Carol C Taylor Blog

History has an unusual way of repeating itself. The whole world has been involved in a dilemma called Covid-19 for months. No one knows how much longer we will be quarantined in our homes, how many loved ones will suffer and die, or if we will ever have a vaccine to help us survive.

Recently the Dallas Morning News had a very interesting article regarding the Influenza of 1918. Reading it, I saw several similarities between 1918 and our pandemic in 2020. Let’s take a look and compare the two. First of all, we now have much more advanced medical tools, doctors and nurses, equipment and knowledge now than were available in 1918.

In the spring of 1918, not long after the United States entered the Great War that we now know as World War I. The United States had no active army; therefore, young men were sent to places like Camp Funston, a training camp attached to Fort Riley, Kansas. One of the recruits developed what was diagnosed as The Flu, sent to bed, but later died. The symptoms of chills, fever, and fatigue spread but most patients recovered rather rapidly. The recruits were sent to other training camps to prepare for the war in Europe. From September to November the second wave of the virus was far more deadly as it primarily hit cities. The medical world was overwhelmed. Does this begin to sound familiar?

Drug stores advertised numerous remedies, most based on alcohol and did little to counter the epidemic. News reports this year have noted an increase in the sale of beer and liquor.

In October 1918, 200,000 Americans died. There were no vaccines, no cures. Everyone was told to follow protective measures by wearing masks to cover faces, wash hands frequently, and avoid crowds. No spitting on sidewalks or in public. Movie theaters, churches, schools, restaurants, and other gathering places closed their doors. Women’s clubs stopped meetings. The State Fair of Texas canceled. The word was that the site was converted to a training field, but now the State Fair of Texas is closed this year. The grounds have always been a source of crowds of people during fair time. However, Dallas did decide to hold a Liberty Loan Parade that caused flu cases to increase exponentially in a few weeks.

While all of this was occurring, military personnel continued training and crossing the Atlantic to fight. The disease spread to all parts of the war. Some historians believe that the loss of soldiers on both sides, may have ended the war when it did.

One shortage in 1918 was lack of coffins, especially in cities. We saw that on television early in this pandemic. Funerals were limited to close family members and could last only fifteen minutes.

Many believed that rural areas did not suffer like city dwellers. However, the truth was that rural residents often could not afford to see a doctor, their records were terrible, and the dead were often buried at home.

One of the most poignant stories that I have heard happened here in Greenville at Burleson College. The epidemic spread like wildfire on college campuses. A young woman rooming at the girl’s dormitory did not catch the disease immediately and began caring for others. It is supposed she saved several lives before contracting the disease and dying quickly.

By the spring of 1919, the war was over and the flu, then called Spanish Influenza, stopped almost as quickly as it began. Yet, for many years, when someone had flu symptoms, they would be isolated, the whole community alerted, yet no one pursued a cure for many years. Maybe we’ll get a cure this go around.

Several years ago, I was asked why Majors Field was not named in honor of two young men from Celeste who died at Pearl Harbor in the early morning of December 7, 1941. At the time I had no idea, but assumed it was because Truett Majors was a Greenville native. Just recently I found the right answer.

Aviation was first used in World War I. It was a hazardous adventure for pilots. In the space between the two wars, especially during the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was encouraged to expand aviation. A large contingency in the United States were strongly opposed and favored isolationism, even though the horrors created by Adolph Hitler beginning in the mid 1930s were well known around the world.

Senator John Morris Sheppard was chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. His insistence on expansion of both Selective Service and U. S. Army Air Corps would prove to be vital during World War II. Senator Sheppard died of a stroke in May 1941. His doctor believed it was the strain and pressure he received with the threat of war. When the 800-acre airfield in Wichita Falls was dedicated, Army Air Corps officials broke the tradition of naming fields in honor of pilots killed in action. Sheppard Airfield was the only war field named for a civilian.

Majors Field in Greenville was one of 149 basic training areas built in Texas in 1941. With the support of Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House of Representative, and member of the House from this area of Texas, Greenville received news that it would be one of the 149. At that time, the names of airfields were of course very secretive. There were numerical codes for military connections and local names for citizens to use in referring to the base.

