fossil
Glad you survived the crash, to live & tell these historical stories!

WestTxAg06 .... You are sitting on one of the best stories of all ... about your hometown buddy Harley Sadler of Stamford. I admit his days of touring with his tent shows was a bit before your time but in the 30s and 40s his troupe provided great entertainment in West Texas during some hard times. He was a great showman and had the knack to have even the most stoic of old farmers rolling with laughter. And he made a good legislator. We loved that fellow in Fisher County.

Every town, hamlet and crossroads in West Texas has fun happenings and strange connections that others would enjoy. But in most cases it takes several years to play out to get the real story. R.D. Hull and Doyle Brunson were non-stories when I knew them in the 40s but 20 years later both were the best stories in town. Some of your stories have played out and we would enjoy hearing them ... others are still being made and will be there for future generation. (I met one person from Lueders in about 1953 and he was a great memory ... I was working that summer for the PMA measuring cotton acreage ... C. A. Douthit near Lueders had a lot of it scattered about ... He insisted we go in his car to check the cotton, a new Cadillac Coupe de Ville ... I argued because I knew we would be popping mesquite brush and crossing dry gullies but he insisted saying that Cadillac was the best pickup he had ever owned ... Sure enough, the back seat had been removed and a bed of straw had evidently been used by calves he had been hauling. One great fellow and a pleasure to know ... and a good story to pass along.)

Hog Killing Time on the farm in the 1930s and 40s.

Another rerun from my West Texas thread dated 3/2006

quote:

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Hog killing day came on the first day in the Fall when morning temperatures were near freezing. This was an annual ritual in rural areas of West Texas up until about 1950 when refrigeration became available at "meat lockers" in town for storing meat. Hog killing day was an excused absence from rural area schools ... just as was cotton picking time in earlier times.

Before refrigeration, we killed, cut up and cured pork on the farm ... and stored it in dry boxes outside the house for a year. In companion processes on that day we rendered out the lard we would need for shortening for the year and made a years supply of laundry and bath soap that also served as a decent shampoo.

OK, I see I am losing some of you doubters already ... but it really happened this way, all in one day. (We did not invent the process ... it came from Tennessee, Missouri and other places long before we came along.)

The number of hogs killed depended on the family size ... a normal family of say four teenage boys would kill three. This would yield 12 hams and shoulders, 6 slabs of bacon, 6 pork tenderloins, 6 rib racks ... we did not keep internal organs like liver, kidneys, lungs, or the head or backbone but would give them to anyone who stopped by and asked for them.

The day before we would round up all the tools, utensils, long table, etc needed for the job at hand. We would also rig up an A-frame with a block and tackle hoist. And dig a hole about 18 inches deep for the back end of a 55 gallon drum to lay in at about a 45 degree angle ... the open end of the barrel up. Then we would take a door off the barn and lay in front of the barrel for a clean place to scrape the hair off the hogs carcasses. (We did not skin hogs ... we needed clean hairless skin to make soap.) And we needed a cast iron wash pot to heat water in for dehairing the carcasses.

Work started at daybreak. A 250-300 pound hog would be singled out and shot between the eyes with a .22 rifle. We would immediately drag it out to the A-frame and hoist it up by its hind legs and cut the throat. After it bled out the carcass would be lowered and we would drag it to the 55 gallon drum. Hot water, steaming but not boiling, would be poured into the drum. The hog would be maneuvered into the drum and sloshed around a bit, then reverse end and done again to soften the hair ... then the carcass would pulled out onto the door for scraping. Long, sharp knives would scrape the hair off clean as a Gillette. Then back to the A-frame for gutting and splitting the carcass. The carcass was split on either side of the backbone with an axe. When this was done, if we had a couple of extra hands, the same process would begin on hog number two.

The split carcass would be carried to the back porch for the meat cutting. First, all the main parts would be cut out such as hams, shoulders, bacon slab, etc ... then those pieces were trimmed of all skin and fat. The trimmed fat and skin went into a tub and would later be cut up into about one inch chunks to be processed later into lard and soap. All meat trimmed off the primary cuts would go into another large bucket for sausage.

