History along the Way: Stories beyond the Texas Roadside Markers
352
History along the Way: Stories beyond the Texas Roadside Markers
352eBookA Texas A&M Travel Guide (A Texas A&M Travel Guide)
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Overview
Texans love stories, and the 15,000 roadside markers along the state’s highways and byways testify to the abundance of tales to tell. History along the Way recounts the narratives behind and beyond more than one hundred Texas roadside markers.
Peopled with colorful characters—a national leader of Camp Fire Girls, an army engineer who mapped the Republic of Texas frontier, a hunter of mammoth bones, a ragtime composer, civil rights leaders, and an iconic rock star, among others—the book gives readers an intriguing and expanded look at the details, challenges, and lives commemorated by the words cast in metal on these wayside markers scattered across the Lone Star landscape.
Also recounted in History along the Way are the stories of historic structures (from roadside architecture and elaborate West Texas hotels to university Old Mains and country schoolhouses of Gillespie County), engineering features (the Hidalgo Pumphouse in South Texas and the Rainbow Bridge in East Texas), and even town mascots (a jackrabbit, a mule, and a prairie dog). Accompanied by helpful maps, colorful photographs, and informative sidebars, History along the Way is guaranteed to inform, amuse, and intrigue.
Every part of Texas gets a visit in this anthology of select sites, making it easy for travelers—both the armchair and touring varieties—to enjoy and learn about the fascinating nooks and crannies of history captured in all their variety by the roadside markers of Texas.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781603448185 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Texas A&M University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/11/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 47 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
DAN K. UTLEY, chief historian of the Center for Texas Public History at Texas State University and a Fellow of the Texas State Historical Association, is the retired chief historian for the Texas Historical Commission, a past chairman of the National Register State Board of Review, and former president of the Texas Oral History Association and the East Texas Historical Association.
CYNTHIA J. BEEMAN is the former director of the History Programs Division of the Texas Historical Commission. She is past president of the East Texas Historical Association and a board member of the Texas Oral History Association and the Ruthe Winegarten Foundation for Texas Women’s History.
Utley and Beeman also coauthored the award-winning History Ahead: Stories beyond the Texas Roadside Markers (Texas A&M University Press, 2010).
Read an Excerpt
History Along the Way
Stories Beyond the Texas Roadside Markers
By Dan K. Utley, Cynthia J. Beeman
Texas A&M University Press
Copyright © 2013 Dan K. Utley and Cynthia J. BeemanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60344-818-5
CHAPTER 1
A Chance Encounter of the Great Procession
As the planting season approached in 1933, migrant farm worker Charles Puckett prepared to work the soil on the Charles Ross Cowan ranch nine miles northwest of Miami in Roberts County. It was a time of unprecedented economic downturn in the nation, and the Panhandle of Texas was in the early phases of a drought that would also prove to be unprecedented. In time, the area would come to be known as part of the Dust Bowl, but in 1933 there was still enough hope in the promise of the coming season for farmers to plant wheat, increasingly a dominant crop on the High Plains. That particular season, however, Puckett set the plowshares deep in order to carve out furrows that might somehow manage to resist the destructive, arid winds that had for some time been scouring the farmland, reconfiguring the surrounding landscape with aeolian drifts and deeply incised gullies. Deep plowing, like dust mulching and contouring, were relatively new techniques designed to meet the challenging demands of dryland farming, and it seemed to Puckett to be worth the effort.
As the farmer slowly worked his way across the Cowan lands that season, though, all was not as normal. In one particular area of the vast field, his plow began turning over a series of large, chalky bones. Puckett and Cowan were unsure of what they had encountered, but they knew the bones were something other than the remnants of cows or wild animals. As a result, they shared their findings with County Judge John A. Mead, not out of suspicion of crime, but rather because Mead had earned a reputation in the region as a knowledgeable amateur archeologist. The judge had investigated numerous prehistoric finds in the area around Miami, and it was possible the large bones unearthed on the Cowan ranch might prove to be similar. Although in some respects they were, in one important aspect they were like nothing else discovered to that point. What emerged from the deep furrows of the Roberts County field would eventually prove to be revolutionary, controversial, and nationally significant.
