Carol C Taylor Blog

This photo shows the destruction in Paris, Texas, after the March 1916, fire destroyed nearly 30 blocks of the city.

The spring of 1916 was typical of Texas weather. No rain and high winds seared the countryside and towns alike. The lack of rainfall and potential for a prolonged drought sent cotton markets in New Orleans and New York teetering.

The worst fear was fire, buffeted by the high winds. One such fire broke out in downtown Houston and threatened to obliterate businesses, courthouses, hospitals, and the population before it was controlled. At a small town in Texas a young boy set the grass afire as a practical joke in March. The wind spread flames to within yards of the local schoolhouse. Thanks to heroic action by local men, the children and teacher were saved. Who knows what happened to the boy, but if I were a gambling person, I would say it wasn’t pleasant.

Right after noon on March 22, 1916, fire broke out in a warehouse on the Texas and Pacific Railway right of way in Paris. The high winds and dry conditions buffeted the fire through approximately thirty blocks of homes, business, banks, churches, the courthouse and jail, and the fire station. The fire raged all afternoon and through the night. As one newspaper reported, the fire “took all before it, then the wind changed and the fire took all behind it.” Fire departments from Dallas, Greenville, Bonham, and Hugo, Oklahoma, arrived to help. It was possible that night to see the glow from the fire as far away as Greenville.

Miraculously only three people lost their lives. Two were found in their homes and a fifty-year-old woman died from heart failure. Three churches were destroyed. The jail was evacuated. Court records lost. Because hotels, restaurants, and grocery stores were destroyed, Paris found itself without food or shelter. Those persons whose homes were safe and intact churches and schools took in most of the homeless. But the almost total loss of food was devastating.

Surrounding towns and cities immediately organized food drives. Trains from as far away as Fort Worth brought in carloads of food and clothing. The citizens of Paris were grateful but determined to recover with as little outside help as possible.

Within a week, storm clouds entered North Texas and broke the drought, but brought damaging windstorms around Denton. Greenville and this part of Texas received beneficial rains with no wind.

On the twenty-eighth of March, fire of unknown origin destroyed sheds and offices of the Greenville Lumber Company. At first the fire seemed to be contained at the lumberyard, but by the next day it became clear that seven homes were destroyed and eight others damaged. No alarm was sounded until the fire had a good start and, once again, high winds caused it to spread rapidly.

As an aside, I am working on a piece about a murder that occurred in Paris in December 1915. The man suspected of committing the crime was in jail at the time of the fire. As I tried to find as much as I could about the circumstances I telephoned the Lamar District Clerk. I must have piqued her interest. She told me about the fire and loss of records, but said since the trial occurred in late April 1916, there might be intact records. There were and she graciously sent me the copies of indictments. As I read about the fire, I realized that the Paris Morning News office was completely destroyed. But they were back in business in no time, thanks to another newspaper press in a neighboring town.

This photo of Frank James was probably taken shortly after he joined the Confederate Guerrillas led by William C. Quantrill. It was likely taken in the summer of 1863. Dr. Sayle was rumored to have set a broken leg for Frank.

Did the Younger Gang stay in Greenville for a time with relatives following the Civil War? That’s a debate that arose a few days ago on Facebook.

It is known that an ancestor of the late Bob Younger owned the OK Wagon Yard located where Market Square is today. But any connection between the two families is not definite. The piece on Facebook stated that Cole Younger lived on West Lee Street in the latter part of the 19th century. Dr. Robert Sayle developed that part of town, including the large homes where Younger may have visited. However, Cole Younger spent time in a federal prison between the fall of 1876 and 1901 when he was paroled. The Sayle Addition didn’t exist until the 1880s.

But not to discredit the story; the Younger brothers as well as Frank and Jesse James were part of William Quantrill’s Raiders who wintered over in the Sherman-Bonham area during 1864-1865. As raiders, they certainly didn’t stay put in Sherman. Theoretically, they were here to assist Confederates in cleaning out the Thickets of deserters from both the Union and Confederate armies. Much of the Thickets were found between Greenville and Bonham. Quantrill’s Raiders participated in raids and robbery of civilians, also.

Enter into the plot Dr. Robert Sayle. He earned a medical degree from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1856. The story goes that he went home to Louisville, bought a horse and saddle, and headed to Texas. After staying a short time in Lamar County, he came to Hunt County where he purchased one-half section of land east of Commerce. He built a log cabin and set up practice as the only doctor in Hunt County with a medical degree. In 1866 he married Texana Kimbell.

In October 1861 he joined the 9th Texas Cavalry to take part in the fight at Elk Horn Tavern and the Corinth Campaign in northern Mississippi. In the spring of 1862 he contracted a fever and resigned as Assistant Surgeon before returning home to recuperate. Once back in Hunt County the Commissioners Court declared Dr. Sayle was a “physician of good standing and absolutely necessary for wants of the County of Hunt”. That was perfectly acceptable in the Confederate States.

With Quantrill’s men in the area and returning Confederates planning to continue the war on their home front, Dr. Sayle was busy patching up bullet wounds, knife cuts, and every violent act imaginable. It is reported that he treated the likes of the James brothers, Ben Bickerstaff and his followers including the Brumbelow and Keith families of Hunt County. After all, he was a trained physician with a wife and two daughters living in a remote part of the county.

In 1877 Dr. Sayle was elected President of the Hunt County Medical Board and served until 1885. In 1878 he moved to Greenville and bought land on both sides of Lee Street west of the Katy Depot to beyond Burleson College. In fact, he was one of the donors to Burleson. Sayle Addition was one of the first housing developments in Greenville, the other the Moulton Addition along Park Street.