One person would then take the primary cuts to another work table and begin "salting." The sugar-cure salt we always used was a mixture of brown sugar and coarse salt. Each cut would be rubbed down good with the salt leaving a layer at least a quarter inch thick ... and a large hypodermic needle would be used to inject a dissolved portion of the curing mixture in around the joints of hams and shoulders. When we were done, those cuts were carried to the outside dry meat box for curing. The cure process took two weeks after which the cuts were removed from the box, the salt washed off in the cast iron pots, and the cuts returned to the box ... safely cured for year. (My grandfather did this with beef in earlier times but we never did.)

You can see this is quite a chore that gets very tedious if three hogs are killed. Usually it would take two or three men and three or four teenage boys going hard all day.

Usually sausage making was last on the meat cutting agenda. Trimming meat from the neck, jowells, backbone, etc was time consuming and you needed to see how much red meat you had to see how much fat you needed to get the right mix. Sausage spice mixture was a personal thing with the boss of the operation so everyone just stood back. A few days before, the mom of the bunch would have sewn sacks out of muslin for the sausages ... about two and a half inches diameter and 14 inches long. A hand grinder would be used and the ground pork would be hand stuffed into the sacks. After all hogs had been processed the sacks of sausage would be stacked up awaiting rendering out the lard.

Next, a wash pot would be set up with a good fire going under it. The fat trimmings including all attached skin would be dumped in. All that fat would soon melt into steaming hot grease (like you see when you fry bacon.) At this point you would need at least three or four four gallon tin buckets with lids. The first bucket would be filled with the sausage tubes standing upright. Hot grease would be dipped out of the pot and poured through a cheesecloth strainer over the sausage until they were covered, then that can was sealed. The sausage sealed this way would keep for months if stored in a cool place.

The rest of the hot lard would be dipped from the pot, strained through cheesecloth, and sealed in the four gallon cans ... to be used as shortening for the coming year. These also went into a cool place inside. What remained in the wash pot after all the lard was dipped out was "cracklings" ... the skin of the pigs that was cooked in the hot grease. The cracklings and any fat you may have chosen to leave in the pot were destined to become lye-soap.

To make soap, you just added five or six gallons of water to your pot and got your fire going again. When the water was steaming that was when you added a one-pound box of Lye (sodium hydroxide) to the mix. Lye dissolved the cracklings and fat, and in a short time the mix would begin to curdle in the pot. You kept stirring with a long wooden paddle until it got thick and you saw no more signs of cracklings. It was then done and time to cool. After the soap cooled in the pot it was a fairly solid mass about the consistancy of cheese. A long knife was used to cut this mass into about three inch squares, and then to maneuver the pieces out, to be cut again in to about 3X3X4 inch bars. And that, my friend, was Grandma's Lye Soap, Good For Everything in the Home.

Darn, I could have processed a hog in the time it took to type this. I apologize for the length of this post, but I think some of you might be interested in what your grandparents did on the farm to keep meat on the table ... in those days before refrigeration.

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[This message has been edited by fossil_ag (edited 8/5/2009 2:16p).]

although thats too many trees for Fisher Country world, how about this.

I love the internets

Handy Farm Devices
http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/device/devices4.html

The old fashion of having a lot of help around at hog-killing time is going out, owing to the use of better appliances for handling the animals after killing. You may rig up a simple arrangement so that you can handle heavy hogs without assistance. Build a fire box with a flue, b, of three joints of old stovepipe. The vat is made of heavy galvanized iron 4 feet long by 2 feet wide and 18 inches deep. Over this erect a frame of 2 x 4-inch strips, upon which place an old traveler from a hay carrier, or construct one similar to d. With the windlass arrangement, a, and the tackle, e, to which are attached the four feet of the hog, you can convey it from the vat to the bench. A rope, c, passing over the pulley at g, serves to pull the carrier, d, over the bench from the vat.


A device which is superior to the old iron kettle for heating water is shown in this sketch. Take a piece of 2-inch iron pipe 8 feet long and have it securely screwed into the bottom of a stout vinegar barrel. In the other end of the pipe screw a large wooden block.