Judge Mead inspected the field and, intrigued by what he found, returned to oversee extensive excavations in 1934. Working with others, he carefully removed the agricultural layer of soil and methodically worked his way down, finding numerous bone fragments along the way. Over time, he came to what appeared to be a bone bed, a sizeable layer of artifacts that lay intact beneath the depth of the plow. Among the artifacts he recovered were the teeth, leg bones, and ribs of an ancient, extinct elephant. On closer inspection, he found amid the massive bones, and on the same plane, a carefully worked spear point. It was then he realized the site held greater scientific potential than any other he had encountered, so he sought outside assistance.
Among those he contacted early on was Floyd V. Studer. A native of Canadian, twenty-four miles northeast of Miami, he was, like the judge, an amateur archeologist with extensive field experience in the region. He was, by profession, a businessman, with interests in banking, ranching, and insurance. A resident of Amarillo by the 1930s, Studer became one of that city's most prominent civic leaders. Throughout his life he maintained a strong fascination with archeology and paleontology, particularly along the Canadian River, which cut a wide swath across the Panhandle. Although he lacked formal training in the disciplines, he had field experience, as well as the investigative and analytical skills to make him a recognized authority at a formative time for the professions in Texas. As a result, he eventually transitioned from a successful business career to one as a museum curator. Joining the staff of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, which opened at Canyon in 1933, he directed the development of that institution's impressive collections of both archeological and paleontological materials.
Studer worked closely with Mead on further investigations at the Cowan site, and he published the first treatment of the information in Science Service. Subsequently interviewed for a 1935 issue of Science News Letter, Studer reflected on the matter of the site's significance, speculating on its relative antiquity: "While I have personally found several true Folsom or Yuma points in this immediate area, this is the first time one has been reported in direct association with fossil animals. The bones were found in blue-green clay, which indicates a lake bed. There is no evidence of river or stream sand. This blue-green formation lies undisturbed about 18 inches below the present soil level." The article concluded by placing the Miami site in the context of what were then the earliest known eras of human existence in the United States: "The discovery site is not very far from Clovis, New Mexico, where Dr. Edgar B. Howard of the University Museum, Philadelphia, has made notable discoveries indicating existence of early inhabitants in the region. It is also not far from Folsom, New Mexico, where one of the first startling clues suggesting that America was inhabited more than a very few thousand years ago came to light." Such discoveries were relatively recent, and the evolving scientific analysis, as well as the concomitant speculation, caution, and controversy, continued to capture the attention of the archeological community.
Renewed interest in the Cowan Ranch site in 1937 signaled a new era of scientific analysis. That year, Elias Howard Sellards of the University of Texas began his intensive investigations. He brought a new level of professional expertise to the project. A native of Kentucky who earned his doctorate in paleontology at Yale University, where his dissertation was on "fossil plants and cockroaches of the Upper Paleozoic in Kansas," Sellards had an extensive career background in geology. Prior to his association with the University of Texas, he served as the state geologist in Florida for more than a decade. Through that position he worked on what proved to be a controversial project at Vero (now Vero Beach) that he believed showed evidence of human existence with Pleistocene fauna. Considered a radical departure from existing anthropological norms of the time, his associated report met with considerable criticism from members of the scientific community who leveled charges of inexperience and misinterpretation against him. As his friend and colleague, the noted archeologist Alex D. Krieger, later wrote: "This criticism—or rather, the kind of reasoning behind it—affected him more deeply than he would ever have admitted to anyone; he disliked controversy and avoided it in publications all his life. The Vero experience had aroused in him a consuming interest in the general problem of contemporaneity of man and Pleistocene fauna in America, but it was many years before he could find time to pursue the matter again with field work." Sellards relocated to Texas soon after the Florida controversy as a research geologist at the Bureau of Economic Geology, part of the University of Texas at Austin. In 1932 he became the director. Only six years later he would accept an additional, dual assignment as director of the Texas Memorial Museum on campus.
