cheesecake, a true culinary coup. With my blood-sugar now at the appropriate levels, we made our way north to Fort Belknap.

Once known as “Belknap” it is now referred to as Newcastle, Texas. Established in 1851 by brevet Brigadier General William G. Belknap (his son, Bill W. became Secretary of War under Grant) to protect the Texas frontier against raids by the Kiowa and Comanche from "Indian Territory" (the future State of Oklahoma). It was the northernmost fort in a line from the Rio Grande to the Red River. It doesn’t present as the frontier Fort you might see in the movies. It is an expansive campus of rock walled buildings without the fortified log walls fencing it in. There had been some shallow trenching done for protection but, back in the day, as you rode up on Fort Belknap, it would have been like riding up on any other small town or Indian Agency.

Today, although the Fort has been made into a State Park, there are private homes which have been built literally right up to the borders of the Fort. As we walked around, there were folks washing cars and mowing their lawns as though the Fort was just another “green belt” within a housing development.

We entered what had been the Fort’s Headquarters building which is now the Fort Museum. Although the Fort had been established in 1851, it was abandoned at the outbreak of the Civil War (TWONA) and briefly used as a base of operations for the Confederate Texas Frontier troops to keep a lid on the Indians and hold back the North from invading the South through North Texas. It was taken back over by Federal troops at the end of the Civil War but abandoned for good in 1867.

The museum is an ecclectic collection of memorabilia from the Fort’s past as well as a collection of tools, personal items and news articles of the period donated by former residents and the memories of others from all over Texas. Most of this stuff is laid out in glass cases and really needs to be digitized or better cared for before the paper and cloth turns to historic dust.

I was reminded that the Fort structures I was seeing had mostly been rebuilt and very little of the original construction is visible. After their abandonment, locals began dismantling the buildings to use the materials in other buildings throughout the area. Luckily, for the Texas Centennial celebrations in 1936, the State reconstructed most of the buildings to their original design but with new materials. The only original building is the Ammunition Magazine which is now used as a church. As the museum staff told us, most of the other buildings are only original from the bottom of the windows to the foundations.

The other interesting structure is the grape arbor. This expansive natural “patio cover”  shelters a huge picnic area from the intense Texas sun. It was planted in the 1940s and has grown continuously since. The staff said they don’t even water it. It grows from several thick grape vines and only sees water when it rains.

The Fort also has the obligatory old west cemetery about half a mile east of the Fort. Established in 1855, the cemetery has plots dating back to the early Republic, Civil War and even some fairly new internments. A short drive through a cattle ranch (always lock gates behind you, Code of the West ) we arrived at the cemetery in view of some resting beef up against the back fence.

Every now and then in Texas, you come across a Texas Ranger grave. All Texas Rangers get a special monument when they pass away and Private Smith got his.

On August 5, 1841, Texas Ranger Private Abram Trig Smith, a member of Captain Eli Chandler's Robertson County Rangers, came upon a party of either Cherokee or Kickapoo, who opened fire at close range from atop a rock cliff, killing Private Smith. Other Rangers were able to beat off the attack and the attackers melted back into the woods. Whenever a suspected fallen Ranger burial site is located, decendants of the Ranger apply to the Texas Historical Commission and the Former Texas Rangers Association who provided the memorial cross for Private Smith in 2005.

Other graves sites included a couple designated as historic with the Republic of Texas badge affixed to them. This signifies a deceased person who lived in Texas when it was an independent nation (1836 to 1846). There were several sections which were dedicated family plots of families which have been in the area since the fort was established in 1851.

The Graham/Belknap area is very scenic and rustic. Like many parts of Texas, it has a certain rugged beauty that's hard to quantify. The rolling hills and winding back roads allow you to suppose what it may have been like for the early settlers to be out here, building up their farms or ranches, trying to scratch out a living, dodging marauding Indians and putting food on their family's table. Except for the occasional modern home, cars and concrete roadways, it's pretty much unchanged from those early days of no refridgeration or air conditioning. How did they do it?

So having worn out the bottom of our shoes walking the Fort Belknap State Park, we booted up Patty and after a quick stop for our Sonic RT 44 Strawberry Limades (light ice) we headed for home.

Thurber, Texas

On a beautiful Saturday, while waiting for the satellite to fall from the sky, we embarked on our adventure to Thurber, Texas. Thurber was a true “company town” back in the late 1800s. No one else was able to call Thurber home except miners, brick makers, shopkeepers, teachers and a couple of preachers who served at the pleasure of the owners of the Texas and Pacific Coal and Oil Company. Thurber always had labor troubles, which didn’t necessarily go away in 1903 when the United Mine Workers Union were voted in. But it then became the first all-Union “closed shop” town in America. If you weren’t a Union member, you didn’t work in Thurber.

