Authentic Texas Winter 2019

O N IE MTME IXGA RS A T I M O AN N IY S FS AU CE E S W I N T E R E DI T I O N

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TE X A S

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D E STIN AT ION S

CANADIAN’S MALOUF

WENDS IN GIDDINGS

& THERESE ABRAHAM:

ASIA IN GRAND PRAIRIE

A R T, H E R I TA G E ,

COSTUMES OF

COMMUNITY

THE AMERICAS

Japanese Heritage, Texas Treasure M A P

F EAT U RE

WHERE DO TEXANS COME FROM?

C I T Y

LIGH TS

HOUSTON’S GANDHI DISTRICT

TR AIL

D R IVE

LONE STAR IRISH HERITAGE

BUILD IN G BR ID GE S

from the past to the present, architect KARL KOMATSU

brings a fresh perspective to Texas preservation

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Welcome to Authentic Texas 2.0

ne evening in l ate August, a cadre of creatives gathered to coalesce around a new vision for Authentic Texas at a screened-in porch table at Perini Ranch steakhouse in Buffalo Gap. As the publisher/CEO, managing editor and design director awaited a sunset breeze to cool the balmy end-of-day summer heat, spirits ran high.

This get-together marked the beginning of a fundamental change in the direction and future of this publication.

Starting in 2016 as a small quarterly published by the Texas Heritage Trails, LLC, a coalition of seven nonprofit Heritage Trail Regions across the state, the magazine had always outsourced its design, editing, and advertising sales even as it grew its readership, revenue, and recognition. A volunteer board of managers worked in tandem with seven heritage trail directors to manage the business model of the publication, which was founded to support the Texas Heritage Trails statewide.

After four years Authentic Texas has taken off as one of the state’s most recognized periodicals, resonating with travelers and history buffs captivated by its glossy approach to showcasing the state’s culture and heritage.

To build on this success, after careful deliberation the LLC’s volunteer board of managers voted to create a request for proposals and hire its own internal creative team.

Margaret Hoogstra will step up from her interim leadership role to CEO and publisher, guiding Authentic Texas into its new future and identifying new ways to grow the brand’s reach. For the past fifteen years Margaret, a longtime Texan, has served as executive director of the Texas Forts Trails Region, overseeing a heritage tourism program throughout a 29-county region of Central West Texas. For six of those years she has had for a dual role, functioning as interim CEO of the LLC as well. In addition to her wealth of experience in heritage tourism, she brings a background in advertising, marketing, and publications in a higher education setting. As of this fall she is focusing solely on Authentic Texas and the Heritage Trails LLC. Serving as managing editor is Dr. Barbara Brannon, whose long career in editing and publishing has embraced periodicals, newsletters, websites, and general and scholarly books. As executive director of the Texas Plains Trail Region from 2012 to 2019, Barbara promoted heritage tourism in a 52-county region and has published the popular “Tales from the Trail” blog. A native of Georgia who got to Texas as quick as she could, she formerly held positions with Texas Tech University Press and the University of South Carolina Press, and headed up the award-winning Publishing Laboratory at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington.

National award–winning designer Troy Myatt of Dallas steps up as design director. Troy’s work has garnered recognition from the American Advertising Federation, Print Magazine, and the Society of Publication Designers. In collaboration with senior art director Steven Lyons, Troy brings a unique leisure communications perspective to Authentic Texas, having [continued on pg 6] WINTER 2019

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Texas Heritage Trail Regions The Texas Heritage Trails program is based on 10 scenic driving trails created in 1968 by Gov. John Connally and the Texas Highway Department (now the Texas Department of Transportation) as a tool for visitors to explore the Lone Star State. The trails were established in conjunction with HemisFair, an international expo that commemorated the 250th anniversary of the founding of San Antonio.

In 1997, the State Legislature charged the Texas Historical Commission with creating a statewide heritage tourism program.

The THC responded with a program based on local, regional and state partnerships, centered on the 10 driving trails. Today, each trail region is a nonprofit organization governed by a regional board of directors that supports educational and preservation efforts and facilitates community development through heritage tourism.

PLAINS TRAIL TexasPlainsTrail.com

PECOS TRAIL TexasPecosTrail.com

LAKES TRAIL TexasLakesTrail.com

MOUNTAIN TRAIL TexasMountainTrail.com

FORTS TRAIL TexasFortsTrail.com

FOREST TRAIL TexasForestTrail.com

HILL COUNTRY TRAIL TxHillCountryTrail.com

TROPICAL TRAIL TexasTropicalTrail.com

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BRAZOS TRAIL TexasBrazosTrail.com

INDEPENDENCE TRAIL TexasIndependenceTrail.com

[continued from pg 3] managed the creative direction for American Airlines’ specialty magazine division and the Fort Worth Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Jim Stone will serve as advertising director. Jim knows Texas magazine advertising, having served as the sales development director for Texas Monthly for seventeen years, and one of his current clients is Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine. He has also formerly handled advertising for Southwest Airlines’ in-flight magazine.

Making history come alive has fueled the growth of Authentic Texas, and with this new team, it will be exciting to see where their creativity and expertise will take the project.

Speaking of preserving history, effective September 1, by direction of the Texas Legislature oversight of six Texas Parks & Wildlife Department sites was transferred to the Texas Historical Commission, our parent agency. Fanthorp Inn (Anderson), Lipantitlan (Nueces County), Monument Hill and Kreische Brewery (LaGrange), Port Isabel Lighthouse, San Jacinto Battleground, and Washingtonon-the-Brazos will now come under our common umbrella, and we look forward to bringing you their stories in these pages in due time.

Finally, Authentic Texas would like to welcome our newest editorial partner, the Texas Downtown Association. Read their story of how the Central Texas city of Seguin is using history to revitalize its downtown (page 95).

Ride along with us on this new path for our publication. We hope you’ll enjoy the journey.

Kay Ellington LLC Manager, Texas Plains Trail Region; Publisher, The Texas Spur

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FEATURES

All images of Karl Komatsu captured by photographer Jovelyn Roden

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Award-winning Fort Worth architect Karl Komatsu represents the third generation of his Japanese family to live and work in the American West. His talents have helped transform the built environment of the Lone Star State.

Beginning in 1968 as the Texas Pavilion of HemisFair ’68, the first international exposition to take place in the U.S. Southwest, the Institute of Texan Cultures welcomes visitors today, exploring what makes us Texan.

It immigrated to the U.S. in the nineteenth century from the Russian steppes. By the 1930s it had become immortalized in a Gene Autry song as a symbol of Texas and the West. Meet the humble, tumbling tumbleweed.

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DEPARTMENTS LOCAL

LIFE

Texas icon

Trail Drives

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The Pluck of the Irish

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Journey to Boerne

The Dutch Oven What would a Texas chuck wagon cookoff be without it? Plus a terrific cobbler recipe

yonder

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Norwegian Clifton In the Norwegian Capital of Texas, Olaf’s restaurant is the new hot spot

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The Wends of Texas

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Polish Panna Maria

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Menard’s Ditch Walk

From Dublin to Shamrock and beyond, follow the green across the Lone Star State

TEXAS HISTORICAL COMMISSION

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German and Czech Life in Fayette County Fayette County, Texas, is the place to dance a polka, down a brew, and discover courthouse and churches

Col. Bettie Edmonds chronicled the story of German immigrants in 1999; it’s abridged here

texas originaLS Deep in the art

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Descendants of arrivals on the Ben Nevis populate Giddings today

Art and the Abrahams Dr. Malouf Abraham’s Lebanese forebears brought threads to this corner of Texas. He brought art

The oldest Polish parish in America opens a new heritage center Remnants of an 18th-century irrigation project invite exploration

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Costumes of the Americas Museum In the Texas southmost city of Brownsville, a colorful collection grew out of the Pan American Union

