Copyright USGenNet Inc., 2013, All Rights Reserved U.S. Data Repository Please read U.S. Data Repository Copyright Statement on this page: Transcribed and submitted by Linda Talbott for the US Data Repository http://www.us-data.org/ ========================================================================= U.S. Data Repository NOTICE: These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or presentation by any other organization. Non-commercial organizations desiring to use this material must obtain the consent of the transcriber prior to use. Individuals desiring to use this material in their own research may do so. ========================================================================= Formatted by U.S. Data Repository Chief Archivist, Linda Talbott All of the above information must remain when copied or downloaded. =========================================================================== SOURCE: East Texas, its history and it makers New York, Lewis Historical Pub. Co., 1940 [Page 803] ANDERSON COUNTY --------------- Anderson County lies between the Trinity and Neches Rivers just south of the thirty-second parallel. The altitude at Palestine is 510 feet; the average annual rainfall is between 40 and 41 inches, quite evenly distributed throughout the year. Its soils include the deep sands of the Norfolk type, modified by the Kirvin and Bowie, some areas of the Nacogdoches series, and the river alluvia of the Ocklockonee-Bibb and Trinity-Catalpa formations. Approximately half of the county lies in the short- leaf pine belt and the remainder in the adjacent postoak forest, which extends for many miles across Texas and has been famous as a hog range ever since white men have known it. A "wild hog claim" in the woods was an assurance of a full smokehouse for the pioneer who was willing to put forth the effort. The territory was in the Burnet empresario grant and there were some Mexican surveys even earlier, but settlement was sparse and precarious until after the Revolution. Fort Houston was established in 1836 as a protection from Indians, and until they were driven out of the country three years later, was an important post of the Republic in the "Upper Trinity" country, as it was then called. Here the refugees from Fort Parker, 65 miles away on the Navasota, found their weary way after six days of excruciating foot-travel, and from here horses were sent to bring in the exhausted women and children, and afterward to bury the dead at the desolated settlement. Part of the Parker clan built "Brown's fort" on San Pedro Creek near the present town of Grapeland while the others went west, and Daniel Parker and his sons later located near the present Elkhart. Some 25 wagons were in the Parker caravan which came from Illinois to Texas in 1833-4, and Miles Bennett followed in 1835, driving a four-horse team and riding one of the "wheelers." His wife was a daughter of Levi Jordan, who served as a surveyor in the new country. A few soldiers at Fort Houston were not enough to hold the Indians in check as long as their villages were scattered all around that part of the country, and the settlers were equally scattered. Here occurred one of those frontier incidents that show the caliber of pioneer women. A party of Indians attacked a house in which only women and children were present. Find- in the door barricaded, they came down the chimney. Cynthia Jordan smothered them with feathers and knocked them on the ------------------------------------------------------------------ [Page 804] head one by one until four or five were laid out. When they failed to open the door the others suspected something wrong and withdrew. To Fort Houston came Dr. James Hunter in 1838 the first practicing physician in what is now Anderson County (grand father of Mary Kate Hunter, poet and publicist). It ceased to be a military post about 1840, but remained the nucleus of a settlement. This area fell to Houston County on its creation in 1837, and after the expulsion of the Indians, settlement was accelerated. In 1846 a new county was created and organized. The first thought was to name it Burnet, but Anderson was finally adopted, in honor of the recently deceased vice-president. Organization was perfected July 13, Fort Houston serving as the temporary capital, but Palestine, named by one of the Parker family for Palestine, Illinois, was adopted for the permanent county seat. The first commissioners court held here (July 30, 1846), ordered the laying out of roads from Palestine to the Neches River at Ledbetter crossing, to Fort Houston, Parker's Bluff, Cannon's Ferry, and to Kingsboro in Henderson County. Enterprising citizens were already sawing lumber when the county was organized, and that year Henry Henderson and John Brown delivered two wagon loads of lumber to Dallas, using eight yoke of oxen to the wagon and taking a month to make the trip--a little more than a hundred miles. A ferry license was granted to John Shipler for the Magnolia crossing on the Trinity, and a 20 x 32-foot courthouse was ordered in January, 1847, to be ready for use by May. The first postoffice in the county was established here in March, 1847, but a store had been here since 1843. At the end of 1847 the county was credited with 343 voters and 