Located in Erath (pronounced “E-rath”) County about 75 miles west of Fort Worth, Thurber (now Mingus, Texas) lies right along the I-20 in the rolling green hills which belie the desolation of the West Texas to come. Established in 1886, at its peak in 1920, it held about 8,000-10,000 people in what was a virtual melting pot of various Europeans mostly Italians, Poles and a smattering of 18 different nationalities. They were experienced tradesmen in the art of extracting first coal then shale for brick making. Thurber was one of the largest deposits of bituminous coal in Texas and the workers were attracted and mostly recruited by management for their skills, the higher pay and a chance to join in the great American experiment.

To their credit, those groups left their indelible mark on America (and Texas) with their culture by way of their religion, food and some of the games they played. Still today, in a park adjacent to the W. K. Gordon Center for Industrial History of Texas you can see two Bocce (pronounced “Bachee”) courts where Thurber descendents still meet to play a little Bocce Ball. Bocce (the plural of the Italian word boccia, which means, "bowl") is the great-grandfather of modern Lawn Bowling originally played on natural ground courts by the early Romans. The word “bowling” refers to the uneven shape of the balls. Unlike lawn bowls, bocce balls are spherical and have no inbuilt bias. Because the Romans took the game throughout the Empire, the game spread throughout Europe and has crossed the oceans to places like Australia and South America.

Thurber was a pretty amazing place for its time. Thurber was built by the Johnson Coal Company that was later bought out by the Texas and Pacific Coal Company in 1888. Its mining operation provided the fuel for the then prevalent coal-burning locomotives of numerous railroads, including the Santa Fe, the Southern Pacific, the Texas & Pacific and the "Katy" (Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad). Probably as a marketing ploy to keep the railroad business, the town was named by the company for a major stockholder of the Texas and Pacific Railroad, H.K. Thurber.

Thurber was pretty amazing for its time in that it was, because of its self sustaining power generation ability (remember all that coal?) the first all-electric powered city in America and soon after natural gas was being piped from the coal shale, it became the only city with piped in gas for cooking and heating in every home and business.

The residents of Thurber were admittedly very restricted in how they could live but it didn’t seem to bother anybody much. Except for a couple of strikes by the early unions, the occupants had a pretty good life. There was little crime and, for its time in the “wild west”, was extremely safe and peaceful. The Texas and Pacific Coal (and subsequently Oil) Company tried to keep the captives happy by bringing in just about all the comforts or services a citizen could want. Every worker could rent a “Company” house and it was well known that the residents of Thurber could buy any number of foods, clothing and dry goods from the huge Company Stores from beans to fur coats. They had even dug, filled and stocked the man made “Big Lake” to fish and swim in.

Thurber had a very ornate 650-seat opera house, which drew in top acts from all over the world including Broadway plays, musicals and world-class opera singers. Because the railroad came by Thurber, it was often the host of a traveling circus came every summer. They had one of the largest ice houses built in Texas up to that time and residents worshiped at company churches, learned at company schools and drank at company saloons.

But let’s face it, you “owed your soul to the Company Store” ("Sixteen Tons" is a song about the life of a coal miner, first recorded in 1946 by American country singer Merle Travis a 1955 version recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford reached number one) was not just a lyric in a song, these folks were virtual prisoners and didn’t even have real money to spend. The Company issued “script” to all the workers who could only spend it at the various Company stores. Not my idea of paradise.

 

When the railroads didn’t need the coal it was heavy Thurber paving bricks that paid the bills. Thurber bricks were universally used throughout much of Texas and can still be seen with their distinctive triangle logo in the streets of Austin, in major buildings, which still exist in Fort Worth and Dallas as well as Seawall Boulevard in Galveston. At its peak, Thurber produced a reported 80,000 bricks daily.

Thurber came to an end in 1936. It was its own executioner in a way. The arrival of the oil boom, which the Company kicked off with its Ranger Oil field discovery, killed it. Suddenly it was more efficient to fuel trains with oil rather than with coal. Oil-based asphalt replaced brick for road construction. The mines and brick factory closed and Thurber’s residents scattered in search of new work. The Company made a business decision to end operations in Thurber. Most of the town was razed. The frame houses were either disassembled and the lumber sold or homes were sold and carted away for $40 each to anyone willing to haul them away. The town became a ghost town almost overnight.