By arranging the affair as shown in the sketch water in the barrel will be heated rapidly and can be removed as desired without bothering the fire. Do not make the mistake of putting a metal cap on the end of the pipe, or the steam may sometimes burst the piping before the cap will come off. The wooden block acts as a safety valve and will fly out if pressure is too great.

Sheik ... Thanks for the illustrations, just too funny for words now but back in the day it was a serious farm chore that we did not take lightly. (And yes, I am sure we looked just like the hillbillies in the top picture! LOL)

Not all families butchered their own stock but made arrangement with someone else in the neighborhood for something like half the meat in exchange for butchering and processing. (A fair deal.)

Rural Texas did not get electricity until 1948. So before that we used methods of preserving meats, produce and other items (along with other lifestyle ways) pretty much unchanged from generations past. It was just the way of life then and if you did not like it you could always move to town ... which many of us did at first opportunity. LOL

WestTxAg06 has mentioned knowing a bit about pigs. He might have noticed that prior to say the 50s, the prevailing choice was for an abundance of fat on hog carcasses as opposed to today's preference of longer, leaner animals. Back in those earlier times trimmed fat was as valuable to rural homes as the meat because of its use in making lard and soap. Times change.

It was an interesting period and I am glad I got to experience it ... but if given the choice, I will continue to enjoy modern hands down over returning to the primitive.

fossil
Another great historical description of "days gone by", sounds just like I have heard it told. I am still going thru my dad's things that we have save, spent some time reading a book about the families of Fisher County, as well as a history of the 1st 107 years of Fisher County. Pretty interesting stuff in there. Are you familiar with the books? Also, it seems you have extensive knowledge of this whole area, do you have any good stories from Dickens and Kent counties? My wife grew up in Jayton, and her grandparents lived out on Duck Creek, knew lots of folks from Jayton, Girard, & Spur.

Life in early day West Texas was not always pleasant. The great majority of the families depended on the quality of the soil and the chances of good weather for a livelihood ... either scratching with bare hands and primitive tools to produce crops or husbanding herds of livestock on thin grass and dry ranges. All families in the region existed on a thin line dividing a degree of prosperity and economic disaster, and that line could be crossed unexpectedly by illness or death in a family, drought that led to crop or grass failure or an invasion of plant devouring insects. There were no government social programs or safety nets to tide families through hard times ... the only hope in most cases was help from an extended family ... and too often the extended family members were facing similar hardship.

In desperate times, folks in those day often resorted to desperate measures. (Today, one can only imagine the agony of good people in making heartbreaking decisions to save members of their family ... but it was done with some regularity.)

In March of 1923 a baby girl was left on the front porch of a house in Haskell. It was an attractive house with two brick columns topped with two large concrete planters on either side of the front porch. The person who left the baby apparently chose the home with care, hoping this would improve the baby's chances for a good life. The baby was clean, healthy and dressed warmly indicating a loving, caring mother had made this ultimate sacrifice. Two young girls arriving at the house heard the baby crying and alerted the household. After about a month the county judge at Haskell deemed the baby abandoned and awarded her for adoption to a young couple living in Haskell at the time.

All the principal players in this saga I suppose are dead now ... except, I am happy to report to anyone in Haskell who was aware of this event in their history, the baby girl. Tomorrow will be her 83rd birthday. Happenstance placed her in a large, closely knit, loving family who adored her from day one. Later, she and her husband enjoyed 50 years together achieving a position of prominance and prosperity in the Austin area. That beautiful, gracious first cousin of mine is the happy ending to a West Texas family tragedy.

The situation of the baby girl in Haskell was not an isolated event in my family. In March of 1926, a neighboring farmer and close friend of my uncle asked if my uncle and aunt could possible adopt and raise his new born son. The farmer's wife was ill, the family had 7 or 8 children already and they could see no way possible to raise the baby. My uncle and aunt agreed and the baby was named by my uncle with the birth family name as its middle name.