1751 total population. The county was only three years old when it acquired a newspaper, first called the Trinity Advocate, the press being removed here by Joseph Addison Clark, who had briefly pub- lished the Rusk Pioneer, but gave up that field to the Cherokee Sentinel. For several years the paper was the only one for several counties around, and doubtless aided materially in center- ing trade in Palestine. In 1857 the population of Palestine was estimated to be 1,200. There were twelve stores, among which were two drug stores and a book store--all seemed to be prospering. The principal transportation was by the Trinity River, and crops were shipped ------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Page 805] down the Trinity to Galveston, or to Houston by ox team. Steamboats navigated as far north as Anderson County until about 1873. Magnolia and Parker's Bluff were the river ports. The centers of population when the county was ten years old are identified by the postoffice list of 1856; Magnolia (yielded to railroad station at Tucker, whose population later went mainly to Elkhart) Kickapoo, Beaver, Bethel, Hendersonville, Louis, Mound, Prairie, Roadville, Tennessee Colony, Elkhart (three miles from present site) and Marlowe's Mill. Kickapoo, built at the springs where the Indians had previ- ously had their village, became a place of considerable impor- tance. The stage line between Tyler and Palestine changed horses here, and when the toot of the locomotive a few miles away superseded the stage driver's horn, the days of Kickapoo were numbered. Its name has since been taken by a Polk County store community, while Neches, and later, Frankston, drew most of its population. Mound Prairie was one of the principal trading centers dur- ing the early development of the county, and Elkhart had a postoffice as early as 1851. In 1847 a number of families from Tennessee and Alabama settled Tennessee Colony, which had a log-cabin school in 1851 and two years later combined school, church and Masonic hall in one building. It persisted through all the vicissitudes of nearly forty years, and in 1880 it was raised to such prestige that it drew students from several coun- ties. Though the village boasts few business establishments, and an estimated population of half a hundred, the community maintains a fully affiliated high school with a vocational agri- culture department. Stovall Academy, opened about 1850, was another ante-bellum school which attracted students from a wide area, and lived until the railroads came. It was near the present town of Neches, and already deprived of much of its support after 1872, the building was moved to Neches in 1890. This former educational center for whites remains one for negroes, with Flint Hill voca- tional school as the heart and soul of an outstanding negro community. In Palestine the Masons established schools for both male and female in 1855; Palestine Female Institute was built by stock subscriptions in 1858; the Palestine Educational Association was organized in 1873 and an extensive curriculum laid out; the Female Institute was incorporated in 1876, but later received ------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Page 806] male students also, and operated until superseded by free schools in 1881. The iron deposits were worked to some extent during the Confederate War, but the oldest and most persistant manufac- turing industry in the county is salt. The "saline" was long ago described as a flat, irregular depression about a mile long and half a mile wide. In pioneer days people used to camp here and boil out a year's supply of salt at a time. With a number of families usually camping at the same time, the yearly task took on the nature of a social and recreational gathering. James L. McMeans bought the saline from Colonel Tom Bonner about the time of the Confederate War, and supplied salt to the government at $8 per hundred pounds. The plant was modernized and its operations greatly enlarged by the Palestine Salt Works about 1903. Between 1850 and 1855 the number of slaves more than trebled, representing more than a million dollars investment. During the same period the number of horses and cattle failed to double, which gives a good picture of the trend of develop- ment. In the vote on secession only seven out of about fifteen hundred were opposed, and several companies promptly organ- ized and went east, where they served in Hood's Brigade. Other contingents served west of the Mississippi, and it is estimated that the county furnished between 700 and 1,000 men for the Confederate service. During reconstruction, Federal troops were quartered in the school house at Palestine, but Principal Nathaniel Brooks con- tinued the schools in another building until the soldiers left. The white renegades who incited the negroes to mass demonstrations in the name of the "Loyal League" were holding a large negro gathering at Mound Prairie on one occassion. A small group of men temporarily gathered and quietly rode up to the scene of the meeting. Keeping out of sight, they simultaneously placed cayenne pepper in the nostrils of their horses. The snorting which broke out was only exceeded by the noise of the stampede as the "Loyal Leaguers" adjourned