Dobbs Valley

Dobbs Valley Detour

If you go north on Hwy 281 from I-20, like you’re going to Mineral Wells, you’ll cross over the beautiful steel-girded Brazos River Bridge. Then on your right veer slowly onto two-lane Dobbs Valley Road. If you take out an old map, you’re in Dobbs Valley already. Palo Pinto County got its money’s worth from the Brazos River, it twisting and turning more than a decapitated water moccasin – eager to please.

Chesley S. Dobbs was scalped here in 1872. Here’s a link to the whole horrific story. http://www.forttours.com/pages/dobbs.asp. This valley rightly bears his name. Some say this valley was settled partly because the mountains to the north broke the cold winter wind. The soil appears to be good. The Brazos flows strong and constant through the middle. There are mature pecan witness trees in the bottoms. Anglos came here fleeing the Civil War, Northern soldiers “burned their homes, killed their stock and took what they could.”

Just off Hwy. 281 you come to Dobbs Valley Baptist Church, established in 1886 according to the sign, a tabernacle to its left, the Dobbs Valley Cemetery to its right. The well-kept church and cemetery are still very much in business. There are Dobbs (including Chesley), Gilberts, Inces, Chestnuts, Hoppers, Whartons, and many other names from the surrounding community here. There’s a list of the residents of this cemetery at along with a cool photo of Chesley Dobbs’ tomb: http://www.landrethcemetery.org/dobbsvalley/list.html.

The asphalt road turns to gravel, then dirt, climbing then falling to creek branches and high ridges over and over. Before long, if you’ll study the left side of the road you’ll see the Goen Cemetery, still muddy from the snow the day I went. Get out and walk around. There’s an old chimney just beyond, same side of the road.

The Goen Cemetery is full of Goens, as one might expect. The place dates back to 1893. Several of the graves are meticulously “paved” with stark red bricks laid in gentle arching quilts…perhaps the family worked at the Bennett Acme Brick plant up the road. The masonry is beautiful, however it came to be there. Capt. Robert W. Goen, Jr. circled our recent Tabernacle trail back to B-17s, he falling in battle in 1944 near Piraeus, Greece “while flying his fiftieth mission”, a too-young-to-die 23-years-old.

Ellen Campbell wrote in the Palo Pinto County History Book that “Grandmother Mary Goen told how the Indians made their raids, how they would gather at one house when they thought the Indians were going to raid. When they would go to church at Soda Springs, across the river, the men would take their guns, because they didn’t know when they might run into Indians. She told of a Millsaps girl just barely getting into the house when the Indians shot an arrow and it pinned her dress to the wall.”

I almost want to tell folks to stop right after they pull off 65 MPH roads for these detours. You’ve got to drive slow and it’s tough after fighting traffic getting here. Look left and right. You’ll likely see things I didn’t. Old roads tend to be like crotchety old mules. They don’t do anything without a damned good reason. If a road suddenly makes a hard left or right turn, there was probably a homestead there at one time. If it crosses a creek in an unusual way, there’s a reason for that too. Enough said.

Just past one bridge there’s a neatly-hewn cut-rock wall on the south side. I’d put this forgotten rock mason’s craftsmanship up against any of the multi-million dollar show homes in Aledo. There’s not enough wall left for me to more than guess – a school, church, a nice house? Right by the creek, I tend to think school. The wall sits behind a game fence, at least still able to provoke further study.

There was a Red Bluff school in Dobbs Valley on the old Benton Hatlfield place. I don’t know where that is. The Red Bluff School was later moved. Again, no idea where it ended up. Feel free to teach me about this.

Near the end of this road, on the left, the north I’d say, there’s a hollow brown rock building’s walls which on first glance looks like an abandoned schoolhouse. Also just past a bridge. Windows spaced evenly, symmetrical architecture. As my zoom lens stretches long I notice a cross made from rocks cemented into the front face of the wall, so a church or a church school, perhaps. It feels 1920s or 1930s, but I have no clue. There was no one around to ask.

This road crosses over into Parker County just before it hits the Bennett Road, another peaceful sojourn if you have the time.