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Dallas’ Crow Collection

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Nazareth Christmas Pageant

city lights

Eats & Drinks

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Houston’s Little India Enjoy dining, strolling, and shopping in the city’s vibrant Mahatma Gandhi District

Grand Prairie The Loh family of Asia Times Square brings Far East culture and cuisine to this North Texas city

80 John Wallace Born to enslaved Africans, Daniel Webster Wallace soon sought a fortune in freedom

TEXAS STATE LIBRARY & ARCHIVES

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Texas History of Immigration The archive holds passports of Sam Houston and Emily West, land-sale broadsides, and immigrant photos

Green’s Sausage House Kolaches, smoked meats, and Texas fare with a Czech flair in Zabcikville

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Trammell and Margaret Crow gave their city an impressive array of Asian art

The Panhandle village of 300 with a strong German Catholic roots first created its nativity pageant in 1972

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LEGACY

Beehive Brothers Iranian-born Ali and Nariman Esfandiary serve up a mean chicken fried steak in Albany

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Seguin’s Main Street heritage Newcomers traveled to Seguin along the German Immigrant Trail in the 1840s and 1850s

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Founded by the Texas Heritage Trails LLC PUBLISHER Margaret Hoogstra Director@AuthenticTexas.com ADVERTISING Jim Stone Sales@AuthenticTexas.com MANAGING EDITOR Barbara Brannon Editor@AuthenticTexas.com DESIGN DIRECTOR Troy Myatt SENIOR ART DIRECTOR Steven Lyons

CONTRIBUTORS MEET SOME OF THE CONTENT CREATORS whose works appear in the Winter 2019 Authentic Texas. And if you have comments about the stories in this issue— or suggestions for a destination or theme you’d like to see in the future—email us at authentictexas@gmail.com. —The Editors

LARRY ZELISKO is a freelance writer/ photographer with forty years of experience reporting and editing with the Abilene Reporter-News.

CONTRIBUTORS T. Lindsay Baker, Valerie D. Bates, Mike Carlisle, Susan Floyd, Rob Hodges, Paige Key, Dee Lackey, Bob McCullough, Eric Miller, Andy Rhodes, Jennifer Sourdellia, Jim Steiert, Fran Walker, Marian Wiederhold, Larry Zelisko EDITORIAL BOARD Texas Brazos Trail Region Coleman Hampton, LLC Manager Andrea Barefield, Executive Director Texas Forts Trail Region Jeff Salmon, LLC Manager Tammie Virden, Executive Director Texas Lakes Trail Region Patty Bushart, LLC Manager Jill Campbell Jordan, Executive Director Texas Mountain Trail Region Randall Kinzie, LLC Manager Wendy Little, Executive Director Texas Pecos Trail Region Bill Simon, LLC Manager Melissa Hagins, Executive Director Texas Plains Trail Region Kay Ellington, LLC Manager Allison Kendrick, Executive Director Texas Tropical Trail Region Rick Stryker, LLC Manager Nancy Deviney, Executive Director

Texas Heritage Trails LLC 3702 Loop 322 Abilene, TX 79602 AuthenticTexas.com (325) 660-6774 Texas Heritage Trails LLC is owned and operated by seven nonprofit heritage trails organizations.

Texas Heritage Trails LLC member organizations are participants of the nationally award-winning Texas Heritage Trails Program of the Texas Historical Commission.

BOB M C CULLOUGH lives near Camp Verde and frequently contributes to regional and national magazines. He’s also communications director for Morgan’s Wonderland in San Antonio, the world’s first theme park designed with special-needs individuals of all ages in mind.

LORETA FULTON is a freelance writer in Abilene.

DEE LACKEY is a semi-retired journalist residing in San Angelo with her husband, Jerry. She has enjoyed communication careers at West Texas Rehabilitation Center, Angelo State University and San Angelo StandardTimes. The couple has four grown daughters and eight grandchildren.

JOVELYN RODEN is a portrait and product photographer serving the Dallas-Fort Worth area. She attended the Academy of Art in San Francisco for film and currently manages a longhorn ranch with her husband in Santo, Texas.

MARIAN WIEDERHOLD, docent at the Texas Wendish Heritage Museum, is a fifth-generation Wend whose great-great grandfather, George Kasper, immigrated to Texas on the Ben Nevis. His traveling trunk is featured in the Wendish Museum. Marian was baptized, confirmed, and married in St. Paul Lutheran Church, and in due time she intends to also be buried in St. Paul Cemetery.

With tumbleweed now in his writing credits, Amarillo-based ERIC MILLER knows he can say he is a native Texan.

DR. T. LINDSAY BAKER, retired as director of the W. K. Gordon Center for Industrial History of Texas, is the author of 21 books on Texas and the American West.

JIM STEIERT of Hereford is a longtime magazine and newspaper writer who grew up on a farm in Castro County between the communities of Hart and Nazareth. He wrote his first story on the Nazareth Christmas Pageant in 1973.

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W HER E T E X A NS COME FROM: IMMIGR A N T OR IGINS Among the population of Texas, the Institute of Texan Cultures educational materials identify 26 settlement groups. Here are a few touched on in this issue of Authentic Texas.

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Map illustration by Troy Myatt

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All photos and historic art are from the General Photographs Collection, UTSA Special Collections.

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L O N E S TA R B E G I N N I N G S “From the arrival of the first humans twelve thousand years ago in the area that is now the Panhandle,” wrote Randolph B. Campbell in his landmark history Gone to Texas in 2004, “the peopling of Texas by immigrants has never ceased.”

Campbell’s volume hasn’t ceased in print since its initial publication, either, largely because the lens of how dozens of distinct arrival groups clashed and combined over the centuries to mold the state has proved a fruitful way of telling the Texas story.

In the twenty-first century, immigration has become a hot-button issue. National and international fervors run high on the topics of political refugees, exiles, evacuees, fortune seekers, freedom fighters, fugitives, undocumented aliens. Yet Texans have been all of these, always. Our state, with its multitudinous talents and treasures, draws from a deep well of mingled waters.

The aboriginal Paleo-Indians came here from afar, as did the Spanish conquistadors, German farmers, enslaved Africans, Middle Eastern merchants, Chinese rail laborers, Wendish Christians, the Irish, the Jews, the Swedes, the East Indians, the Polish, the Japanese, the Scots, the Laos— to name but a few discrete populations whose legacies continue to enrich our shared land.

The Institute of Texan Cultures, established in 1968 as part of the HemisFair international exposition in San Antonio, celebrates these varied groups. (Read about the institute in depth, on page 48.) It’s a terrific starting point for gaining a thoughtful and nuanced appreciation for what each has contributed to the larger picture of Texas.

So, we hope, is this issue of Authentic Texas Magazine.

In it, we’re borrowing that lens from Professor Campbell and passing it over the vast geography of the Lone Star State. We’re looking at places that fascinate visitors through the customs, costumes, and cuisine they preserve. At the Texas Folklife Festival, held each June at the ITC, more than forty world cultures are represented. But it’s possible yearround to travel to communities in every corner of the state that embody the lifeways of these cultures, and tell their stories. We’ve highlighted more than a dozen of them for you, just as starting points. —The Editors

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TROY MYATT/DESIGN DIRECTOR/TAMARACK AGENCY

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F e at u r e s

Cooking on the Texas Frontier with the official state cooking implement, the dutch oven

Skol! Enjoy a day of art appreciation and an evening of local fare in Clifton, Texas’s Norwegian capital

Sip, dine, shop, and sample sweets in the Hillcroft suburb of Houston’s Mahatma Ghandi District

Grand Prairie lights up the Lunar New Year night at the Loh family’s Asia Times Square WINTER 2019

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The

Dutch Oven Cooking on the Texas Frontier

by Tammie Virden

Photo: ©iStockphoto.com | ktmoffitt

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f you’ve ever lifted the heavy iron lid on this implement and experienced the divine aromas emanating from beneath it, you know what we’re talking about: the Dutch oven.