sine die. The carpetbag administration in the city led to tragic con- sequences, both the agent of the Freedman's Bureau and the city marshal behaving in a tyrannical and overbearing manner. The bullying marshall was killed by Chris Rogers, who had already whipped the Freedman's Bureau agent for threatening him. After an absence of a few years Rogers returned to ------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Page 807] Palestine when it was a boom railroad town with a tough reputa- tion. As city marshal for fourteen years he handled the gun men by their own standards, and in 1886 stood off railroad strikers and moved the trains in defiance of their threats. The population of the county was 9,229 at the census of 1870, and it almost doubled (17,395) during the next decade. The Internatinal railroad, which began construction at Hearne in 1870, reached Palestine in February, 1872, and was completed through Anderson County to Longview before the year was over. In November of the same year the Houston & Great Northern reached Palestine from the south, and the following year the two were consolidated as the International & Great Northern. Palestine, as the junction point, became the head- quarters and a division point for the system, with its general offices and shops. In 1882 Palestine could boast that "the whistle of the shops brings 300 mechanics and laborers to work, the monthly pay- car jingles to the tune of $25,000, and the faces of the merchants light up"; and in 1885 "the new courthouse is a massive brick structure, 70 x 96 feet, with terra cotta trimmings." All this was followed by the establishment of the first railroad Y. M. C. A. in Texas in the early 1890's, to which Miss Helen Gould contributed $14,000 for the erection of a building. The popula- tion of the county climbed steadily to 28,015 at the end of the century. At the beginning of the present century the Texas & New Orleans Railroad crossed the northeast corner of the county, between the old towns of Fincastle (Henderson County) and Kickapoo. A station first called Ayres, after a local doctor, became Frankston, in honor of Miss Frankie Miller. Some busi- ness houses moved in from old Kickapoo, and Frankston soon acquired a bank and a newspaper, the latter later absorbing the Neches paper. About this time Anderson County went in heavily for peach growing, at one time boasting nearly a quarter of a million trees in its orchards. The cream of the pine forest industries was skimmed during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but the hardwood supplied the material for crate factories and others which carry the manufacturing to the finished product rather than merely supplying lumber in bulk. The Texas State Railroad from Rusk to Palestine (1910) was the last rail line built in the county, but it wrought no such ------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Page 808] important changes as the earlier lines did. It later passed into the Southern Pacific system. Slocum is the successor to Cross Roads postoffice; Montalba is in the Beaver Valley; Elkhart was formerly known as Elkhart Springs (not a present site) where a pioneer woman discovered a fine flowing spring while hunting calves in the woods. The 1930 census is now nine years old, and the evidences of growth are so striking that present population can only be esti- mated, both in town and country. As elsewhere, suburban resi- dential development is following the paved highways outside the incorporated towns, and even the census figures of 1940 will only be accurate for the county as a whole, since an increasing num- ber of people work in the cities and live in the country. At the last census Palestine had 11,445 in the corporate limits, and is now estimated to have 14,000. Elkhart and Neches had about 900 each, Cayuga about 1,000 and Frankston 1,109. Slocum, Montalba, and Salmon are other business centers of some importance; Tucker, Long Lake, Bethel, Salmon and sev- eral other rural communities maintain graded high schools. Slocum was the first to introduce vocational agriculture. Neches, with several neighboring school communities, was the first to form a consolidated district under what is known as the "Marrs law," and its example has spread well over the county. Away back yonder signs of oil had been noted in this county, and when he recognized local specimens of "asphalt" as the residue from oil, M. A. Davey began prospecting in 1902. Not until a quarter of a century later, however, was the presence of commercial oil confirmed by the Boggy Creek gusher just across the county line in Cherokee. Anderson got first produc- tion in 1928; Long Lake in 1933, Cayuga in 1934, and Camp Hill in 1935, which rapidly brought Anderson up in the petroleum ranks, her production for 1938 amounting to more than three and a quarter million barrels. The proration schedule issued in May, 1839, gives the county 310 wells with a daily allowable of 14,267 barrels, while drilling was still active. The county ranks twenty-ninth in the State in the size of its industrial payrolls, yet nearly three-fourths of the population still live on farms, of which there were 4,417 in the census year of 1935, cultivating 105,420 acres of crops, and keeping more than 25,000 cattle, nearly 16,000 hogs, a few sheep, and some eight thousand horses and mules. The production of cotton has averaged around 15,000 bales in recent years. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Page 809] KENNETH L. ANDERSON - The last vice-president of the Republic of Texas had recently died when the first state legislature created this county from a part of Houston County, and named it in his honor. Kenneth L. Anderson was a North Carolinian, educated in the famous Bingham school in his native county. As a young lawyer of 24, he left his Piedmont home and went across the mountains to Shelbyville, Tennessee, where he prac- ticed his profession about eight years, removing to San Augustine, Texas, in 1837. He became district attorney by appointment in 1842, was afterward elected to the lower house of Congress, of which he became speaker. In the last national election of the Lone Star Republic he was chosen vice-president, presiding over the Senate in the Ninth Congress. The regular session had adjourned February 3, 1845, and the annexation resolution was passed in the United States Congress and signed by President Tyler, March 1. Upon receipt of official notification thereof, President Anson Jones called an extra session of the Texas Congress to act upon the annexation matter. It met at Washington on the Brazos June 16, approved the joint resolution June 23, and also gave its consent to the plenary convention called by President Jones to meet in Austin July 4. Mr. Anderson had been put forward for the governorship, had a strong following, especially in East Texas, and was gen- erally known as one of the foremost lawyers of the Republic. At one time or another he had maintained partnerships with Thomas J. Rusk and J. Pinckney Henderson, their practice extending throughout the eastern half of the State. En route to his East Texas home from the Congress which ratified annexation, he became too ill to proceed, and died at Fanthorp's Inn (then in Montgomery, later in Grimes County), on July 3, 1845. The place was renamed in his honor and became the county seat of Grimes County when it was created the following spring, at the same session of the legislature which also created Anderson County. HISTORIC SITES and PIONEER BURIAL PLACES - Two miles west of Palestine on U.S. Highway 79 is the site of Fort Houston. "A Fort and Stockade built about 1836 on the Public Square of the Town of Houston (then in Houston County), as a protection against the Indians, by order of General Sam Houston, Commander-In-Chief of the Texan Armies. The town was aban- doned in 1846 for Palestine, the New Seat of Anderson County, ------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Page 810] the fort about 1841. The site is now a part of the historic home of John H. Reagan, which is called Fort Houston." Near the Neches, 12 miles northwest of Jacksonville, is found the site of the Kickapoo Battlefield. "Here General Thomas J. Rusk with 200 Texans on October 16, 1838, attacked a band of hostile Indians and Allied Mexicans, molesters of Frontier Settle- ments, and routed them." The survivors of the Parker massacre (1836) made their way to Fort Houston, and settled in the southern part of what is now Anderson County. Near Elkhart is the Parker family cemetery, with monuments to Rev. Daniel Parker--"Pioneer Baptist Minister. Born in Virginia April 6, 1781. Died Decem- ber 3, 1844 His wife, Patsy Dixon Parker, was born January 17, 1783. Died December 1, 1846." Dickerson Parker - "A San Jacinto Veteran. Born in Tennessee May 29, 1812. Died August 1, 1844. His wife, Lucinda Eaton Parker, was born January 14, 1820. Died January 27, 1847." South of Elkhart, one and one-half miles, is found the Pilgrim Predestinarian Regular Baptist Church - organized in Crawford County, Illinois, by Elder Daniel Parker in 1833, with the following charter members: Daniel Parker, Pheby Parker, Patsey Parker, Julious Christy, John Parker, Rachel Christy, Salley Brown. The first Baptist Church in Texas; first meet- ing held in Stephen F. Austin's Colony, January 20, 1834; first log church built in 1839. And in the Pilgrim Cemetery three miles southeast of Elkhart is buried Miles Bennett. "A Soldier in the Army of Texas 1836. Born in Indiana July 26, 1816. Died November 24, 1849. His wife, Laura Jordon Bennett, was born August 28, 1830. Died December 24, 1925." Another marker near Elkhart designates the site of the McLean Massacre. "Daniel McLean and John Sheridan, expert Indian Fighters employed by the Settlers as Guides and Pro- tectors, were killed here in 1837. By holding the savages in check until the Settlers could escape, both sacrificed their lives." Ten miles west of Palestine, in the old Magnolia cemetery, is the monument to "Henry Fields, a San Jacinto Veteran; born in North Carolina, May 8, 1806; died October 15, 1890." Another San Jacinto veteran is commemorated in the old cemetery at Palestine - "Captain William Kimbro; came to Texas in 1831; commanded a company at San Jacinto. Born in Tennessee; died in Anderson County, September 14, 1856." Palestine honors its most distinguished citizen, John H. Reagan, with a handsome statue, in an attractive setting. ===========================================================================