I guess I skipped telling about the old farm house. Not that old, 1930s I’d guess. Sitting empty, behind a big long fence, behind a big red and white For Sale sign. Though the old home is different in design and karma and location and almost everything else, it reminds me of my Brown County Clark Family grandparents’ place. I don’t know why. The house I’m looking at was probably nailed together by whoever lived there. I suspect through the years they invested the money they saved in other ways. That might explain the long fence. I suspect grandparents lived here too.

There are more photos in the Palo Pinto Photo File. If you get down Dobbs Valley way, and aren’t in a hurry, I recommend it as a short detour. Today was my first time, so I’m sure I missed much of what’s out there. If anyone knows where Red Bluff was, or what stone wall was, or the church-like building skelteton was (you get the point), I’d appreciate your help.

Anthony Bascilli

Anthony Bascilli

What’s Next is Coming

Thurber miner Anthony Bascilli’s rugged wooden cross has fallen to the ground at Thurber Cemetery, a victim of old age. It stood over six feet, one of the more notable landmarks on Graveyard Hill. By the time you read this, God-willing, it will have been repaired. It will again be standing.

Bascilli may have worked the mines as late as 1926. After that, he probably did odd jobs around Thurber while the place was shutting down. He was Hungarian.

Anthony Bascilli was a man who thought things through. Four mortared brick walls line the six foot deep insides of his grave, from ground level to buried floor of casket. Like an elevator shaft. These Thurber bricks were laid by Luigi “Gi Gi” Biondini and his son Johnny. Bascilli’s casket was also made by Gi Gi. Mr. Bascilli slept alive in the wooden coffin before being buried in it later. Eternity is a long time. One wants to be comfortable.

Bascilli instructed that two steel doors be placed over his casket with several feet of dirt separating the two. This was carried out. He then wanted a key to the casket to be dropped down a vent or air pipe to his casket. This pipe was also indeed installed at his request. The key is available to him.

The year 1927 is etched into the front of the wooden cross, though this is thought to be the year of construction, not the later 1932 year of his death from pneumonia at age 77 according to Church records. The large square piece of sheet metal visible on the cross was to frame the photograph of Bascilli’s friend Louis Piontek. A practical joke, one has to believe.

Gino Solignanni says Bascilli sometimes got drunk and would walk down the Back Road to Thurber (going north to 108 out of Thurber, first road east) and every couple hundred yards set off a half stick of dynamite. There couldn’t have been more than two or three blasts. There’s only about a half mile stretch where no houses then were.

Ka-boom.

Palo Pinto County backroads guard many stories of strange burial practices – phone lines to coffins, glass-topped see-into caskets and some other richer stories best not told in polite society. Though life was said to be cheap back then, apparently what happened next was very much on these folks’ minds.

Bascilli left directions that a new suit and new shoes be folded inside the foot of his casket. When it was time to rise from his grave as the Bible promised, he wanted to look good. With the doors and keys and brick-lined hole, the man wanted a head start.

Anthony Bascilli’s grave makes me smile when I walk past. He believed certain things a little outside the norm and he had the courage to act. Visibly, out loud, the hell with what people might think. More importantly, it appears the man kept his sense of humor in a time when life was hard.

And getting harder by the day.

He was waiting for something. Or someone. But he was ready to make the first three moves. He wasn’t afraid to give the destiny he hoped for a little nudge to move it along. Whether he was born like that or first circled around life or books or whatever, I don’t know. But he got there by the end.

Words from the past, for the future.

Caddo, Texas

Loop 252

Caddo, Texas

I’ve been bouncing across a too-rough-for-little-cars gravel road for over an hour, its rocks sharpened daggers, listening for the inevitable flat tire. I’m deposited on the southern shore of Highway 180, on the southern edge of Caddo. Caddo the town, in Stephens County. If Texas & Pacific Oil’s Hohhertz Camp was behind me on that silent sojourn, I didn’t see it. It didn’t flag me down.

I have an hour to kill, my next appointment not til 3. I drive around Caddo.

Lots was here.

Little today.

This 1870s Anglo settlement is said to be on the site of a Caddo Indian camp. When the oil boom hit around 1916, the population swelled to over 1,000. Some say more.

I spy an old wooden tabernacle being reclaimed by the woods. Like always, I stop to hear what it has to say. Its shadows hide several hundred yards away from the freshly-painted Caddo church. I’m not sure if the church is open or closed. The tabernacle is closed. Is in its final moments.