Ubiquitous vessel of early settlers, Spanish explorers, ranchers, chuck wagon ”cookies,” cowhands, and Boy and Girl Scouts, it’s a must-have for anyone who’s spent time camping or living outdoors for any length of time.

So central to life in the Lone Star State is this lidded receptacle, in fact, the 79th session of the Texas legislature designated it the official state cooking implement of Texas.

The Dutch oven is a 17th-century innovation, traditionally constructed of cast iron with a thick wall and a tight-fitting lid. Its lid, with a sturdy hook, can double as cover, griddle, panini press, and pizza oven. The versatile pot’s handle allows it to be set into a bed of coals or hung from a tripod over a fire.

Its origins appear to lie in the sand-molded brass vessels manufactured in the Netherlands in the 1600s, according to bushcooking.com. The Englishman Abraham Darby traveled to observe the process, created a more economical version of iron, and patented his “Dutch oven” in 1707.

In the American colonies, it was no less than Paul Revere himself who added legs and a lid. Lewis and Clark carried a Dutch oven overland with them in 1804, as many pioneers did on their westward treks. Today, the Tennessee foundry established by Joseph Lodge in 1896 still makes some of the most popular examples of Dutch ovens, including many durable and prized specimens that made their way to Texas.

Dutch oven societies are in existence today across the United States. In 1994, the Lone Star Dutch Oven Society was established to form a gathering place for people interested in cooking outdoors in the inconic vessel. Members assemble in local chapters and host cook-offs and classes.

If you’ve ever wanted to learn Dutch oven cookery out in the great wide open, be on the lookout for a demonstration at a nearby Texas state park. You’ll discover a whole new meaning to the phrase “home on the range”!

One of my favorite things ever cooked in a Dutch oven is peach cobbler — hot bubbling sweet goodness! I am including a recipe very similar to the one my mom used when making peach cobbler in our Dutch oven. It’s found in the Texas Treasury Dutch Oven Cooking book (first edition, October 1997).

Lone Star Dutch Oven Society lsdos.com Scroll down the organization’s menu to find a local chapter and a public event near you.

Cooking in Texas State Parks tpwd.texas.gov/ calendar/cooking WINTER 2019

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Photo: ©iStockphoto.com | jpacker10

LOCAL

Andy’s Peach Cobbler 10-inch Dutch oven; yields 8 servings CHARCOAL FOR DUTCH OVEN COOKING

FRUIT FILLING

CRUST

“The Dinwiddie Method of Charcoal Briquet Use”

8 cups sliced peaches, fresh or frozen

1 cup flour

2 tablespoons flour

1 tablespoon sugar

1 RING Make a circle of hot charcoal with all the briquets lying flat and touching each other (with spaces left out for the pot legs on the bottom rings). ½ RING A “half-ring” is the same size circle, but with every other briquet missing.

2 RINGS Add a second ring inside the one-ring, touching each other.

FULL SPREAD means to put all the briquets you can (one layer deep, lying flat) either under (very rarely, except in frying) or on top of the pot.

All rings start with the outside edge of the briquets lined up with the outside edge of the oven, top or bottom. You will rapidly learn about how many charcoal briquets it takes to make rings for different size ovens and the respective cooking temperatures.

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½ teaspoon cinnamon 1 cup sugar Mix the peaches with flour and cinnamon in a large bowl. Add the sugar a little at a time until the fruit is sweet enough for your taste. Spoon the fruit mixture into a greased Dutch oven.

The Cherokee Chefs Bonita & Felicia Sanders, Seabrook, Texas

1 tablespoon baking powder ¼ teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons butter or margarine 6 tablespoons milk or half-and-half 1 tablespoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon sugar Flour for cutting board Sift together flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt into a bowl. Cut the butter into small chunks and add to flour mixture. Use a pastry cutter to blend flour mixture into pea-sized lumps. Add milk. Stir with a fork until all ingredients are moistened.

Roll dough out on a flour covered table to ¼ inch thick. Cut crust into shapes and place on top of fruit mixture. Mix cinnamon and sugar and sprinkle over the crust.

Bake with 1 ring of coals underneath and 2 rings of coal on lid for 30–35 minutes.

Life is short. Texas is big.

Hit the trail.

IT’S TIME to make plans and take off to explore the many great trails of Texas!

Come explore Texas with us throughout 2020 as we hit the trail with travel ideas just for you.

Take in the views of wide-open spaces. Make a splash in our lakes and rivers. Explore the state’s diverse history through historic sites, museums and courthouses. Check out distinctive downtowns offering unique shopping, dining and entertainment. All you’ll need is to make the time! In fact, American workers failed to use 768 million days of Personal Time Off in 2018 — an unhealthy waste for our health and the economy. We want to change that.

So get ready to use your time off in Texas and hit the trails!

AuthenticTexas.com

NATIONAL PLAN for VACATION DAY is JANUARY 28, 2020.

Use the Vacation Planning Tool at AuthenticTexas.com to plan this year’s three-day weekends, spring break and holiday excursions.

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Norway on the Bosque Clifton Thrives As Texas’s Norwegian Capital

by Paige Key and Fran Walker

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LONG A WINDING CREEK northeast of Waco, Texas, the Cleng Peerson Memorial Highway leads from the hamlet of Cranfills Gap into Clifton, the town settlers originally named “Cliff Town” for the limestone outcrops lining the Bosque River.

The destination is a community designated a Texas Cultural Arts District in October 2011 for its abundance of public art and creative activity (in a ceremony that marked the first time a Norwegian cabinet-level minister had ever visited Texas!) — but which was known much, much earlier as the Norwegian Capital of Texas.

“An estimated 30-40% of residents in Clifton, population 3,500, can trace their heritage back to the land of fjords, social progressivism and $15 beers,” wrote The Guardian newspaper in 2015. “Thousands of tourists have visited in recent years to 24

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CLIFTON

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DON’T MISS Visit Clifton cliftontexas.org Bosque Museum 301 S. Ave Q Clifton, TX 76634 (254) 675-3845 bosquemuseum.org Clifton Art Alley facebook.com/ cliftonartalley Olaf’s Restaurant and Bar 121 N. Ave. D Clifton, TX 76634

The Flocktail Party by artists Jonathan, Emily Ding, and J. Muzacz graces Clifton’s Art Alley.

Recent Clifton dining-scene arrival Olaf’s is featured on the town’s Norwegian Country Christmas Tour in December 2019.

The Corner Drug Cafe features an original 1930s soda fountain

see the Norwegian historical sights and festivals.”

The region around Clifton was settled by Cleng Peerson, Ole Canuteson, and Carl Engebretson Quaestad between 1854 and 1872; Peerson, the “Norwegian Pathfinder to America,” originally obtained a grant of 313 acres in Bosque County in 1857. Peerson persuaded many of his Norse peers to emigrate with him.

The Bosque Museum tells this story in much more detail, with many artifacts and books brought by immigrant families.

Today, colorful murals by local

artists throughout the town also tell Clifton’s story. Stroll downtown’s “Art Alley” and catch a first-run movie at the classic Cliftex Theatre, which opened in 1916. Nearby, Market at the Mill is a unique historical venue housing an eclectic offering of décor. Boutique shops, eateries, and lodging, along with convenient parking, make it easy to explore downtown.

SALMON AND SALSA AT OLAF’S At the corner at Avenue D you’ll find a large gated courtyard covered by a canopy of two well-established live oaks.

Olaf’s is a full-service restaurant, bar,

and music venue featuring local talent and an eclectic, often-changing menu created by designer-turned-restaurateur Olaf Harris.