Times were equally hard for my uncle and his family which now had three daughters and two sons. In the mid-30s my uncle's family joined the Okie migration to California, hoping to escape the effects of the Great Depression in West Texas and find a better life in California. (Their travel to California in an old 30s model automobile hauling all their possessions in a small trailer was a story in itself ... and moreso when they purchased a small acreage near Buena Park California next door to a nice couple name Knotts who raised berries and sold berries and pies at a small stand at their front yard ... (You can still buy pies there ... Knott's Berry Farm, in case you get out that way. But that is another story.)

That adopted son was welcomed into a loving family which for him over time grew to 32 first cousins. When the son was 13 my uncle told him for the first time that he was adopted and about his birth family in Texas. In 1940 my uncle brought the son back to West Texas to meet his original family. It was a grand reunion of the birth family with the baby brother they had never known. That birth family was as large as the adoptive family and the the young man must have thought half of Fisher County had turned out for the joint family reunion ... and it had.

I hope all children who were displaced from their homes and families during those hard times were welcomed and embraced in other families as the two described above. And, I rather suspect they were knowing as I do the generous and gracious nature of West Texas extended families toward their neighbors.

[This message has been edited by fossil_ag (edited 4/18/2006 7:55a).]

I came across a diary of a trip my grandmother and her family took from California back to Texas, not sure when it was, probably in the 1910-20 range. Sounds like it was quite challenging, but the kids sounded like it was more an adventure to them. Camping on the side of the road every night, patching tires, getting stuck in mud holes, only making 15 miles some days. We are certainly spoiled as to travel convenience now.

I'm not the story teller as fossil, but I had an interesting conversation with an uncle once who explained how they processed and stored beef back when he was young....

Once it got where it was good and cold and would stay cold for a while, they would butcher a beef. Having no electricity and no good place to store it...they would wrap it in cheese cloth and hang it from the platform under the windmill...the beef would be hanging inside the legs of the windmill....

to keep the dogs and coyotes off of it, they would use a "block and tackle" (I think that's the correct term) to raise it to a level where the dogs couldn't get it

when they wanted meat, they'd lower it down, cut a hunk off, and raise it back up

when it got moldy, they would trim the mold off just like trimming the mold off of cheese


another interesting thing they did was regarding the lack of a refrigerator...the water up there comes out of the ground pretty cold, so they set up a covered box for the windmill water to run into....as it got to a certain point, it would overflow into the stock tank...it wasn't as good as what we have, but it did allow them to hold some foods for a while, that might otherwise spoil

Powerbiscuit ... The description of hanging beef from the windmill tower is interesting and reasonable. A thoroughly bled out carcass covered with cloth to ward off blowflies would keep fairly well in areas where the winter temp did not get above about 60 degrees. But even if it did, the meat might get "ripe" but not be dangerous for consumption. I have visited many open air meat markets about the world and folks seem none the worse for the wear.

Without refrigeration people had various ways of storing products like milk, butter and eggs. Most farms had "cisterns" for storing rainwater runoff from the roof of the house for drinking. Cisterns were jug shaped, brick or plaster-lined holes in the ground 12-14 feet deep with a narrow coverable neck at the surface. Temperature in the cisterns were generally 60-70 degrees and so perishable items would be lowered in a bucket down almost to water level for keeping. Others would build boxes about two feet square outside a kitchen window. The box would be in the shade of a tree and the sides covered with screen to take advantage of cool breezes. Many families had storm cellars in back of the house and I am sure many stored perishables there ... I know that was the place of choice for canned goods and root products.

Milk was an interesting item to store on the farm without refrigeration. Milk and cream will go "bad" if left over 40 degrees for a period of time. We normally milked cows morning and night so having fresh milk was no problem. Milk left out at room temp begins to take on a sour taste ... but (contrary to current culture) it is not bad in a health sense. Milk does not acquire pathogens in the souring process that are unhealthy to drink. We drank sour (or "blinky" milk when we did not have fresh.) Sour cream was the prime ingredient in sour cream cakes and in other recipes. If left out for more than a couple days milk eventually solidified to a consistency of jello. This was called "clabber" and was dipped right out of its crock and eaten with a covering of sugar. Not great but older relatives particularly enjoyed clabber. (I wonder about the first person to discover that clabber would not kill a person the same as I wonder about the first person to eat a raw oyster.) We churned butter from the cream we separated from whole milk and did not worry if some of the cream was sour ... it did not seem to affect the taste of the butter.