The Caddo Cemetery to the north is immaculate, ironic among the left-without-saying-goodbye of this town. Or fitting, carefully maintaining what’s already gone, at least on this earth.

Loop 252 cuts through Caddo, two digits shy of an ever-diminishing second chance. The old bridge betrays Bankhead heritage, bricks probably sleeping beneath this asphalt.

Highway 80 bypasses where downtown Caddo used to be. Or still is, I get confused. This road gets some traffic, but no one’s moving out there to set up shop. No one gets it.

Traffic.

Second chances.

Even the proud Caddo Mercantile at the westbound Y junction of Loop and Bypass is closed, is for sale, after many bites at the apple.

Buildings here were once nailed together hastily in wood plank. Tents were pitched. Tomorrow would take care of itself.

There are a few nice homes sprinkled still – less than ten. Scattered mobile homes, well, doing what mobile homes tend to. These streets, the few nature’s not reclaimed, host once proud structures that have fallen to their knees, then given up their fight to the ground into which they rot.

Others should’ve been bulldozed, before this decay gained momentum. I have to believe someone said something. Once.

Whatever happened or failed to happen, few are here to see the result this day. Folks like me swing through, attracted to the poignant ghost stories digital photos can unspool onto our computers.

The post office is open, its lone employee parked out front.

Most driveways are empty. Folks at work. Others never coming home.

Cars whiz past as I pull back onto Highway 80. Traffic turns to the state park to the north. To Ranger going south. There was a time this traffic could’ve stoked some commerce, some jobs. But like the proud Caddo Native people, oil moved on. People moved away. Those left behind failed to adjust. Failed their future.

We are one quiet chapter from the end. It’s time to go.

Bankhead Hwy Map up Wiles Canyon

The Prayer

I sat in the pew behind them, a quiet couple, he balding, she well-made up, hair coiffed, both dressed nice, many decades between them.

The sermon was about new beginnings, this the first Sunday of the year.

Let go of the past. Act in faith. Move forward.

Move on.

The winter wind strengthened outside the little country church. Cold, so cold, the sub-freezing January morning rankled the lonely heart left behind. Sit in a sanctuary. Come inside for a moment. Try to leave the Cold Alone outside.

During the rambling homily the preacher said, “Everyone needs someone,” a toss toward God or friends, family, perhaps one’s exiled self, I suppose.

Everyone needs someone.

The crisply-dressed nice older woman touched wrinkled fingertips to her husband’s tweed suit coat, touched him gently, just them, just then, she thankful for the man who’d sit beside her in church. Fingertips her silent I love you. A delicate silver diamond antique wedding ring shone back at me, twinkled a midnight lighthouse from the row just in front.

This once-was rural county has been a hard place from the very beginning, a confusing place, how some treat others. The preacher prayed, slowly, “Lord, help us begin anew. Lord, let us have a fresh start.”

Lord, hear this man’s prayer.

“I feel moved to pray one more time,” he said, after another song. It brought him back on stage. Eyes down, the congregation heard his question, “If there’s anyone who would like to let something go, get past it, raise your hand. I won’t address you or draw you out, but I want to pray for you.” Several hands went up, judging by his solemn “Thank you,” then “Yes, thank you, sir”. “Thank you too.”

I saw the weathered hand go up, just for a glimmer second, then come quickly down, this man’s wife who loves him as best friend, her life’s mate.

That’s how it looked to me.

What past misty chapter could she have to let go of? They prayed hard, the husband looking down at his bittersweet wife, eyes full of sadness or love or wanting to take whatever burden it was from her.

It hit me at the time. It hits me now, the day-to-day miracles that God plants in this desert to find, if we will but look.

This county was settled by husbands and wives – least those are the historical stories that echo ‘round  my quiet now. Sanches, Mansker, Flannigan, et al.

That husband and that wife were what needed to be seen this morning – a prayer placed where it needed to be.

Blessings accrue to those who never give up. Perfect, no, rocky sometimes, but together faithful to whatever they two set out to do. Whatever comes.

Act in faith.

Don’t lose your nerve. Three.

“Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not;

See, I am doing something new!

Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

In the desert I make a way, in the wasteland, rivers.” Isaiah 43: 19

Buggy Horse Story

Buggy Horse Story

I Hope to Meet Him Soon 

Snippets slide past my boat nearly every day. Too many to chase after.

So call this a breadcrumb. Maybe the answer will come following up this trail one day.

This happened before 1906, maybe in late 1800s. Up along Hohertz Road, between Strawn and Necessity. I’m pretty sure it’s true.

A lady wanted to catch her buggy horse so she could go to town. It was running with the neighbor’s horse, playing, carrying on as horses will. The lady was in a hurry. Or not used to waiting. She pulled out a shotgun, shot the neighbor’s horse dead.

She had places to be.

The lady hitched her now friendless horse to the buggy and went on her way. I’m sure her horse knew better than to do that again.

Later that day, the lady’s neighbor returned home and found his horse dead. He figured out what must’ve happened. This neighbor man marched out into the woods, found the impatient lady’s husband in the field dressing hogs. I like to think he was happy, out there alone, not bothering anybody.

Her husband was a man who wasn’t lucky.

The aggrieved neighbor shot her husband dead. The man didn’t know his wife had even done that. He didn’t know what she had done. Cost him his life, it did.

This dead husband man is buried out on that hillside still, I’m told, behind a cable fence, overgrown with weeds and mesquite.

At least it’s over.

I hope to meet him, soon.

Dr. Jackson Evans Brings 1872 Medicine to Eastland County

Dr. Jackson Evans brings 1872

medicine to Eastland County

            We left the pavement seven miles ago. The time machine dial rolls backwards – 2008, 1941, 1917, stopping at 1872. We’re bouncing, twisting and turning through Eastland County’s vast Palo Pinto Mountains. Rutted roads turn to dim trails, then finally to expectant footsteps. My guides this day are good people. They made a pact with the landowner on my behalf to preserve the secrecy of Evans Cemetery’s location. Let me save you some time. There is one publicly-available set of directions, but they’re wrong. Bad wrong. Really.

Jackson Evans was the first physician to permanently settle in Eastland County. He was recruited by the citizens of the Palo Pinto District in 1872, which then included Eastland County. Their next nearest doctor was in Stephenville.

I try to imagine what this rough country looked like back then. Take away the mesquites, most of the cedar. The Evans came to this ridge March 10, 1872, after a short stay at the Allen Fort, a mile down the hill from here. Why did they pick this hidden mountaintop? Comanches would terrorize these hills for three more years.

We reach the final clearing, surrounded by cedar and majestic oak. The original arch-topped iron fence surrounds the Evans Family’s final resting place, maybe forty feet square.

Bessie Hill, the Evans older daughter, died first in 1894. Her grave is the center anchor to this cemetery, covered with knee high crepe myrtles. This plot was overgrown for many years, but the invading trees and brush (and rattlesnakes) have been cleared. Good people.

Dr. Evans reports that 1870s Eastland County “was a paradise for hunters, when I came here – cougar, bear, deer, and turkey in abundance. I killed all I needed for family use, while out visiting the sick. One day, just one mile from where I now live, a party of men (of which I was a member) killed four bear, while another party in hearing of us killed two more. Many jokes were perpetrated on Eastland County in those days,” continues Dr. Evans. “I heard a traveler, who was passing along the road near my house, say, ‘I would not have this county and one dollar’. We little thought then how valuable this shinery was.”

Jackson Evans was sent to school at the University in Oxford, Mississippi to study for the ministry by a childless aunt. He apparently didn’t feel God’s ‘calling’, switching to medicine. He finished up at Tulane in New Orleans. Dr. Evans tended the sick and wounded during the War of Northern Aggression (Civil War).

Mrs. George Langston’s “History of Eastland County, Texas” reports that one of Dr. Evans’ first calls in Eastland County was to a very sick woman. She’d been stricken with fever for three weeks, outside a doctor’s care. “It is to Dr. Evans’ credit that she was soon convalescent,” Langston writes. “The territory covered by this first doctor reminds one of the extent of the pioneer ‘circuit rider.’ From the North Fork of Palo Pinto Creek to Desdemona, and from Barton’s Creek in Erath County to the limits of civilization in Eastland were the bounds of his calls.”