The dining room of the restaurant is situated inside the Bosque County Emporium, established in 1992 as a high-end antique shop occupying a building originally built in 1895. The beautiful wooden flooring, more than a century old, still supports daily use today.

Harris’s design background is evident in the intriguing ambiance he has established, both inside and in the courtyard. Relaxing, fun, classy, and WINTER 2019

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CLIFTON DAY AND NIGHT Visitors may appreciate a drive to St. Olaf’s Lutheran Church near Cranfills Gap (above, left; Institute of Texan Cultures Collection) or a show at the restored Cliftex Theatre downtown (above).

diverse, Olaf’s has already built a popular following since its opening earlier this year. The host himself is visible, approachable, and receptive to customers’ needs.

Olaf’s chef Carlos Cortes, local to Bosque County, has traveled the world in his career and has created a seasonally changing menu which reflects his culinary skill. Everything is prepared in-house with fresh local ingredients.

The full-service bar offers not only seasonal specialty cocktails but also wines that pair well with each course. Adding to the seasonal theme, the courtyard provides a festive atmosphere for live music and socializing.

CHRISTMAS IN NORWAY If you go to Clifton and Bosque County during the Christmas holidays, the Chamber of Commerce welcomes visitors to numerous locales during its Norwegian Country Christmas Tour on the first Saturday of each December. You’ll be particularly in luck this year, as Olaf’s will be featured as the historic business location.

There are many more fine examples of historical reclamations of the buildings in this small town and a visit to 76634 will prove a delightful experience for a day or a week. Be “that friend” who discovers the newest fun location!

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Sailing on Faith The Wends of Texas

WENDING THEIR WAY The Ben Nevis brought nearly 600 Wends to Texas in 1854. Photo originally published in The London Illustrated News, September 4, 1852. | Texas Wendish Heritage Museum

by Marian Wiederhold

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s with man y European groups who faced religious oppression in the middle nineteenth century, the Wends—a community of Lutheran Christians—opted to transplant their faith and culture to the New World.

In December 1854, a group of Wendish immigrants arrived in Galveston, Texas, in search of a better home for themselves and their descendants. The Wends, also called Sorbs, are a Slavic people from Eastern Germany in an area called Lusatia on the banks of the Spree

River near the modern cities of Bautzen and Cottbus.

With their own Wendish language and Wendish culture, these Wends were a minority in Germany. They suffered social and economic oppression, and when they were required to join the one state-regulated Protestant church body, the Lutheran Wends believed this action would dilute their pure Lutheran faith and, rather than accept this decree, they made plans to emigrate.

In 1854 approximately 588 Wendish Lutherans formed an immigration society which they soon organized into a

GIDDINGS

BRAZOS TRAIL REGION

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DON’T MISS Giddings Chamber of Commerce 183 E. Hempstead, Giddings, TX 78942. Located in the Lee County Museum, off the Courthouse Square, (979) 542-3455 giddingstx.com Texas Wendish Heritage Museum and Library Tuesday–Saturday, 1:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m.; closed holidays The museum preserves the history of the Texas Wends, Slavic immigrants from Lusatia, an area in eastern Germany. Located in Serbin, 7 miles outside of Giddings at 1011 County Road 212.

St. Paul Lutheran Church 1572 CR 211, Giddings, TX 78942, (979) 366-9650 stpaulserbin.org

PAINTED PULPIT The St. Paul Lutheran Church (above), in Serbin, was built in 1871 and is still in use today. | Texas Wendish Heritage Museum PASTOR AND POET Jon Kilian (right) brought a group of Wends to settle on a league of land north of Houston in the 1850s. | Wikipedia On page 29 THE TEXAS WENDISH HERITAGE MUSEUM houses permanent exhibits about Wendish life in Texas. It also includes the Lillie Moerbe Caldwell Genealogy and Research Library Collections. bookstore, and gift shop. | Texas Wendish Heritage Museum

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Lutheran congregation to relocate to Texas. Rev. Jan Kilian of Weigersdorf and Klitten was called as pastor to lead their group.

They followed an 1853 contingent of thirtyfive whose letters home commented favorably on the availability of jobs, the opportunity of obtaining firearms for hunting, and the absence of state regulations in Texas—persuading them to choose the Lone Star State over Australia.

Sailing on the large sailing ship the Ben Nevis, they experienced many hardships.

Seventy-two died before they reached Galveston in December 1854, most from cholera.

After the Ben Nevis Wends arrived in Galveston, they continued on to Houston. Some remained there, but most traveled inland to the homes of earlier Wendish settlers.

Instead of settling amidst German farmers, however, the Ben Nevis Wends searched for a tract of land where they could all settle together. Three months after their arrival they purchased 4,254 acres in what

is today Lee County, between Houston and Austin. After dividing the land into parcels, they began clearing the land and constructing one-room log cabins and dugouts for their families.

This group of Wends set aside 95 acres in the center of the league for their church, which they named in honor of Saint Paul.

They built a two-room cabin used both as a residence for Pastor Kilian and as a school and church. Pastor Kilian, also known as a poet, named the place Serbin, the Sorbian place. This was to be the colony where they could continue forever their Wendish language and cultural traditions. St. Paul Lutheran Church at Serbin had its own Lutheran school — the only Wendish school in America.

The present St. Paul Lutheran Church building at Serbin was completed in 1871. A beautiful yet simple struc-

ture, it is the obvious product of pioneer craftsmanship. The unique interior includes a balcony extending all around the church with a pulpit elevated nearly twenty feet above the lower floor. One of the “Painted Churches of Texas,” St. Paul is one of the oldest churches in America that has been in continual use since its construction.

In other new congregations formed by groups of Wendish colonists as they struck out for other parts of Texas in the latter 1800s, the Wendish language and culture soon died out. Only in Serbin, where Wendish worship services continued to be held until 1920, did it survive.

The great irony of the Wendish migration was that in the effort to establish a pure Wendish colony where the language and culture could be preserved, these very things were lost due to the economic and social realities of the frontier and the people’s desire to be Americans.

There are thousands of Wendish descent in Texas, but as with many other groups, the Wends have blended into the larger American society and in the process, many of their distinctive customs have faded away. Nevertheless, the Wends of Texas still take pride in their special place in the cultural history of Texas. A Wendish Festival has been held in Serbin each fall for more than three decades.

As a result of education and economic opportunities, Wends can be found in all levels of Texas society. Among the Wends of today, one finds physicians, attorneys, college professors, and business leaders—as well as Wendish farmers who till lands that have been in their families for over a century.

Although being Wendish means different things to different people, the strongest tie that binds the Wends is their Lutheran origin. Above all, they share the conviction that their forebears come to Texas to enjoy the blessing of freedom of religion. They may no longer be able to speak Wendish — or even German—but they are Wends by heritage, and at the core of their heritage is their devotion to the traditional Lutheran faith.

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Panna Maria in Texas

by T. Lindsay Baker

I

n December 1854, a bedraggled group of peasants from Poland gathered beneath a live oak tree for a Christmastime Mass. With them stood the priestly father who had brought them to a new and alien land—Karnes County, southeast of San Antonio, in the new American state of Texas.

It might have been almost anywhere. But because these events transpired in the Lone Star State, they led to Texas having the oldest Polish Catholic parish in the New World, the Panna Maria community.

The travel-worn immigrants, most of whom had walked overland a hundred miles from the Gulf of Mexico at Indianola, had originated from the Polish region of Upper Silesia. In the 1850s it constituted the southeastern tip of Prussia, for in the eighteenth

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PANNA MARIA

TROPICAL TRAIL REGION

century Prussia, Russia, and Austria had cut up the former Polish kingdom among themselves.

Father Leopold Moczygemba, who originated from the village of Płużnica Wielka in Silesia, had come to Texas a few years before as a Catholic missionary to work among German immigrant settlers. From New Braunfels and Castroville, he wrote letters home to friends and family members in Silesia, encouraging them to join him in the New World to find better lives than they experienced at home.