Most of these practices grew from prairie knowledge gleaned through trial and error over the years and passed on in families. They worked and we survived very well, thank you. (But I still prefer modern.)

Sometime misinformation was passed along. Somewhere down the line my family developed the notion that "drinking milk with fried fish would produce a deadly poison." In my growing up years we never violated that rule.

fossil
Drinking milk with fried fish may not produce a poison, but those two tastes mixed together might taste poisonous!

Howdy Ags -

I graduated in 1992 and now practice law right down the road from FisherCoAg, a good friend, who has never managed to kill one of my animals.

I reluctantly admit that I am Tom Hargrove's('66) nephew and Raford Hargrove's ('70) son and Rafe Hargrove's ('91) brother. Married to Amy ('96) with two kids, one of whom is bound and determined to be a yell leader.

Our DA put me onto this site ... glad I found it.

Hey Mark, glad to have you on the board. As you might have surmised from my posts, I hail from just up Highway 277 from your eastern office. We've not had the opportunity to meet, but my father speaks highly of you.

[This message has been edited by WestTxAg06 (edited 4/18/2006 4:41p).]

All right, WestTxAg06, these screen names are baffling to me ... I am sure I should know you or your dad, but am particularly interested since your profile says you intend to go to law school. Send me an e-mail when you get a chance ... mark@hargrovelaw.com

Gig'em.

I am sure most of you were green about the gills by the time you finished the post above of how country folks survived before the days of refrigeration. Stick with me now because some day, some circumstances, you may have to lead your family through a period not unlike that. Think Katrina II, a collapsed power grid, tornado in the area knocking out power lines, and you want to remain at the homestead protecting property. Bear in mind, rural folks in West Texas have lived without electricity and refrigeration for as long as they have lived with it ... 1890-1948, 1948-2006.

I am not a survivalist and faced with a calamity with only a short time to prepare, of course I would stock up on as much ice and bottled water as I could carry ... along with the other items recommended by Emergency Preparedness folks. But I would remember some of the things described above.

Grab some extra milk for the kids. Keep it cold as long as possible then as cool as possible. It may eventually sour but it is still wholesome ... assuming you have a campfire, it works just fine in gravy and that is the top of the food pyramid in West Texas. You can alter the sour taste by heating it or by aereating it by stirring vigorously in an open container ... or as a last resort con the kids into eating milk jello (clabber!)

Don't shy away from fresh meat, beef or pork. With no refrigeration, if you give it a good thick coating of table salt and hang it up in as cool a spot as you can find, the salt will draw out the moisture and it will keep. Before cooking just wash the salt off and cook away. The unused portions, just replace the salt and rehang. Hanging allows the moisture to dribble out and reduces your competition with dogs and coyotes. (powerbiscuit's post)After 10 days or so wash all the salt off ... it is cured. Just keep covered.

No way to salt or refrigerate the meat? and no way to cook it? Grab a gallon or two of white vinegar. Cut up the meat in 1 inch chunks and cover it in vinegar in a container. The meat will not spoil and the vinegar will "cook" it. Natives in Guam taught me that with pickled venison ... good stuff.

I had relatives north of Beaumont who remained for three days after Hurricane Rita damaged their house and left them without power for two weeks ... (before I insisted they come stay with us in BCS. They suffered needlessly because they had been away from a Fisher County farm for more than 60 years.)

Anyway, this is just some miscellaneous knowledge you can clutter your memory banks with ... and hopefully will never need to call it up for use.

Mark, email sent.

WestTxAg06 ... Were you familiar with the story about the baby given up in Haskell in 1923?

fossil, as you surmised, Stamford's Harley Sadler was well before my time. As for the baby in Haskell, I'm trying to think if I have ever heard that story or not. I don't think I have. If you don't mind me asking, what is her last name (maiden and now)?