Company House

There are still a couple of original buildings left. The firehouse is still there as well as the huge brick smokestack, which was built to be part of the power plant, towers over the landscape, and continues to be a highly visible landmark off the I-20. There is also the “SmokeStack” Restaurant, which resides in the old General Store building. This is the SmokeStack Restaurant's second location. Once in the old company Drug Store building just east of the General Store, it was consumed by fire in 1992 and the owner, Andrea and Randy Bennett moved the operation to the General Store. Randy passed away in 2000 and Andrea and her son continue to operate the restaurant. Andrea still lives in the former company doctor’s home and her son lives in the old manager’s home. They are the only Thurber residents occupying the town.

The other gem left in Thurber is the cemetery on the hill overlooking the old town. It has over 1000 gravesites and many with custom brick or metal enclosures. It is a Texas State Historical monument and has security cameras at the entrance to upload vehicle photos and license plates as they enter and leave. It was put in after a serious vandalism occurred a couple of years back. The Thurber Cemetery Association had restored the cemetery, which straddles both the Palo Pinto and Erath County lines, in 1990. Soon afterwards, with the use of ground penetrating radar, they identified 758 people buried in unmarked graves and commissioned a monument maker to make two-stone monuments, etched with these names. Among other damage to gravesites, both those monuments were toppled and shattered.

Pete here helped build the Smoke Stack in 1908

The cemetery also contains a large number of graves of children who died before the age of two. Death certificates of the era state causes of death as either "natural causes" or common childhood illnesses. Nobody is sure but there are suggestions that the causes may have been the flu epidemics during the early 1900s and Tuberculosis which was very prevalent in Europe and some of the children may have acquired it from their parents. The cemetery is considered haunted and some visitors report seeing little children walking around the cemetery or seeing images of them in their photos of the gravesites. We had no experiences like that but what a rich source of history and display of the burial practices of the eastern Europeans who were there.

Tony here dug his own grave, put a door on it and had a glass faced casket
so relatives could peek in on him
from time to time. 

If you have any questions about Thurber or the history of the region, just drive under the overpass and visit the W. K. Gordon Center for Industrial History of Texas, a research facility of Tarleton State University (Go Riders, Bleed Purple!) part of the Texas A&M University System. William Knox Gordon, a native of Virginia, was hired by the Texas and Pacific Coal Company in 1889 as a civil and mining engineer. He was instrumental in expanding the company’s operations into brick building and convincing the company to explore for gas and oil in a place just further west, called Ranger, Texas. Gordon used his knowledge of both geology and the local terrain to convince the company there was oil in West Texas and with a $20,000.00 investment (wouldn’t you want to have been in on that deal), McCleskey No. 1 “blew in” in 1917 and the Ranger Oil Field began a long and prosperous oil boom in West Texas.

An interesting by-product of the sudden Texas oil wealth had its origins in 1839, when the Texas Republic Congress set aside 50 leagues (221,400 acres) of land for the endowment of a university. Of course, the Legislature wasn’t going to put up really good land so, as politicians do; they secured some really poor land in arid West Texas. What goes around comes around and, guess what, the arid West Texas land ended up to be right on top of some of the biggest oil deposits in the state known as the West Texas Permian Basin.

The Santa Rita No. 1, discovery well of the Big Lake Field, blew in on May 28, 1923, in Reagan County. It was drilled on University Lands. So much money was coming in, that in 1931, the legislature split the net income of the Permanent University Fund, with two-thirds going to the University of Texas (Hook’em Horns!) and one-third to Texas A&M University (Go Aggies!). The Permanent University Fund, which receives all revenue from oil, gas, sulfur and water royalties; increases in investments; rent payments on mineral leases; and sales of university lands, is one of the largest university endowments in the world.

It is a little eerie when you stand on the bluff of the New York Hill Restaurant (New York Hill was the name given to the neighborhood for the white-collar clerks and brick-counters that the company recruited from the East Coast....yeah, probably not segregation) and take in the land below and realize that there once was a thriving community, which used to be where several thousand people lived and worked. It’s hard to imagine a town completely removed from the landscape where those who called it home can’t even return to their place of birth, sit in a park they played in or attended school. Like the hand of a tsunami washed away the place and replaced it with trees and grass as it receded. Next time you find yourself in West Texas looking for a place to rest yourself and grab a bite to eat, just look for the Smoke Stack, jump off at the TX-180 and check it out.