And come the peasant farmers did.

In December 1854 the first of several ships arrived at Galveston and Indianola bearing human cargoes, including three of Father Leopold’s brothers and other Polish families. They settled not only at the colony Moczygemba organized at Panna Maria (meaning Holy Mary), but also in the pre-existing American

towns of Bandera and in San Antonio.

Later the Poles expanded settlement in Karnes, Wilson, and Bexar counties as well as farther afield.

At Panna Maria the immigrants quickly excavated shallow, cellar-like shelters with straw thatch roofs to give relief from the elements. Within a short time, however, they began purchasing cattle and in the spring planted food crops. One colonist wrote home the next year, “If you have money, you can keep even one thousand head of cattle, as the Americans do.” During the first year the newcomers started erecting stone and wooden cottages similar to the ones they knew in the Old Country, some of them surviving to this day.

The new arrivals hardly found a land of milk and honey. Instead, during their early years in the state, they experienced one of the most severe droughts in its history. Those Poles who had brought

Prussian gold and silver money had to spend it just to buy food. Then in 1861 Texas seceded from the United States, and the active-aged men became subject to draft into the Confederate States Army. Some would return after the Civil War; others would not.

Over time the Poles achieved prosperous lives in Texas. From the mother colony at Panna Maria, their community grew up the San Antonio River and Cibolo Creek valleys, where they founded additional Polish Catholic parishes.

Today these towns and churches in places like Czestochowa, Kosciuszko, and St. Hedwig have become destinations for modern-day heritage tourists. And starting in fall 2019, the new Polish Heritage Center at Panna Maria is destined to become a place of pilgrimage for Poles from around the world who seek to visit the oldest Polish colony in the New World.

Polish Heritage Center 13897 North FM 81 Panna Maria, TX 78144 polishheritagecentertx.org The Center is located across the lawn from the historic Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic Church (opposite page) in the heart of Panna Maria, a farming community in Karnes County about 60 miles southeast of San Antonio.

Polish American Heritage Month October, annually

The Center plans to provide interactive and immersive experiences from early Polish history to the present, and will be a vibrant location for special events, programs, conferences, and celebrations. While previews may be arranged now by calling (210) 387-7472, a grand opening is anticipated in fall 2020.

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Menard Irrigation ‘Ditch’ Dates Back to 1757

by Dee Lackey

DON’T MISS Visit Menard menardchamberof commerce.com (325) 396-2365 Presidio de San Saba 191 Presidio Rd. Menard, TX 76859 Hours: 7 days a week, 8:00 am–5:00 pm presidiodesansaba.org Fort McKavett SHS 7066 FM 864 Fort McKavett, TX 76841 (325) 396-2358 thc.texas.gov/ historic-sites/fortmckavett-statehistoric-site Lazy Ladle Café 509 Ellis, Menard, TX (325) 396-2069

U

nderground treasure potential has lured sailors and seekers to Texas for centuries. Whether it was gold, silver, oil, topaz, or pearls, it’s been hunted since Francisco Vázquez de Coronado and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca explored Texas mountains, plains, and rivers.

However, it may be the clear, cool water flowing above and below ground that’s always been the most precious resource. Spanish missions, cavalry forts, and early homesteaders all were dependent on a viable water source—as people are today.

The small settlement of Menard traces its beginnings to an irrigation system that eventually provided water for farming the San Saba River valley. Segments of this system now are more than 260 years old.

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MENARD

FORTS TRAIL REGION

The fascinating history of the canal begins with the Spanish settlement in 1757, when missionaries came from South Texas to Christianize the Indians and prospectors arrived to search for gold and silver.

Today’s modern canal dates more than a century later, to 1874, and various portions have been expanded over time. Many historians have utilized historic survey maps to verify that part of the main canal follows the abandoned Spanish acequia or irrigation canal.

Former Menard newspaper editor N. H. Pierce stated in his book The Free State of Menard that the original functions of the acequia were to help transport rock for the building of the presidio and for irrigation and farming purposes.

Originally the canal was 15 miles long, beginning above the town and extending a dozen or so miles below it.

At one time, two or three gristmills and a cotton gin operated in the valley.

Among the first residents to harness the river’s waters was William Vaughan, who established the Menard Irrigation Company. His surveyor, however, was not reliable, and irrigation flow proved ineffective.

Other engineers envisioned various possibilities for the irrigation company, which was reformed by Gus Noyes in the late 1880s. Noyes purchased

controlling shares from the Vaughan family and hired workers with picks and crowbars to dig the canal deeper and make slight changes to the course. These hired hands often lived in shabby tent camps—one was known as Sunnydale, a misnomer for sure.

Noyes reportedly profited $20,000 per year from his ventures, which grew to 2,000 irrigated acres producing cotton, corn, oats, potatoes, and melons.

Old-timers have related that when patrons got too rowdy at the local saloons, the town marshal would dunk the drunks in the ditch to sober them up.

Recent droughts and seepage within the canal have dried up the water flow, however. Menard citizens commemorated 250 years of agricultural history in 2007 and continue to promote the Ditch Walk as a tourist attraction. The portion of the canal that runs through town is locally known as the “Ditch.”

Several unique sites line the Ditch as it meanders through town and welcomes visitors to take a walk back in time. Among the favorites are the water wheel, the 120-year-old Sacred Heart Church, First Christian Church, the 1903 Bevans Bank, the Mission Theatre, Pioneer Rest Cemetery, and the Menardville Museum, located in the Santa Fe Depot near the intersection of U.S. Highway 190.

PATHWAY THROUGH HISTORY Stroll along Menard’s historic Ditch Walk to discern the community’s early history of missions, farming, ranching, and prospecting. | Tim Chandler photos

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DON’T MISS Visit Houston visithoustontx.org Visit Houston’s Mahatma Gandhi District Bounded roughly by Westpark Tollway, Southwest Freeway, and Hillcroft Avenue

Himalaya Restaurant 6652 Southwest Freeway Houston, TX 77074 (713) 532-2837

himalayarestaurant houston.com Raja Sweets

5667 Hillcroft Avenue Houston, TX 77036 (713) 782-5667

rajahouston.com

India Culture Center– Houston icchoustontx.org Hillcroft Shopping hillcroftshopping.com

Houston’s Mahatma Gandhi District Celebrates South Asian Culture

by Larry Zelisko

C

hef K aiser L ashk ari’s Himal aya Restaur ant wasn’t the first eatery in what is now known as Houston’s Mahatma Gandhi District, or Little India.

A number of Indian and Pakistani restaurants were well established when he opened his in 2004. It was exactly that concentration of all things South Asian that attracted him to the area, also still known as Hillcroft after the main street that runs through it.

“People of Indian or Pakistani origin—even if they live in Clear Lake, The Woodlands, Kirkwood, Katy, Sugar Land, Rosenberg, Richland—they all come to Hillcroft for good food,” Lashkari says. “Hillcroft is the heart of where it all happens on the dining scene. Specifically, that’s the reason for me to be there. It’s an established area known for its food, for its boutiques, for its grocers—for all the things related to Indian and Pakistani culture.”

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HOUSTON

INDEPENDENCE TRAIL REGION

The Gandhi District is a highly commericalized triangular area bounded

by Westpark Tollway and Southwest Freeway and extending a few blocks west of Hillcroft.

In the shopping centers that line Hillcroft Avenue and Harwin Drive, people from all over Houston can get their fill of tandoori chicken and other delicacies in dozens of restaurants. In this mishmash of businesses, shoppers can find saris or quinceanera dresses. In this small area, people can shop for spices and other staples at Indian grocers or diamonds and gold at several jewelry stores.

The Atlantic magazine credits Raja Sweets as being among the founding businesses that transformed the area around Hillcroft Avenue into an ethnic enclave.