For the fieldwork he would oversee at the Cowan Ranch site, Sellards called on his trusted bureau colleague, Glen L. Evans, to serve as manager. In Evans, Sellards saw a kindred spirit, someone with impeccable credentials and diverse interests who shared his finely honed observational skills and intensely focused work ethic. The two proved to be a strong team, collaborating through the years on a number of significant archeological sites, and they became fast friends in the process. Writing later of their countless research trips together, Evans noted his supervisor's "wonderful zest" for fieldwork and added that his "way of studying a subject, mountain or anything else, was not by viewing it from afar. He liked details, and always preferred a scientific approach to a problem." Sellards's drive in the field, as Evans noted, often required some personal adjustment to the intense schedule: "Never one to lie abed of mornings, especially when in the field, in his eagerness to get started he occasionally misread his watch and got up at an ungodly early hour. Then he would rout me out of my blankets with his familiar sleep-rupturing call, 'It's hard on daylight, Glen, time to get up.' We would then get breakfast and a packaged lunch at some truck-stop or all-night café, and drive to where we intended to work that day—there to sit shivering and yawning in the automobile until it was light enough to start work."
For the project northwest of Miami, Sellards set the parameters for the scope of the investigations, and Evans oversaw the on-site excavations. Assisting them by providing the labor necessary for moving large amounts of dirt were a number of unskilled workers hired through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal agency set up to bolster employment during the Great Depression by means of federally funded public works projects. Such an arrangement between the government and the university was not unusual in the 1930s, and the WPA funded a number of important early archeological projects and related surveys in the state.
Under Evans's careful excavations, the Cowan Ranch site—given the scientific site designator 41RB1—began to yield important new evidence, much of it geological in nature. He showed that the basal feature was, in prehistoric times, a pond or playa lake approximately seventy-five feet in diameter—a watering hole frequented by mammoths, specifically Columbian elephants (Mammathus columbi). Evans uncovered the remains of several mammoths, but, curiously, no other animals. All of the remains were in a horizontal plane, an indication they had likely died on their sides rather than being trapped vertically in the thick silt layer of the playa lake. In his examination of the bone bed, Evans found what proved to be a monumental discovery: a fluted projectile point less than three inches from the atlas vertebra (at the base of the skull) of one of the elephants. As Sellards described, the point and vertebra "were removed in a single block." He added, "The point, including the broken base but excluding the extreme tip, which is wanting, is 113 mm. long, 22 mm. wide at the base, and 30 mm. wide above the base. It is made from slightly mottled light chert or flint."
While no doubt concerned about the position and proximity of the point to the skeletal remains, given the earlier criticism of his work at Vero, Florida, Sellards realized this find was different. It was a site separate from any early stream bed or collapsed geological feature that could have resulted in movement or repositioning of the artifact over time. With the discovery, Sellards had his long-sought-after evidence that early man and early mammoth existed contemporaneously. He also believed, as others would later echo, that the site revealed some considerable skill on the part of the ancient hunters, who evidently knew how to disable the massive animals by severing the spinal cords. Sellards remained, however, somewhat cautious in his assessment: "Although the evidence in this connection is meager, the most probable explanation of this unusual occurrence of a group of elephants in a water-hole, with associated artifacts, seems to be that disease, starvation, or drought may have caused the death of some of the elephants and that others, enfeebled by disease or otherwise, may have been killed by early man." Because of the design of the projectile point, the discovery also provided some general sense of the site's antiquity. Sellards determined it to be associated with the so-called Clovis people, a Paleo-Indian culture which earlier excavations in New Mexico and other locales had shown to exist roughly 13,000–10,000 years BP (before present). That placed the Roberts County find among the earliest known cultural sites in North America at that time. By comparison, the important benchmark Paleo-Indian discoveries at Folsom, New Mexico, occurred in the mid-1920s, and excavations of an earlier culture near Clovis, also in New Mexico, took place in 1932, the year before the Cowan Ranch site discovery.
Subsequent excavations in the western states showed that the Columbian elephant, among the last of the megafauna to face extinction, was a commonly discovered mammoth species in the North American paleontological record. Several sites in Texas, including most notably the Waco Mammoth Site in McLennan County, discovered in 1978 and only recently opened to the public, have yielded their remains. The larger of the mammoths are believed to have reached twelve to thirteen feet in height and approximately ten tons in weight. Speculation on the era of the megafauna differs considerably, but the Columbian elephants may have faced extinction sometime more than ten thousand years ago. That would place the encounter near Miami near the end of their existence.
