Carol C Taylor Blog

Allen H. Parmer dressed for what might have been a Civil War Reunion. He lived from 1849-1929, most of the time in the saddle.

It wasn’t the content of the story that was so eerie, but the coincidence that when I read it, the time lapse was almost forty-one years to the day after my mother’s death. But let me start at the beginning.

My mother, my brother, my husband, our son, and I love to read. When I travel I tend to buy books as souvenirs and generally have two or three books going at the same time. Last weekend I picked up Tales of Texoma: Episodes in the History of the Red River Border, edited by Michael L. Collins (Wichita Falls, Texas: Midwestern State University Press, 2005). It’s full of wonderful stories about life in the late 19th century on both sides of the Red River. At first “Kin to Outlaws: The Lives of Allen and Susan James Parmer” by Everett Kindig seemed to be a typical piece written about Jesse and Frank James and their followers.

The James Brothers were even here in Hunt County after the Civil War. Oral history claims that Dr. Robert Sayle tended to Frank James after he was shot in the leg. The only photograph I have seen of Frank James was taken in McKinney. He was standing on a wooden sidewalk leaning against a post. I can believe he had difficulty standing after leg surgery.

The lovely Susan James Parmer was a delight to everyone she met. She was remembered as a teacher, a nurse to cowhands during an epidemic, and a true friend to her brothers Frank and Jesse James.

But I digress. Susan James Parmer was the younger sister of Jesse and Frank who married Allen Parmer, one of their fellow Civil War guerrillas who followed William Clark Quantrill. In the winter of 1864/65 Quantrill brought his men to northeast Texas between Bonham and Sherman. Some even hid in Black Cat Thicket. That spring most men followed Quantrill back to Missouri while other stayed in Texas.

Allen and Susan married in Clay County, Missouri on November 24, 1870. They were in Clay County, Texas by 1877. Many of Quantrill’s Gang resettled in the Clay County, Wichita County and Archer County areas, as did more than a few Confederate veterans and families. In fact my great-great grandfather Alexander Marion (A.M.) Seay, a disabled Confederate, brought his family to Beaver Creek near the town of Cambridge in Clay County in 1872.

Allen and Susan were in the same vicinity in January 1880 when A. M. Seay went on a rampage, killing three friends before shooting himself. Did Susan and Allen know A. M. Seay?

That distinguished gentlemen was none other than Frank James, the outlaw, and Susan’s older brother. By 1890 the Federal government forgot about the James Gang. Frank spent most of his time in Texas where he, his wife, and son lived in Fort Worth. He actually became a traveling salesman in the area of Wichita Falls where he often visited with Allen Parmer, he friend and brother-in-law. (Find-a-grave)

By 1882 the Parmer family moved to Beaver Creek in Wichita County on land near the Stone Ranch owned by the Stone Land and Cattle Company or the T-Fork Ranch. Luke Wilson purchased a portion of Stone Ranch in Wichita and Clay Counties to form the Wichita Land and Cattle Company. Wilson hired Allen Parmer as foreman.

This was during range wars between cattlemen and homesteaders who wanted to fence their lands for farming. Parmer and his son were involved in some of those encounters.

Now skip ahead to 1912 when A. M. Seay’s son Jeff bought 870.5 acres of grassland west of Archer City. In February of the following year Jeff Seay sent two of his sons, Virgil and Hardy, along with two cowhands and fifty impregnated heifers to the newly acquired Archer County land. After the cattle were bedded down, Hardy and the two hands loaded their horses on the train for the trip back to Montague County. My grandfather Virgil remained in Archer County for fifty years until his death in 1963.

During World War II my mother Evelyn Seay Coley lived with her parents while my father served in the U. S. Army in Italy. Evelyn taught in a one-room schoolhouse on the Luke Wilson Ranch. The school was named for the train siding, Luke Wilson Switch. She told me about driving to teach when the weather was fine but riding her horse during rain and mud. But I learned little about the Luke Wilson Ranch.

My grandmother Maime Matthews Seay was born on Beaver Creek in Wichita County. Over the years she told a few tidbits of 19th century life in Wichita, Archer, Clay and Baylor counties. Virgil told me stories of his childhood, but most related to the cattle business. He wasn’t much for what he considered gossip. I really wish they both had talked more. And I’m always so glad to find a documented piece like “Kin to Outlaws: The Lives of Allen and Susan James Parmer”

Colonel Ned Green and his bride Mabel Harlow Green shown shortly after their marriage in 1917. They made their home aboard a lavish passenger car named “Mabel” and traveled across North America. (Wikipedia photo)

Imagine knowing your mother was worth at least ninety million dollars ($90,000,000), yet you and your sister lived with her in the squalor of New York and New Jersey tenements. You grew up shy with no self-confidence. Once a boy slashed your leg with a knife. Your mother made the rounds of hospitals to find one that would treat your leg free. None did. You had to have your leg amputated. You wore cork prosthesis for the rest of your life. Such was the early life of Edward Howland Robinson Green (1868-1936).

The mother was Hetty Green, known to New York businessmen as the Wicked Witch of Wall Street. During the Gilded Age, Hetty was a big player in the Robber Barons who created an intricate web of ownerships, receiverships, and sales with the inability to pay interest on loans. By 1891 Hetty’s major feud was with Collis P. Huntington of the Southern Pacific Railroad. At stake was the Texas Central Railroad, a short line railway with decrepit equipment and disgruntled employees. For $75,000 in cash and three-quarters of a million dollars in Texas Central bonds, Hetty Green acquired the railroad.

Hetty Green, Ned’s mother, was known in New York financial circles as a miserly but brilliant businesswoman.