The restaurant’s website boasts that Raja Sweets was the first Indian restaurant in Houston, opening in 1986.

“My dad’s motto was: Bring the streets of India to Hillcroft,” Sharan Gahunia, the second-generation owner, says on the website.

Other businesses followed, and today the area is a magnet for people seeking South Asian restaurants, grocers, jewelers, sari shops, and more. Efforts by the India Culture Center in Houston resulted in the area officially being designated as the Mahatma Gandhi District in January 2010.

Many of the first Indians to come to Houston were college students in the 1960s, Uzma Quraishi wrote in her doctoral thesis at Rice University. Now an assistant professor at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Dr. Quarishi noted Houston’s growth half a century ago.

“As newly degreed engineers, scientists, and, increasingly, business majors, Indian and Pakistani immigrants in the 1960s and 1970s found in this expanding city immediate employment and a burgeoning ethnic community,” she wrote. “The ‘pioneers’—students who preceded them by almost a decade—had already established the foundations of ethnic community: organizations, public

events, and a handful of small businesses.”

The majority of the Indian and Pakistani immigrants came from middle- to upperclass families from urbanized areas, she found. “Indians and Pakistanis have flocked to Houston to take advantage of its booming oil-led economy, advanced medical complex, and steady growth of jobs for engineering professionals, as well as for working-class immigrants.”

By the 2010 Census, the Indian population was 82,575 and Pakistanis numbered 27,856.

As many as 150,000 people with an Indian background now live in greater Houston, says Vipin Kumar, executive

In suburban Houston, the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir (Hindu temple) welcomes visitors; at Raja Sweets, guests enjoy traditional gulab jamun. | Courtesy photos

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c i ty l i g h ts director of India House, a nonprofit community service center not far from the Mahatma Gandhi District.

Sugar Land and Katy have the largest Indian American populations, he says, but Hillcroft is a gathering place for dining and shopping.

Kumar says Houston attracts investors from India because it is a financial center and an oil and gas center.

The city and the state of Texas have courted overseas business and industry, with Houston mayor Sylvester Turner making a trip to India in November 2018 and Texas governor Greg Abbott traveling there in March 2018.

Houston’s importance to India was underscored in September when Prime Minister Narenda Modi spoke along with President Trump at a rally at NRG Stadium, attended by an estimated 50,000 people.

Lashkari believes Houston’s

The Indian presence in Houston’s Hillcroft area took off in the 1980s. The area was designated the Mahatma Gandhi District in January 2010, and a monument was erected to the nonviolent Indian independence movement leader in August 2016. A statue of Gandhi is located in Hermann Park, and the Mahatma Gandhi Library in Sugar Land is raising money for the Eternal Gandhi Museum in southwest Houston to recognize leaders of peace such as Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and others. | Courtesy photo

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weather is a big attraction for South Asians.

“It’s exactly the same in Karachi (Pakistan) or Bombay (now Mumbai, India) as it is in Houston—same humidity, same heat, same winters.”

Houston’s diversity attracts more diversity, he says. The mayor’s office says one in four Houston residents is foreign-born.

“More and more people are going where they can find more and more culture and where they can educate their kids in the same culture they grew up in,” Lashkari says.

Lashkari himself was reared in Karachi by an Indian father and Pakistani mother. Despite tensions between the two countries, he has never experienced problems between the two in the United States. “When we change continents, all of that is left behind. Every one lives with love and peace over here—that’s the way it should be.”

Preserving Tradition and Promoting Culture at Asia Times Square The Lohs of Grand Prairie

by Jill Campbell Jordan

A

t the Pearl, one group of diners converses animatedly in Vietnamese.

At the next table over, a server delivers a steaming serving of dim sum, little jewels in a round basket. The youngsters are restless, eager to go try out the carnival games before the Flower Festival gets under way at dusk.

No, it’s not Saigon—but Asia Times Square, one of the largest Asian markets in Texas, centered in the immigrant enclave of Grand Prairie between Dallas and Fort Worth.

While manufacturing and high-tech industry have recently brought an influx of far eastern and southwest Asian workers to the area, many Vietnamese families arrived here in the mid-1970s, fleeing the humanitarian crisis in their native country and looking to escape communism. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington metropolitan area today has the fifth largest population of Vietnamese immigrants in the United States.

GRAND PRARIE

LAKES TRAIL REGION

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AT ASIA TIMES SQUARE guests can shop for maneki-neko and Buddha figurines and bamboo plants — and dine on Chinese delicacies such as chicken feet and dim sum.

The Lohs, from Vietnam, settled in Texas in the 1980s. In the back row of the family photo above, from left, are parents Kay and Grant and son John; at front, children Matthew (also shown upper right, today), Melodie, Richard, David, Steve, and Bonnie.

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A QUEST FOR FREEDOM That’s the story of the late Grant Loh, who struggled to find a way to a better life away from repression by the communist regime. In 1977 he and his wife attempted to leave Vietnam with their eight children. Loh was captured and imprisoned for months in difficult conditions. At last reaching an American refugee camp in Malaysia, the Lohs spent nine months awaiting passage to the U.S. before a sponsor, Aunt Bonnie Minitra, helped them reach freedom. “She’s our angel,” says Grant’s son Matthew.

Grant Loh’s journey to financial independence in the new country was an arduous one. Having settled first on the High Plains, in 1985, when a snowstorm forced Loh to abandon his plans to travel home to his family in Kansas, he stopped into an Asian market in Arlington for a meal, and to purchase gifts for a friend he was going to visit. The owners of the market were looking to sell out. The very next day Grant and his oldest son returned to the store to close a deal.

Youngest son Matthew runs the Pearl Restaurant and Lounge today; the family owns two markets with locations in

Grand Prairie and Dallas. Occupying a glittering corner of the colorfully lighted Asia Times Square, the Pearl delights tourists as well as Vietnamese looking for a taste of home.

“We were blessed to have the support we had, and the business continued to grow,” says Matthew. “When you talk about the land of opportunity, there is no greater land than the U.S. We went from absolutely nothing to what we have now.” The Lohs hold a deep love for Texas—and for Texans, on account of their kindness and spirit of hospitality.

MORE THAN A MARKET Asia Times Square has grown from what was once a market that served the community and provided for a family with big dreams, to a multi-purpose center

with restaurants, boutiques, grocers, beauty and health providers, and other retailers that hosts the popular “Dem Cho Hoa” (Night Flower Market) to celebrate each Lunar New Year.

Visitors can experience Asian culture through traditional celebrations and traditional dishes mingled with modern cuisine and entertainment. In a complex that blends modern and traditional Asian design, customs are held dear. Sights and smells of the market transport travelers virtually around the world, and to earlier times. Be daring — try out a new dish or go exploring through the luxuriant grocery aisles!

LOVE, OPPORTUNITY, HOPE The Loh family provides a space where people from all backgrounds are welcome to explore the cultures of Asia, and for those of Asian descent to enjoy

a touch of home or learn about their own heritage. Younger generations are encouraged to keep traditional customs alive: creating a sense of community is the building block of all that the Loh family does.

“Do more, talk less, be humble” was the motto Grant Loh imparted to his descendants, says Matthew.

The success that the family has built, together with the help of others, has now afforded them the chance to give back. To honor the memory of their father, the younger Lohs launched a foundation that awards scholarships to students and provides aid to community nonprofits. Its name? The LOH Foundation: Love, Opportunity, Hope, “continuing the legacy of spreading Love, providing Opportunity, and giving Hope to all.”