He covered a huge swath of wilderness on horseback, then by buckboard driven by his daughter Alice. His saddlebags were fitted to hold glass vials of medicine. Dirt poor settlers might pay Dr. Evans in chickens or pigs, or not at all. A small fortune in uncollected fees remained on the books when he died thirty years later.

The time machine has been kind to these woods. The trees were thinner back then, more brush, taller grass, more “shinery”. Some sounds stuck with this land – wild hogs, fawns running through the thickets, rattlesnakes. Today, thankfully, no Comanche war cries.

Dr. Evans wife Maria presents an even bigger mystery. She married Jackson in 1863 at her father’s plantation in Sumpter Hill, Alabama. She is the grand daughter of Revolutionary War Generals Pickens and Anderson. Jackson met Maria while she was teaching at a girl’s seminary established by her father in Meridian, Mississippi. Maria was raised on another plantation in Pendleton, South Carolina and was well-educated. Plantation life did not follow Maria to this savage corner of Texas.

The second Evans daughter, Alice, wrote that “mother was often left alone with us three small children, often at night and through the long days, but she was always so cheerful and brave, we never knew that danger might be lurking near…Her life here, reminds one of the missionary in a far country, as she cared for all who came and sought the Doctor's care and in her Christian faith and integrity, had an uplifting influence on all with whom she came in contact.”

The old wagon road to their house left the main road between Blair’s Fort (later Desdemona) and North Fork (later Strawn), tracing the slope of a creek as it climbed over a hundred feet in elevation to their corral.

We retrace our steps. Across a small meadow, a stacked rock chimney peeks out of the dense brush, the crown of the original Evans log cabin, over twenty-five feet in the air. Cabin logs lie rotting in the brush.

Dr. Evans grasped the sacrifices his family made. “My three children were then very small, but I had often to leave them and their mother alone when there was danger of Indians. We stopped near a cow-ranch for protection – as there was no town in the county – and we are still at our old stand with all the practice I can do.”

Dr. Evans’ land holdings exceeded 2,000 acres at one point. The family raised cattle and horses. “They planted one of the first orchards in the county, and Maria dried peaches, apricots, and apples for use during the winter,” a granddaughter tells us. “Deer, turkey, bear and an occasional piece of buffalo meat brought by a passing hunter were diet staples. Such luxury items as coffee, sugar and wheat flour were scarce because supplies had to be hauled from Waco or Fort Worth. My grandmother recalls that her father received a box of medicines from Stephenville which arrived before Christmas with some red stick candy and a note saying ‘for the children, from Dr. West’.”

Mrs. Evans raised the children, nursed her husband’s patients, ran the kitchen, and educated her children. She later taught at the first school located at the Allen Fort.

Alice breaks the code on her mom. “As the wife of a pioneer physician, it was not an easy life…the sick would often come and stay for days. No one was ever turned away.”

            It’s time to leave. There’s a light wind in the trees. The smell of cedar. There are no sirens, car horns, pump jacks or airplanes. We are standing in true wilderness, at the front door of a family that helped birth Eastland County. Dr. and Mrs. Evans were partners, both born in 1837, both passing in 1908. The word “hero” gets thrown around a lot by historians. These folks are. I’m glad they are out here, in this wild country, today much as they found it. May this family’s hallowed cemetery, and the fabled land they once roamed, forever rest in peace.

            This story is excerpted from the book “Tabernacle – The Back Road to Alameda and Cheaney,” by Jeff Clark (774 pgs plus notes, $24.95 + postage, jdclark3312@aol.com). Special thanks to Alice Evans Allen, Ed Allcorn, Kenneth and Jean Underhill, Lynn Nicholson, Shirley Cawyer, Virginia Allen Pickrell, Mitch Fincher, Mrs. George Langston’s 1904 “History of Eastland County, Texas”, the red “Gateway to the West” Eastland County History, Rosalie Daniel, Ann Clark, Annagrace Fincher, Septima Anderson Fincher, Wanda Frasier and the landowners that provided access to this important site.

SUGGESTED CAPTIONS

1.                  Dr. Jackson Evans, first doctor in Eastland County.

2.                  Evans Homestead chimney peaking through the brush.

3.                  The Evans Cemetery.

4.                  Dr. and Mrs. Evans headstone, both born in 1837, both passing in 1908.