When Evans and Sellards closed the project on Cowan Ranch, WPA workers refilled the site, and the land returned to agricultural use, with no evidence remaining of the landmark investigations. The artifacts, carefully encased in plaster, went back to Austin for further analysis. They included numerous elephant bones and teeth, three projectile points, and a scraper. Sellards, a prolific writer, authored several important papers and articles on the finds over the years, and the Miami mammoth collection became one of the most important in the holdings of the Texas Memorial Museum. There, the geologist-paleontologist kept a watchful eye on the materials through his years as director, from 1938 until his retirement in 1957.
In 1952, Sellards completed perhaps his most important and long-lasting work, a broad-based overview entitled Early Man: A Study in Prehistory. By the time of the publication he was in his seventies and facing complications associated with long-neglected health concerns. Nevertheless, the book seemed to offer him a personal release at that point in his career, and his colleagues noted a marked change in his demeanor. As Alex Krieger observed: "The indomitable old man, always unsparing of himself, began to mellow and relax; he spent more time with people and took an interest in small talk. He became more interested in the problems of others, and wherever he traveled he showed warmth and charm and a lively sense of humor which had apparently long been suppressed."
Sellards's new persona is perhaps reflected best in his seminal work Early Man, in which he took the time to provide a contextual commentary replete with his own personal perspectives from a lifetime of study and contemplation. The results are an amalgam of philosophy and literature. "It is as though the earth were a stage across which passed an endless succession of changing scenes and changing life," he wrote. "Each succeeding group and kind held the stage temporarily and disappeared to be seen no more." And then making the connection with the present, he added, "We, ourselves, who are now part of the moving scene, are privileged through records of the past to obtain glimpses of the great procession."
Elias Howard Sellards retired from the Texas Memorial Museum in 1957 and passed away four years later. Sadly, in the early 1970s someone stole all but one of the original Clovis spear points that were central to his longtime analysis of the Cowan Ranch investigations. Photographs remain, however, as do meticulously detailed replicas of the points, the latter thanks to a collaborative effort with the University of Missouri in the 1940s. Sellards's beloved and trustworthy coinvestigator, Glen L. Evans, had a remarkable career in his own right through extensive work in both the public and private sectors. Always a man of diverse interests and talents, Evans had an inquisitive mind that led him to explore far afield of the geology that had proven to be his early defining passion. Toward the end of his long life he compiled a collection of nature stories he entitled Wildness at Risk. Evans passed away in the summer of 2010 at the age of ninety-nine, remembered by many who worked closely with him as the "dean of Texas paleontology."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from History Along the Way by Dan K. Utley, Cynthia J. Beeman. Copyright © 2013 Dan K. Utley and Cynthia J. Beeman. Excerpted by permission of Texas A&M University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Introduction,
PART ONE. TEXAS ORIGINALS,
Chapter 1. A Chance Encounter of the Great Procession,
Chapter 2. John Ben's Critters,
Chapter 3. A Life in Ragged Time,
Chapter 4. Turn East to Texas,
Chapter 5. Illumined by Truthful Artistic Ideals,
Chapter 6. Her Lonely Way Back Home,
PART TWO. THE TEXAS CULTURAL LANDSCAPE,
Chapter 7. And the Cars Keep Rolling By,
Chapter 8. "To Have What We Must",
Chapter 9. A Journey back to Nature,
Chapter 10. Lift High the Water,
Chapter 11. The Normal on Chautauqua Hill,
Chapter 12. History on the Grounds,
PART THREE. TEXANS REACHING OUT,
Chapter 13. Justice Is the Corporate Face of Love,
Chapter 14. A Light on the Path of Wisdom,
Chapter 15. Two Generations Striving for Civil Rights,
Chapter 16. A Citizen with Work to Do,
Chapter 17. Here I Am in Palestine,
Chapter 18. The Three Graves of Judge Baylor,
Notes,
Index,