DON’T MISS Visit Grand Prairie visitgrandprairie.com Asia Times Square 2615 W. Pioneer Parkway Grand Prairie, TX 75051 (972) 975-5100 asiatimessquare.com The LOH Foundation thelohfoundation.org Lunar New Year Celebrations 2020 Friday–Sunday, January 10, 11, 12; Friday–Sunday, January 17, 18, 19 A twoweekend event featuring various festivities ushering in the Year of the Rat Mid-Autumn Festival Friday–Sunday Sept. 25, 26, 27, 2020

DIM SUM YUM YUM The authentic Hong Kong–style dim sum served daily at the Pearl Restaurant and Lounge is based on a traditional meal once reserved for the Emperor of China and his family dating back 2,500 years ago. The delicately designed, bite-sized servings are presented in small steamer baskets like those shown at right — and everyone around the table shares in the treat.

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A U T H E N T I C

P E R S O N

P R E S E RVAT I O N IS A PRIVILEGE

By Patty Bushart and Jill Campbell Jordan Cover and feature photography by Jovelyn Roden

Karl Komatsu is President and CEO of the architectural firm that bears his family’s name, a leader in design-build management, interior design, and historic preservation. Established in 1959 by his father, Albert S. Komatsu, the firm was recognized by the Texas Historical Commission in 2013 with the Texas Treasure Award for more than fifty years in continuous business and for “their exceptional historical contributions toward the state’s economic growth and prosperity.”

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un your finger down the list of credits for a major restoration project or historic courthouse in Texas, and you won’t be surprised to spot a distinctive name belonging to three generations of Japanese-American builders: Komatsu.

Easygoing and unassuming, Karl A. Komatsu, current leader of the family firm, has contributed to some of Texas’ most influential architectural designs.

His steady hand and commitment to heritage have formed a lasting impression on the state’s built environment, one that will endure for years to come.

On the day we meet in Komatsu’s Fort Worth office, overlooking the Trinity River, we’re greeted at the door with a warm smile. Karl’s presence is friendly and relaxed, and his welcome is genuinely hospitable.

Our conversation begins with a little history. Karl is a third-generation immigrant—sansei, in the JapaneseAmerican vernacular. His grandfather, Hisakichi Komatsu, was born in Japan in 1887, arriving in the United States in 1900 as a member of the Japanese merchant marine. Bright and industrious, Hisakichi went to work for the Spokane-Seattle Railroad, landing a position as foreman because of his ability to communicate in English as well as Japanese, a bit of Cantonese, and other Asian tongues. As was customary in Hisakichi’s culture, his family arranged his marriage. Hisakichi returned to his native country to marry Kofusa Honda, 42

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and she soon joined him in Portland, Oregon, in 1921.

PERSECUTION AND PERSEVERANCE Karl’s father, Albert, was born in Portland in 1926, the second of the Komatsus’ three children. When U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, authorizing the internment of citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan, the Komatsu family were taken to Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles in January 1943. It was a

trying time for Japanese-Americans, who were born with full rights of citizenship yet treated as threats during wartime. Families were separated, homes were seized, and workers were assigned to menial jobs — yet many, like the Komatsus, endured hardships and eventually reestablished better lives in the U.S. Family members were scattered among several internment camps. “My father, Albert, my mother, and my two sisters were assigned to a camp installation in Idaho,” Karl explained.

REUNITED Albert S. Komatsu first came to Texas as an army engineer at Camp Wolters Helicopter Training Facility in Mineral Wells, where his wife and young son Karl (shown in a circa 1953 snapshot) were reunited with him. | Komatsu Family collection

COMING HOME Albert Komatsu was released from internment and returned to Minneapolis in 1945. | Komatsu Family collection

On account of his exceptional mathematics skills Albert was recruited to join a special intelligence unit in northern Minnesota assigned to develop a device similar to the Enigma machine.

“Determined to avoid internment, my father was ultimately deemed of national interest because of his railroad construction experience and allowed to remain on the job.”

Agricultural production was essential to providing food in the camps as well as to the national economy. Young Albert and his older sister were allowed to leave, having signed a federal affidavit agreeing to work only with agricultural teams growing and harvesting crops. Albert’s mother and his younger sister, however, remained in the camp until 1946.

Eventually released, Albert’s older sister assumed a teaching position in Minneapolis–Saint Paul. Albert, too, was released and allowed to join his sister in Minnesota to complete his high school education. Boarding at the YMCA until he turned 18 because his sister was unable to provide living accommodations, Albert soon received a draft notice from the U.S. Army.

On account of his exceptional mathematics skills Albert was recruited to join a special intelligence unit in northern Minnesota assigned to develop a device similar to the Enigma machine.

He enlisted in the engineering group but was assigned to army installations around the U.S., auditing and reconciling accounting procedures.

Following his discharge in 1947, Albert enrolled in college under the G.I. Bill. Still unable to afford his first choice, the mathematics program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he returned to Minneapolis and enrolled in the University of Minnesota, where he earned his degree in architecture. It was at the university that Albert met and wed Karl’s mother, Toyoko ‘Toy’ Tanaka, the youngest of ten children born in Hawaii of Japanese parentage, and an ancestry that Japanese scrolls trace as far back as the 1600s.

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Helicopter Training Facility in Mineral Wells, Texas, where they remained until Albert’s discharge in 1954.

Only then was Albert free to pursue a career in architecture, working first in Dallas for the prominent George Dahl Architectural Firm (best known for the Art Deco buildings of Fair Park) and then in Fort Worth with Wyatt Hedrick of Sanguinet, Staats, and Hedrick, designers of Love Field, among other major projects, before opening his own office in 1959.

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON Karl grew up in Fort Worth knowing how his father made his living, but contrary to the Japanese custom of sons following fathers in a family business, he was not particularly pressured to adopt the tradition.

“The joke,” Karl notes, “was that my father wanted me to become a doctor or lawyer so he might retire comfortably at an early age.” Only at age 80 did the elder Komatsu retire, in 2006—though he still works providing expert witness testimony on behalf of construction companies, architects, and engineers.

So when Karl made the decision in high school to study architecture, he sought his mother’s counsel, wondering just how badly he’d let his father down.

Quite the opposite was true, she assured him; his father would have been disappointed had Karl not decided to pursue a career in architecture!

Karl enrolled at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1970. He chose Charlottesville because he was eager to meet new people and loved the natural beauty of the area. The curriculum leaned heavily toward Jeffersonian architecture, and Karl’s studies included attendance at the university’s affiliate International Centre for Palladian Studies in Vicenza, Italy. While he appreciated classical design, Karl was also influenced by the mid-century and Japanese styles he grew up with, as well as expressive modernist forms.

Graduation came on the heels of a recession in the U.S., and Karl worked with several East Coast firms before 44

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settling in Washington, D.C. There, he recalls, his appreciation for restoration and preservation evolved “more or less by osmosis.” He worked for a time with the independent firm of Harry Weese & Associates, a well-known advocate of historic preservation and the foremost designer of rail systems at the time, whose works included D.C.’s Metro.

Assigned to work on the master plans of several historic stations between Washington and Boston as part of the Northeast Corridor High Speed Rail Improvement Program, Karl found his interest in historic conservation and adaptive reuse growing.

By 1978 Karl had opened his own architectural firm in D.C. despite warnings about the challenges of working in such a temperamental business climate both commercially and politically. He grew his business, building an impressive portfolio of federal work along the way until merging his Washington firm with his father’s Fort Worth business in the early 1980s.

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SUCCESSES IN TEXAS There, the family were happy to be reunited once more.

Under Albert’s leadership, Komatsu Architecture had become widely recognized for contributions to some of Fort Worth’s most endearing projects, including most of the structures in the Japanese Garden at the Botanic Gardens and civic buildings like the city’s Fire Station No. 8 on Rosedale.

In addition to the firm’s endeavors in local and state preservation activities, Karl received a two-year appointment to serve on the National Park System Advisory Board under the George H. W. Bush Administration, reporting to the Secretary of the Interior. His duties in that capacity included reviewing national historic register and natural resource grant nominations.

