Carol C Taylor Blog

Greenville Texas Municipal Building and Auditorium, opened in October 1939

On a fall evening in 1939 former Greenville resident and recognized baritone Mack Harrell made his hometown debut with a German Lieder recital.  The event held on Thursday, October 26, 1939 marked the opening of the new $200,000 Greenville Municipal Auditorium and the celebration of Harrell’s recent contract with the Metropolitan Opera of New York City.  The Dallas Morning News called the event the “most brilliant affair in Greenville society in years.”  Sponsored by the    Co-operative Concert Committee, the recital was attended by everybody who was anybody in the surrounding area.

For the first time in the city’s history, all municipal offices were under the same roof.  The fire department and police department along with the new jail joined the mayor, city commissioners, and department heads on the ground floor.  Above, on the second floor was the new auditorium, well planned and about to be known for its fine acoustics.

The building was a tribute to a large group of men who came together to apply for a grant and loan from the Federal government through the Public Works Administration.  Turned down on the first round in 1933, the group led by Mayor A. S. Moore resubmitted the application in 1938.  This time they were successful.  Local architect William R. Ragsdale supervised the construction as he had done a decade earlier on the Hunt County Courthouse.  All bills were paid on September 27, 1939.  Ragsdale recommended the city accept the new building on October 9th.  A little over two weeks later the festivities began.

Baritone Mack Harrell, who was raised in Greenville and returned to perform at the opening of the Greenville Municipal Auditorium

Harrell’s program consisted of twenty pieces by such composers as Handel, Mozart, Schubert, Wolf, Berber, and Schindler.   Harrell began his musical career as a violinist, but was encouraged by his bride to focus on his outstanding voice.  He chose to specialize in German Lieder music.

What makes all of this even more interesting is that the recital occurred less than two months after Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler invaded Poland and destroyed her army.  World War I ended only twenty-one years earlier.  During World War I, there were strong anti-German feelings throughout the United States that included boycotts of concerts with music by German composers.  In 1939 were the same feelings prevalent in the United States?

At that time the United States was still recovering from the devastating economic disaster that had wrecked the nation for a decade or more.  Americans focused more on their problems than those taking place in Europe.  On September 5, 1939, the United States declared its neutrality with regard to European problems.  However, sixteen days later the Neutrality Act was repealed and a Cash and Carry Plan was adopted that allowed the United States to provide Great Britain and France with arms and food.

Since 1900 public opinion had become an issue for most Western countries.  While dictators still ruled, they watched the people over their shoulders.  Public Opinion Polls were taken frequently here in America.  The week of Harrell’s recital only 5% of those polled favored U. S. involvement in the European war militarily.  At that time, Americans were satisfied with the Cash and Carry Plan.  They could sit back and enjoy Mack Harrell’s recital with no ill feelings for their future foe.

The tall windows and wrap-around porch provide summer breezes for this Texas foursquare home.

Throughout all of North Texas one can see variations of foursquare houses, an easily identifiable style of architecture found throughout the United States.  First of all, the foursquare house is considered the only uniquely American style of residential architecture.  It is a relatively latecomer on the architecture scene, appearing between 1890 and phasing out during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  It was a reaction to the ornate Victorian houses of the late 19th century.  Often foursquare houses contain elements of Prairie Style and Craftsman Style architecture.  Many of these are found along turn-of-the-century streets in North Texas towns.  Yet, rural homes were often simpler interpretations of the same styles.

When my grandfather Virgil Seay moved a herd of cattle to a newly purchased ranch in Archer County, Texas, in the spring of 1913, he moved into this foursquare house. Originally the house had only four rooms, a front porch and a back porch. Later a bedroom was added, the garage was built and the water tower that stored drinking water from a well was erected. The fence was built to keep cattle out of the yard.

A foursquare house looked like a big box, like the houses in a Monopoly game.  In towns and cities, they were usually two and one-half stories with dormers either in the front center or on each side of the hipped roof.  Rural homes were usually one story.  All had four large rooms on each floor.  Some had a central hall reminiscent of dogtrot cabins.  In others, rooms were adjacent with no separate passages between.

In towns, a single front door opened onto a large front porch with a wide roof.  In rural areas, the two front rooms had exterior doors opening onto the porch.  The two-door option offered more summer breezes in a time without air-conditioning.  To further facilitate natural cooling, foursquare houses usually had a hipped roof with wide overhanging eaves to shade the interior of the house.

This more traditional two and one-half story foursquare house with a wrap-around front porch and multiple doorways was built for Texas summers.

Foursquare homes were substantial looking and substantially built.  While most were constructed of wood siding originally painted white; brick, stucco, and concrete blocks also covered the exterior surface.  In many parts of the United States, a foursquare house had a basement.  Basements were not a frequent part of a foursquare home in Texas.  Our soils, especially on the black land, tended to allow moisture to seep into basements.