You're certainly right about the stock show hogs of yore, they look absolutely nothing like the animals of today. The steers are even more dramatic, I've seen pictures of champion Herefords and such from 40 or 50 years ago that are just a square, stocky block of meat and fat that barely come up to chest-high on an adult.

Now, we try to get that fat in those steers and barrows down to almost zero. Oh, how the times are changed.

my dad and his brothers had some champion sheep in the 50's....all southdowns...they were as wide and tall as they were long

WestTxAg ... I cannot give out any info on the "baby girl" out of respect for privacy. The baby was left on the front porch of the Pace family ... a Haskell druggest at the time. But the important point is that baby is enjoying her 83rd birthday today of a happy life. This is just for the info of Haskell folks who may have been aware of the incident.

In the 50s no sheep breed were competitive in market lambs against Southdowns. In barrow classes, you had no chance without a Berkshire or Duroc. (Anything long, lean and white would have been sifted.) I was at the Houston Fat Stock Show in 1953 and a class of the newly imported breed of Charolais was exhibited for display only ... not competing. People were flabbergasted that anyone would waste good money importing "oxen" as a beef breed ("Look how long those legs are!"

I understand completely. I've got a lot of family from Haskell, especially on my mom's side. I'm going to ask her next time I talk to her if she's ever heard that story

The Harley Sadler Tent Show (homebased at Stamford) was the only outside entertainment in smaller towns in the Central West Texas area in the 30s and 40s ... except for an occasional traveling Medicine Show.

The Sadler Show had a pretty fair size tent that would seat 40 or 50 people, a good size stage with curtains, a popcorn machine and soft drink stand, and a sort of band that sort of played music between acts. Harley was the headliner and had a funny standup routine. Then four or five actors (including his wife) and the rest that I always assumed were Stamford folks would put on a funny three-act play. One year it might be a melodrama with the villain versus the beautiful heroine, the next year maybe a Beverly Hillbillies type play. Of course it was overacted horribly but we considered them home town folks so it was a hoot. Between acts he might have a trio of little kids singing or maybe someone playing a banjo. I remember even then realizing how corny it was but families would not miss at least one night's performance when the show was in town. He always ended the show with the cast and audience singing some old time gospel song and sent the crowd home happy.

I guess he stopped doing the shows during WWII because I don't remember the shows in the late 40s. (Travel was restricted because of gas rationing and good tires were hard to come by) I think he was elected to the legislature sometime in the mid-40s and served several terms.

I don't know if a show like that could draw people away from their televisions now days, But if anyone could it would have to be a showman like Harley Sadler. He had the gift that everyone liked him the minute he started speaking.

[This message has been edited by fossil_ag (edited 4/18/2006 11:03p).]

did you ever catch a bob wills event?

Mark Hargrove, Attorney at Law. Welcome aboard!

I am sorry to tell you but if you were expecting to have fun practicing law in Fisher County you are about 60 years late. Times have changed and the old time characters have left the stage.

In the late 30s, 40s and early 50s (16 years total) Fisher County had an arch-type West Texas Sheriff, R.L. (Bogue) Wilkins. In those days the Sheriff was THE LAW in his county ... just like in Nolan, Taylor, Scurry and every place else. I never saw Bogue pack a gun ... he didn't need to. He was more than 6 feet tall and had the countenance of a Bear Bryant in boots and white hat. We had bootleggers in those days (all counties in the area were dry) but not more than one in each town. (Just happened that way I suppose and the locals were content with that.) Now Bogue's job was to apprehend and jail lawbreakers, which he did with great regularity. His nemesis in Roby was a country lawyer named Clay Coggins ... who felt duty bound to get Bogue's catches out of jail. The two men disliked each other greatly ... but only displayed that dislike in the courtroom of the old Fisher County courthouse.

I will never forget the smell of that old courthouse. Lord only knows what disinfectant was used on the wooden floors and marble wainscot but it reeked ... but I suppose it was necessary because seems like every ten feet there was a big brass spitoon overflowing. The courtroom was on the second floor and was a dark and dismal place to me as a teenager ... I knew early on I didn't want to be a center of attention there.