Robert Sayle, like many others in Hunt County, was well respected by their peers. He served on the Board of Directors of the Greenville National Exchange Bank as well as numerous other civic services. Dr. Sayle died in 1914.

Town Branch in February 2016. Evidence of the original rip-rap rock filling is still evident.

Oops! I made a couple of mistakes in a recent blog post. Sometimes I do that with oral history. It wasn’t critical; I just didn’t ask enough questions. If you recall I wrote about the Gumbo Pits found in Hunt and Collin Counties.

The purpose of the gumbo pits was to turn our black soil into rocks, a commodity not found naturally in the Blackland Prairie. But somehow I was a little too creative when describing the process. Reading a wonderful article on the Collin County Historical Commission website (http://www.collincountytx.gov/), I learned more about the physical phenomenon of changing dirt to rocks.

In Collin County, the Cotton Belt Railroad dug long trenches with steam shovels instead of by hand in the 1880s. I suspect both methods were used, especially during the 1930s. The Cotton Belt laid crossties in the trenches, then a layer of coal, and finally a layer of dirt clods were place on the crossties. The area was watered down to prevent the coals from burning too fast. Once the fire died and the trench cooled down, the clods that were now rocks were raked out, cooled and used as ballast for the tracks.

My Hunt County sources noted that crossties were not wasted. Large trees were plentiful along the small creeks and streams throughout the county. Those were the fuel used to convert dirt to rocks. During the Great Depression, dynamite was used to blast out the pits.

The same principles were used until the 1880s in other parts of Hunt County to make bricks. One of the brickyards was located between Ardis Heights and Puddin Hill. The bricks were a light red-orange, not perfectly formed, and a few are still in existence today. In later years the bricks were covered with a plaster to appear more appealing to the eye.

A second phenomenon I encountered in my paper for the New Deal Conference in Beaumont was “rip-rap.” The Greenville Garden Club received an $1100 Public Works Administration (PWA) grant to clean up Town Branch. By the early 20th century, the small creek just south of the GEUS Service Building was a foul smelling, mosquito breeding water hole. Cleaned out by the City Street Department repeatedly in the teens, Town Branch was a mess again in a few weeks.

So the good ladies of the Garden Club, led by president Gertrude Horton, applied for the grant. With the money they decided to riprap the creek. That meant large rocks were moved to the creek bed, laid in a manner to reduce stagnant water, and hopefully rid the waterway of sewer and weeds. The rocks came from debris left after the construction of the present day courthouse in 1928 and other building sites. Prisoners in the county jail volunteered for the project in order to work out fines. A total of $500 was spent on the project; the remaining $600 returned.

The Town Branch project went from Wesley Street to Johnson Street. Countless other projects put the unemployed to work for a short time throughout Greenville and Hunt County during the Great Depression. While the intent was creating jobs, what really happened was community improvement in the form of public works.

Samples of burnt clay or Black Gumbo as it is known in Blackland Prairies.

My family loves gumbo. When eating out at seafood restaurants, at least one of us will try the gumbo to see how it measures up to previous servings. Making gumbo at home is a task that needs time, patience, but is a wonderful way to mull over life. Philosophers must make wonderful gumbo.

To make gumbo, you need lots of time, a great deal of patience, a good wooden spoon and cast iron skillet plus an empty mind. It works much better to cook the roux over a gas range; electric stoves are too hard to control the temperature. Forget the thought of using a microwave. If you need reading glasses, grab them. You will be on the lookout for tiny black specks of burned flour in the roux. If spotted, it is imperative to throw out the whole thing and start over again. You stand over the stove on low heat, constantly stirring the roux with that wooden spoon and contemplate something pleasant for about an hour. Eventually you will create a delicious dish to enjoy with family and friends. One taste and your legs will no longer ache from standing.

Now I want to introduce you to Black Gumbo made here on the Blackland Prairies in vast quantities around the beginning of the 20th century, at least. Huge cauldrons replaced the cast iron skillets. Wood fires replaced the gas stove. Strong backs were absolutely necessary.

You see, when you dig down into this black, waxy clay around here, you won’t find rocks for a long way down. Our house sits on top of a ridge. When we built, the contractor had 19-foot holes dug for the piers to support the house. Nary a rock or even stone was found.

Today, when roads and parking lots are built, crushed stone is still vital to the roadbed. Railroads must have ballast or good rock base to hold the ties to support the rails. Rock is essential to good construction. Today it is hauled in on trucks, but as late as the 1930s, rocks were made around here by cooking the black, clay soil.

Ask any old-timer out there about the Gumbo Pits and they will proudly tell how gravel was made. Mule teams and log scrappers dug the pits. Men gathered the chunks of clay in wheelbarrows, emptied them into large cauldrons sitting on a wood fire. The heat released the moisture in the chunks. As the clay burned it slowly turned a reddish color. At just the right temperature, the men pulled the glowing coals out from under the pots and emptied them. Scattered across the open space, the chunks cooled to a hard, red stone with no dust.

In January 1916, the Katy Railway announced it would spend 2.5 million dollars to repair 219 miles of track between Greenville and Shreveport as well as the route from Greenville to Mineola. Materials to be used were crushed rock, burnt clay, and gravel. I suspect that burnt clay or gumbo was used when the original tracks were built in the latter part of the 19th century.

In the 1930s the WPA built a large pit near the intersection of Highway 34 and FM 2358 for use in making the roadbed for Highway 34. At that time dynamite was used in place of mules and log scrappers. The dynamite was stored in a wooden building.

As I research the New Deal agencies that attempted to bring employment rates to acceptable levels during the Great Depression, I learn more and more about the labor methods and theories used. It is a fascinating, and sometimes tragic, time in our national history.