A foursquare house was so popular in the early part of the 20th century that Sears Roebuck & Co. offered homebuilding kits in their mail-order catalogs.  Everything was included in the kit, down to the doorknobs and faucet handles.  For a modest price at that time, a future homeowner could send a check or money order to Sears Roebuck and expect their new home to arrive shortly at the local railroad freight station.  All that was lacking was the lot on which to build the house.

A sample of a Sears, Roebuck & Co Foursquare house from their 1908 Book of Modern Homes.

For the time period, a foursquare house was well built, although lacking in ornamentation for the most part.  The fact that so many still exist is a testimony to their sturdiness and usefulness.  It is possible to date a home or even a neighborhood by the presence of foursquare houses.  After the downturn in homebuilding during the Great Depression and World War II, the style fell out of favor for more modern homes.  Yet they can still be spotted.

Once upon a time not so long ago, I read old newspapers at the library and recorded one event for each day of the month.  GEUS then published them as a trailer on their television station.  When I retired I found I had too many family commitments to continue.  Now that I have more time and have discovered I miss knowing what happened around here in the past, just as I like to read this newspaper every day.  I realized it was time to begin again.

Last summer a friend convinced me I needed a Facebook page.  So the logical things to do were read the 1914 Greenville newspapers and add a comment each day on Facebook.  I began on January 1, 2014.  This time around I added names of persons who married that day, comments about national events that had an effect on Greenville and Hunt County, and items from area newspapers.  While as a historian, I look for trends and attempt to analyze the events; I have chosen to omit that from Facebook.

On Sunday, December 29 this newspaper ran an article by Dr. James Conrad entitled “Winter wedding typical in early 20th century.”  As all of his columns are, this one was both informative and interesting.  After reading it, I realized that Dr. Conrad could have written about any number of the weddings that took place in January 1914.  Many were reported in the Greenville Morning Herald.

For example, A. D. King of Dallas and Annyee Roark of Pittsburg (TX) agreed to marry here on January first; but her train was late arriving.  The marriage was delayed until the second when it took place in the County Clerk’s Office.  Later in the month Paskle Middleton of Point and Mary E. Burns of Kingston were married in Greenville by Rev. F. Graham McMurray of Central Christian Church.  Both took the train to Greenville and returned to their new home via the railroad.

Greenville in the early part of the 20th century was a major railroad hub in Northeast Texas.  Hence, it became something of Gretna Green, a small community located in the south of Scotland.  That village is famous for the vast number of runaway weddings that occurred there.  In fact, Mary and Edith motored to Gretna Green to dissuade their young sister Sybil and Tom Branson from marrying in season two of “Downton Abbey.”  Wonder if anything like that happened here?

The most unusual item I read in the Greenville Morning Herald was a wedding that took place in Naud Burnett’s grocery store.  No copies of the Greenville Evening Banner exist for 1914 and the copies of the Greenville Messenger are somewhat unorganized so we know little about that wedding.  The original copies of the Messenger were sorted in order by days and then bundled by month.  However, the person doing the microfilming wasn’t paying attention or didn’t know the order of months in a year.  December is sometimes followed by July, etc.

To read what happened in Greenville a century ago, go to www.facebook.com/carolcoleytaylor and enjoy.

Rainbows like this one are seldom seen during a drought. This one followed an afternoon shower in Greenville, Texas in August 2013. What a welcomed sight. Virgil Seay loved to see rain and rainbows.

When I was a child I spent as much time in the summers at my maternal grandparents’ ranch in Archer County as was possible.  I loved it out there and my grandfather was such a good friend.  In the early evening he and I would sit under the mulberry tree after supper.  Sometimes we talked but most of the time we simply listened to summer noises.  That was during the drought of the 1950s, one of several disastrous droughts Virgil Seay survived.

We would speculate about the next rain and how soon it would take the waterholes to refill.   Sometimes he would tell me about his early childhood and days when cattle were still driven up the Chisholm Trail.  The Seay family owned land in Montague County on the Texas side of the Red River, but leased land across the river in the Chickasaw Nation of Indian Territory.  In very dry weather, the land in the Territory had more grass and water.  The Chickasaw were not really into the cattle business, so their lands were not as depleted as Texas ranges.

My great-grandfather Jeff Seay operated a ferry between Red River Station and the Chickasaw Nation so their home was a short distance from the trail.  On summer afternoons they often heard loud rumbling sounds like thunder and saw cumulous clouds build into tall thunderheads, only to discover some Texas cattleman was moving a herd to better pastures.  The noise from the travelling herd and the accompanying dust created false hopes for everyone.

That was approximately 1895 to 1897, a time of no rain up and down the Great Plains and economic uncertainty throughout the country.  But the Seay family managed to survive that drought along with the ones in the 1930s and in the 1950s.  Virgil was four when his first drought began, but the lack of rain and vanished hopes of thunderstorms remained with him forever.  I was a little older in the 1950s but the memories of dry, hot summers, grasshoppers, and rapidly shrinking waterholes have stayed with me to this day.
I look up at the sky every summer afternoon, looking for a possible raincloud to cool things off.  And when I do, I recall those wonderful visits with my granddad.