But Clay Coggins put on some dramatic and I suppose effective performances in that courtroom because a trial always drew a full house. One time in particular he literally brought the house down. In the trial Clay was trying to make a point about how drawing a gun could instill fear in a crowd or something to that effect ... and he jerked a long barrel .45 revolver out of his pants and waved it. As you might expect, the crowd, the jury, the witness and the judge hit the deck hiding behind chair legs. It took a few minutes but order was restored and I suppose Clay made his point ... folks laughed about that for a year.

Clay's greatest win occurred in about 1951. It seems some fellows in Bogue's jail knocked a jailer over the head and made a break for it ... last seen headed toward Cottonwood Creek. Now it was pretty obvious the guys were on foot because no cars or tractors were reported stolen so it had the earmarks as a good use for the Fisher County Sheriff's Posse ... a ceremonial group that rode in area parades and rodeos. So they saddled up and the chase was on ... in the direction of Abilene as the crow flies. What they didn't expect was that everyone else in town that didn't have anything better to do joined in with the posse. Now the desparados must have seen the mass of humanity on their trail and they covered a lot of ground before being caught up with on the back side of the Newman Ranch. They were thankful to be taken alive and safely back in the old jail.

And this is where Clay Coggins came in. He discovered these boys had been locked up in the jail a couple of weeks before and had never been charged and had not had contact with another human being. They were convinced they were in the Fisher County Jail for life. (Bogue was sometime dilatante about paperwork of that sort.) Anyway, Clay was in his glory trying that jailbreak case and got the boys off scot free (I think he even had the jailer sorry that his head got in the way of their dash for freedom.) I don't think Bogue filed for reelection after that ... the old west had changed and he did not feel up to changing with it.

I will have to give Sheriff Wilkins credit for a novel but effective way of educating young men about the penalties for misbehavior. If he got a call about a drunk (or drunks) interfering with a sociable evening at the local VFW hall or the colored beer joint down by the cotton gin, he would get a couple of teenage boys loitering around main street ... the teens would accompany Bogue as he arrested the drunks and it was the teens job to wrestle them into the car and later up the stairs to the jail cell. After a couple of tours of that duty I swore of alcohol for life ... and particularly any close proximity to drunk tanks.

Interesting story ... I inherited some of Coggins' old law books with my office, and gave them to his daughter some years ago.

I've had a good bit of fun practicing law in Fisher County, been doing it now for 10 years. I was a public defender the first five, a good way to get to know your fellow man. Also have the abstract office there, another good way to learn everybody's history.

My folks have been in Fisher County since its inception.

I reread my post above and can see how some might interpret my remarks about Sheriff Wilkins as somewhat derogatory.

That was certainly not my intent. Bogue Wilkins was my ideal as the perfect old time Texas rural county peace officer. He was honest, straightforward, fair in dealings and dedicated to the welfare of the citizens of his county.

My grandfather was one of the earliest settlers in West Texas, first in Jones County and later for the inception of Fisher County and Roby. In the 40s the little old man was bedfast and lived with our family (old folks lived with family in those days.) Every two or three months Bogue would take a break from his rounds and come by and visit with my grandfather. That symbol of respect for the elders of the community went a long way in endearing our Sheriff to the rather large clans within the county.

Us kids in the household spent hours sitting by Granddad's bed listening to his tales about his early life in Missouri after the Civil War and his travel to Texas at 16 and eventually venturing onto the West Texas frontier ... to own land, build a home and establish a family.

We never knew what Bogue and Granddad discussed during those visits ... but I just imagine Bogue was hearing the same tales that enthralled us kids. That connection with the past was important to folks like Bogue Wilkins and in great part helped focus his moral and social compass.

In the early 40s Sheriff Wilkins built the white two story house 2-3 miles north of Roby, on the east side of the highway going to Rotan. That is another good West Texas connection ... the house, the man and his story.

My TAMC Class of 1956 is celebrating its 50th Reunion in conjunction with the 2006 On-Campus Aggie Muster. Notes about the class:

1684 Enrolled as Freshmen in Sept 1952.

Of these, 1642 were in the Corps of Cadets.