Immediately Hetty named her son, always known as Ned, as president and general manager of the newly christened Texas Midland Railroad. Everyone thought it was the greatest mistake Hetty ever made; Ned knew nothing about business. But Ned surprised everyone after Hetty opened her pocketbook with $1.8 million in cash. He turned the derelict railroad into one of the best short line railways in the country.

Shortly after obtaining the Texas Midland, the United States entered a national economic panic beginning in 1893 followed by the Pullman Strike of 1894. Yet, Ned Green managed to build 125.22 miles of main tracks, 37 miles of spurs, sidings, and yard tracks by laying heavier rails. He pioneered the art of “burnt combo” by burning heavy clay clods until they hardened like rocks to be used as ballast. And he bought only new locomotives. (Author added italics.)

His amazing passenger cars were instruments of new technology. He created the first café lounge cars, the first observation sleepers in the Southwest, the first electric locomotive headlights, the first steel boxcars, and after the introduction of automobiles the first high speed gas-electric railcar. By 1923 Texas Midland stock included 16 locomotives, 16 passenger cars and 183 freight cars.

In the late 1890s, the Texas Midland gained the reputation of hauling the largest tonnage of cotton in the country. When the boll weevil crossed the Rio Grande to damage Texas cotton, Green worked with state and Federal agricultural departments to buy, equip, and operate a model demonstration farm at Terrell, Texas, to combat the boll weevil.

Along the way Texas Governor O. B. Colquitt extended to Green the honorary title of “Colonel”. From then on Edward Howland Robinson Green was known as Colonel Ned Green. He became successful by hiring competent, loyal railroad officials with experience, and of course, gave them excellent salaries.

Before making it big in the railway business, Colonel Green met and fell in love with a vivacious redheaded prostitute named Mabel Harlow. She realized his disastrous childhood and the awkwardness of the cork leg. Mabel was a compassionate, kind woman who gave the large man self-confidence. The colonel was six feet, four inches tall and later in life weighed in at 300 pounds or more. Of course, the pocketbook sealed the relationship.

Colonel Green ordered a magnificent passenger car from George Mortimer Pullman. Described as “palatial” the car cost $75,000. Ned Green christened his new home “Mabel”. To aggravate local, state, and later Federal tax collectors, Green made the passenger car his legal residence, frequently moving it to another state or town when he suspected the tax collector was looking for him.

Colonel Green swore he would never marry while his mother was still living. Shortly after she died, Ned and Mabel were married on June 27, 1917. Colonel Green died in 1936. It took various counties, states, and federal officials over 29 months to settle the estate. His unmarried sister received the bulk of Hetty Green’s estate but Mabel received an ample $900,000 settlement.

One question remains. What happened to the elaborate passenger car “Mabel”? No one seems to know.

1919 Hunt County Poll Tax Receipt for a voter in Celeste, TX.

Next Tuesday, March 6, is Primary Election Day in Texas. After months of finger pointing, name calling, negative ads and general disorder on social media and television, Texans will get to vote on the persons they want to run in the General Election on November 6. It will be the time to narrow the race down to two candidates, one for each party, in the final race.

Every person who registered to vote this year can go to their polling place and cast a ballot. But lots of changes have occurred in Texas voting laws since 1900. Then it was only in cities of 10,000 or more where voters had to register. Everyone else just walked in cast their ballot, visited with other voters and went home. All saloons and bars were closed that day, either for the election or because area was already dry.

In 1905 the A. W. Terrell Election Laws went into effect after Governor S. W. T. Lanham refused to sign the bill or return it. Who could not vote as a result of the new law? Any male under the age of twenty-one, idiots and lunatics, paupers supported by the county, persons convicted of felony unless pardoned or restored to full citizenship with the right of suffrage, and all members of the U. S. military, soldiers, sailors, and marines. At that time, women were not allowed to share the privilege of suffrage. It would not be until 1918 that women in Texas could vote; a year before females throughout many other states.

To vote, one must of course be a male, and a citizen of the state, county and precinct if he filed intention to vote one year before the election. The would-be voter must have paid his poll tax and have the receipt with him as proof. Poll tax exemptions were issued to those over the age of 60, or men blind or deaf or dumb, or persons permanently disabled or anyone with the loss of one hand or one foot. Voters were allowed to have someone to read the ballot to them but not advise whom to vote for.

Texas, like many of the former Confederate states, developed a systematic disenfranchisement of blacks, Native Americans, Latinos, and poor whites after the Civil War. They blatantly denied those minorities representation in government by ignoring the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments known as the Civil War Amendments. The 15th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote to all U. S. citizens became the one-issue Southern states could not tolerate. They enacted Jim Crow laws designed to restrict or prevent African American voter participation. It should be noted that at the time of Civil War Amendments, Native Americans did not have American citizenship.

Texas suppressed black voting using poll taxes and white primaries. To vote, one had to pay an additional out-of-pocket expense of $1.25 to $1.75 after 1902. While not much in today’s economy, it was a month’s worth of groceries for the poor at the time.

White primaries were used solely in Texas. The prevalent political party, Democrats, claimed to be a private club whose membership was restricted to men of Anglo heritage. The white primary election became law in 1923; everyone could vote in the general election, though. Numerous legal challenges to repeal the law failed until 1944 when the U. S. Supreme Court finally prohibited the white primary in the Smith v. Allwright.

Prior to 1944 the fourth Saturday of July every two years was “Primary Election Day.” With only one prevalent party, the Democrats won the primary or a run-off if required. Important local elections were settled in the summer leaving the November election for president and vice-president. Minorities could vote in November since it was a federal election. However, they had no representation locally.