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THE CLAY PITS AT WELLBORN

"When we wanted to swim, we went to the Clay Pits. The pit we used as a swimming hole had been dug out by miners looking for lignite, but they hit a spring instead and the pit filled with water. Actually there were two different places that were called the "Clay Pits. The first was a pit on the old Smith farm where red clay had been extracted; it didn't have any water. The second, called the "New Clay Pits" on the Neelley place, was where most boys went. It was where Fullers Earth had been extracted and the white clay contrasted starkly with its very blue green water."

"This clay pit was scenic and suitable for swimming, although the water was very cold. The problem was that the water contained a fine silt, so if you swam in it you were covered with these tiny white particles. You ended up with the powder in your eyes, which was quite uncomfortable. Despite these drawbacks, the Clay Pits were a favorite gathering place for local boys. However, most mothers forbade their daughters to go there, for obvious reasons."

"There was a high cliff on one side that boys used as a diving platform. What seemed like 50 feet to them at the time is more like 20 feet now, but it was a thrill to jump into the water from there."

"The local boys had the Clay Pits all to themselves for many years until word about this great swimming hole in Wellborn leaked out on the A&M campus and the following rush of Aggies ruined the place forever, at least in the eyes of the locals. They came with their kegs of beer and held their infamous 'beer busts', in which the idea seemed to be to drink as much as humanly possible and then go do something really stupid, which often entailed destroying local property. According to the observers, some Aggies would lie on their backs under the kegs, open their mouth and let the beer fill them up."

"The Aggies used to hold Midnight Yell practice at the Clay Pits, to the consternation of locals living close enough to hear the noise. J.E. Loupot, who was an Aggie grad and owner of the Northgate bookstore, had an old '39 ambulance that he loaned to the Aggies to transport yell leaders and others to these midnight shindigs, an old Aggie tradition. One night, as the story goes, the Aggies got so drunk they drove the ambulance off the cliff and into the deep part of the swimming hole, which is at least 80 feet deep. It is still there, some say."

"On their way back to College Station, the Aggies, usually in an inebriated state, used to try and cut across our field instead of taking the dirt road. When it was wet they would get stuck, so we Nolans, who lived close to the Clay Pits, used to park our tractor beside the field waiting for this predictable event to come to pass. It was an old John Deere, with a 150-foot chain. The charge was five dollars a pop to get pulled out. We had developed a new cottage industry, thanks to the Aggie's and they're drinking habits."

"That wasn't our only little cottage industry, either. Aggie upperclassmen were always stripping 'fish' (freshman) naked and leaving them in the dark beside the Clay Pits; this kind of hazing was great fun back in those days. Practically every night, there were four or five fish hiding in our old chicken coops near the swimming hole, buck naked. They searched desperately for something to cover up with, so we got to leaving old work clothes on the clothesline, knowing that they would take them. However, these clothes would always magically reappear cleaned and starched."

"The Clay Pits also used to be the romantic spot Aggies would take their dates, if they had a car. They'd spread their blankets out on the white clay and the fun would start or go at it in the back seats. The place got to be as notorious as a drive-in movie, some said, and the local folks started to say that 'enough was enough'."

"Finally, the beer busts and the hell-raising Aggies got to be too much even for the mild mannered Neelleys, who owned the property. They didn't need this partying, which tended to disturb their cattle that were grazing on the land. Feeling they had no choice, the Neelleys sold the land to the Farquhars, who then posted the property and made it off-limits to anyone, especially to Aggies."

"Old Wellborn for Boys" by Paul and Harold Nolan and John William "J.W." Parsons. From the book "How We Lived in Wellborn Before Television" (2010) by Glenn D. Davis.

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