Of these, 901 returned for the Sophomore year.

Of these, 685* graduated in May 1956.

Of these, 570 received Military Commissions.

* 874 of the original freshman class eventually graduated ... Veterinary and Architecture required more than 4 years and many previous dropouts returned to graduate. Of these, 240 have died, many while on military duty.

Of these, 300 are on campus today to celebrate the 50th Reunion and to participate in the Muster Flag Raising Ceremony in front of the Academic Building Friday morning and the Campus Muster Ceremony Friday evening.

Since graduation, members of the Class of '56 have donated $7.1 million to the Former Students Association and to the Texas A&M Foundation.

Tonight the Class of '56 presented a check for $136,000 to the Texas A&M Foundation to fund two Annual $2,500 scholarships to Outstanding Student Workers, in perpetuity.

There are many West Texas connections in the numbers above. The many resurfacings of Highway 36 over the years will attest to that.

"But there's a Spirit can ne'er be told...."


[This message has been edited by fossil_ag (edited 4/20/2006 9:02a).]

[This message has been edited by fossil_ag (edited 4/20/2006 11:06a).]

This is an outstanding thread, and I'm not even from West Texas.

Sheik:

Thanks for the heads up on the bygone ways website. I have done a lot of road tripping over the years and if I have the time, I try to take historic routes and bypasssed roads. It makes for a lot of nostalgia.

FisherCoAg - Make sure you save these stories for your grandson

Farming in West Texas has changed a good bit in recent years (according to my time line.) Six, eight, and 12 row behemoths with air conditioned cabs, stereo music and power/electronic everything ... and they still call that farm work?

My dad bought his/our first tractor in 1937. It was an International Harvester Farmall F-12, about 15 horsepower, with steel lug wheels, hand crank and hand levers to raise and lower plows. It was rated to pull a two row plow but I think that was assuming soft sandy loam soil ... clay?, ummm No. Now IHC had only been making tractors about 5 years so the purchase was not without trepidation ... new technology then was as suspicious as it is today. But the old tractor did well since it was geared so low it was powerful, but a person could out-walk it even at its highest speed. But it rarely reached it highest speed because those lug wheels on hard dirt would shake your liver loose and probably over time fuse your backbone. Overall it had some applications superior to a team of Mules.

You scoff when I mention Mules. Ha! Mules were still the mainstay in West Texas rowcrop farming well into the 30s. New red tractors were nice to have in the yard to indicate a progressive person lived at that house, but the experience of most farmers owning them proved those early models to be as balky as ... well, as balky as a Mule.

So from the 1890 start of farming in West Texas, Mule teams were the source of real power. I did not say horsepower because by this time it was a known fact that Mules had greater endurance than horses, had greater pulling strength and Mules were less excitable.
So all fairly large farming operations had a goodly number of Mules on hand for field work ... and this in turn required a goodly number of growing stout sons to match the number of Mule teams required to get the work done. This, fellow West Texans, explains why the larger more prosperous farming operations developed from those early families that produced 8-12 sons. (The only problem encountered in those early large families was by the time all sons, saddle horses, Mules and dogs had been given names it was difficult to think of a name for a late arriving son that was not already in use.)

And while I am at it I will answer another question you may have concerning old time big families ... Why did they need so much acreage in cultivation to sustain the size of the family. It's elementary: A family might subsist with 40 acres and a mule but if growth in family size or improved standard living was desired it required more Mules, and land to grow feed for the Mules and thus more sons to operate the Mules. A rule of thumb was a farm needed to have as much land devoted to feed crops for stock as it did for cash (and/or food) crops. I think Ag Econ folks would call it a Ratchet Effect. The number of sons produced could be a limiting factor in farm size growth, and the amount of land available to purchase or lease could limit the number of Mules a farmer could feed and support.

But the arrival of gasoline consuming tractors in the 30s changed the old farming equations and changed farm lifestyles completely. As the days of the Mule dwindled in the next few decades, so did the remaining knowledge of farming with Mule teams. It was a very interesting time and I will fill in that gap in your history in the next few days.