The official codes were destroyed with other records when the base closed in 1945. However, Greenville Chamber of Commerce chose to give the civilian name to Lt. Truett Majors. Majors came from a well-respected family. His father was minister of the Baptist Church and a brother was also in the Army Air Corps. I interviewed a younger sister many years later. She was a delightful lady, but vaguely remembered Lt. Majors.

After receiving his wings, Majors was assigned to an airfield outside Manila in the Philippines. In November, he developed appendicitis; surgery was necessary. He wrote his mother around Thanksgiving to say he was recuperating but was not allowed in a plane until he was completely recovered from the surgery. He had been assigned to an anti-aircraft unit as a gunner.

Due to the time changes, Americans in the Far East heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor as soon as Americans did in the U. S. Immediately American forces in Manila and other posts went into combat mode. Lt. Majors died, not in his well-loved aircraft, but on the ground with an anti-aircraft gun, on December 8, 1941.

At this time, townsmen decided without a doubt, that the airfield south of Greenville would be known to the public as Majors Field.

Texas is well-known for its Blackland Prairies, a swath of black, gummy, clay that runs like a tornado from counties adjacent to the Red River southwesterly to beyond Austin. When early settlers from Mississippi and Alabama saw the rich Eco-Region, they were thrilled. Blackland grows great cotton. There was one difference between the Texas Blackland Prairie and that in their home states. Where were the rivers? Yes, there is the Red River, and the headwaters of the Sabine, the Brazos and the Trinity, none of which are navigable this far north. Like all agricultural endeavors, cotton needs not only good soil, moisture, and sun, but the farmer has to have a market so sell his product. To get to that market, it was much easier, quicker, and cheaper to float the bales downriver. There were no rivers deep enough above Falls of the Brazos. Freighting it to Jefferson and shipping down the Sabine to Galveston was an option. That worked if you had sons to do the work. It usually took almost a month.

Railroads were very practical means of transportation. But the only railroad in Antebellum Texas was a short line around Houston. During the Civil War, planters in Arkansas piled bales of cotton in wagons and sent long lines through Texas to the Rio Grande where the cotton bales were unloaded on the Mexico side, then loaded onto British ships in exchange for food, liquor, and medicine for Confederates. It would be late 1870s and early 1880s before rail transportation became available in the state of Texas.

Once railroads were up and running, cotton gins sprouted up on every rural crossroad. Life was good again in Northeast Texas, except for one thing. Railroad lines, such as the Katy in north Texas, charged enormous fees and were not found everywhere like streets and roads are today.

The Katy came into Texas through what is now Denison and ran southeasterly through Greenville. It was October 2, 1880 that the train made its first appearance to a great celebration. Farmers knew of the arrival and planted cotton earlier in the spring. Now cotton and railroads were connected.

Every fall, wagons were lined up at the gins, baled cotton was for sale on the courthouse square, furnishing merchants recouped part of the farmers debts. Cotton sold in Greenville was taken to the compress to be squeezed into tighter bales before they were loaded on trains for Galveston and shipment to Europe. Who paid for this? Most of the time the fee funneled down to the farmer.

The Katy had the round house in Greenville and the county had two attorneys and a judge on their side. Numerous lawsuits were filed at the Hunt County Courthouse in Greenville. One is worth telling. A farmer had taken his cotton to the gin and on returning home, he smelled smoke and discovered his load was on fire or smoldering as cotton does. Approaching a railroad track, he drove over it, stopped his mule to jump off, sent the mule and wagon on. This didn’t work out as he planned. He broke his leg, the mule wandered off, and the wagon with cotton slowly burned.

But, aha, there was another chance to make some money. He visited one of the attorneys, filed a claim against the Katy and won. A little later, the Greenville roundhouse burned to the ground. At that point, the Katy owners decided to teach the attorneys and judge a lesson. They left the remains of the burned roundhouse and built a new one a Denison, a much more friendly railroad town.