By the 1980s Karl’s reputation as a preservationist was acknowledged by then Governor Bill Clements, who in 1987 appointed him to the Texas Historical Commission (THC). He was

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WISE COUNTY COURTHOUSE Lakes Trail Region 106 S. Trinity St. Decatur, TX 76234 (940) 393-0340 co.wise.tx.us Hours: Monday-Friday, 9 am–4 pm The Decatur courthouse was designed by architect J. Riely Gordon of New York and built in 1895. The first court was held in the new building in December 1896.

Photo: Jim Bell

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LAMPASAS COUNTY COURTHOUSE Hill Country Trail Region 501 East Fourth St. Lampasas, TX 76550 (512) 556-8271 co.lampasas.tx.us Hours: Monday–Friday 8 am–5 pm The Second Empire–style courthouse, completed circa 1883–84, was the design of W. C. Dodson. The courthouse was restored

by Komatsu Architects and the building rededicated in 2004.

Photo: Texas Historical Commission

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THROCKMORTON COUNTY COURTHOUSE Forts Trail Region 121 N. Minter Ave. Throckmorton, Texas 76483 (940) 849-4411 throckmortontx.org Hours: Monday–Friday, 9 am–4 pm The Throckmorton County courthouse design reflects an Italianate styling and features polychromatic walls of tan- and buff-colored quarried sandstone and a mansard roof with a square cupola.

Photo: Wayne Wendel

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PARKER COUNTY COURTHOUSE Lakes Trail Region 1 Courthouse Square Weatherford, TX 76086 (817) 598-6195 parkercountytx.com Hours: Monday–Friday, 9 am–4 pm The 1886 Parker County Courthouse was designed by architect W. C. Dodson. The style and design are similar to those of his other Texas courthouses in Hill, Hood, and Lampasas counties.

Photo: Wayne Wendel

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ENDURING LEGACY In Japanese, Komatsu

means “small pine tree,” a fitting metaphor for a clan that came to the U.S. in 1900 from a region in Northern Japan known for the abundance of trees that produce the sap, or resin, used to craft the signature durable and waterproof finish on works of ancient oriental lacquerware.

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reappointed by Governor Ann Richards in 1993 to serve as chairman.

Preservation of historic architecture and archeological sites faced serious challenges to preservation at the time, and in response the 71st Legislature established the Texas Preservation Trust Fund in 1989. As a commissioner, Karl played a role in creation of the trust that awards competitive matching grants annually to qualified applicants to preserve architectural and archeological treasures throughout the state of Texas. He also participated in early planning for what was to become the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program. “In my last year as chair of the THC,” recalls Karl, “I spent over 200 days in Austin.”

Karl’s service on the THC caught the attention of President George H. W. Bush, and he followed one of Fort Worth’s most influential leaders, Ruth Carter Stevenson, creator of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, as trustee on the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In addition to providing leadership and advocacy for revitalization of America’s historic places, the trust works on policy and local preservation campaigns

through affiliated agencies including the National Park Service and state historic offices nationwide. Karl would serve nine years on the board, under two presidential administrations.

In the early years of the Clinton administration, the president created the National Performance Review, a federal initiative with the goal of creating a government that “works better and costs less.” Vice President Al Gore led the task force, forming teams to evaluate and make recommendations on the operations of hundreds of departments and governmental agencies. Karl was appointed to chair the task force to undertake review of federal historic preservation, creating guidelines for preservation offices in all fifty states.

The post did have its perks, Karl remembers. “All our meetings were held in National Parks across the U.S., which made for some pretty extraordinary backdrops,” he says—but also for critical issues ranging from privatization of national historic sites such as the Presidio in San Francisco and the redevelopment movement that threatened the Little Tokyo Historic District in Los Angeles, and, at home, Dallas’ proposed Sixth Floor Museum. When proponents

of the Dallas museum proposal came up against factions that viewed the project as glorification of a national tragedy, Karl weighed in. For those who really care, he argued, the museum was “not about politics, it’s history—no matter how glorious or tragic.”

When the museum opened in 1989, members of the John F. Kennedy family expressed appreciation for the efforts put forth by the Dallas County Historical Foundation and the THC. COURTHOUSES AND COUNTDOWNS One of the THC’s most revered initiatives—and one near and dear to Karl Komatsu’s heart—is the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation program. Since its establishment in June 1999, the project has provided assistance to seventy of the state’s more than 240 courthouses,

all at least fifty years old. Karl notes that, while there were many project collaborators over the years, “the THC staff should be credited with recognizing the dangers and need for protection, especially after courthouse fires such as those in Hill and Newton Counties.”

Komatsu Architects’ first courthouse project was in the central Texas county of Lampasas, in the city of the same name. The earliest of Waco designer W. C. Dodson’s courthouses, the 1884 structure had survived natural disasters over the years, but “very nearly didn’t survive the awful repairs made over time,” lamented Karl. Repairs performed by numerous engineers covering very different generations of construction complicated the project and threatened its success. The Lampasas edifice, third oldest in the state still functioning as a

courthouse, was rededicated on March 2, 2004, the 169th anniversary of the Declaration of Texas Independence.

Komatsu Architects has gone on to work on several other courthouses around the state, including projects in Marion, Parker, Glasscock, Cooke, Wise, and Lynn counties.

Karl’s career has spanned nearly 50 years and is distinguished by a reverence for, and deep-rooted commitment to his cultural heritage and preservation of our state and national history. Of the projects he considers personal triumphs he is surprisingly modest, focusing on collaboration and relationships. Review of possible environmental impacts of airport noise on historic resources, early conversations surrounding preservation and restoration of NASA’s Apollo Mission Control Center, creation of the Texas Preservation Trust Fund that was established during his time on the THC, and his work restoring some of Texas’ historic courthouses are just a few of his contributions. Karl is particularly proud of his association with current THC chairman, John L. Nau III, who followed Karl as chair of the THC in 1995 and returned to chair the commission again in 2015. As Karl notes, “John is a marketing genius who has seized on heritage tourism and turned Texas history into an economic driver.”

Karl and his wife, Nancy, live in Fort Worth and have two sons, Brice and Christopher. Karl’s younger sister, Sylvia, is chief content officer for KERA and KXT public broadcasting stations in Dallas.

The elder Komatsu, Albert, still stops by the office on occasion—“mostly to check in and visit,” quips Karl. As we depart, he brushes aside questions about his own plans for retirement, saying simply, “There is so much more to be done . . . work in preservation has been like a continuing education, so it hasn’t been a chore, it’s really been a privilege.”

PERSEVERING PRESESRVATIONISTS Karl Komatsu (left) and historian T. R. Fehrenbach participated in the 1991 public hearings for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act prior to implementation by the State of Texas. | Texas Historical Commission

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P L A C E

TEXANS ONE AND ALL A V ISI T TO THE I NST I T U T E OF T E X A N CU LT U R ES

Story and photographs by Mike Carlisle Opening montage: General Photographs Collection, UTSA Special Collections

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UNDER THE DOME The ITC’s Dome Theater today has been upgraded with LED lighting and digital projection to serve special events as well as daily screenings.

hether a “fromhere” or “comehere” Texan wanting to appreciate the diversity of your great state, or a visitor who wants to learn what makes the 28th state and its people so special, make the Institute of Texan Cultures (ITC) your first stop.

The location alone of this fiftyyear-plus institution signals its symbolic place in a multifaceted state.

Situated on the University of Texas at San Antonio HemisFair campus, next door to the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center and the Tower of the Americas, directly across the freeway from the Alamodome, and just a short walk from the Alamo and the River Walk, the ITC is a popular destination for tourists, residents, students, researchers, and armchair historians. The Institute complex is also family-friendly and filled with hands-on activities for children.

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realize an experience as big as Texas is about to begin. The ITC wants you to enjoy a memorable experience, not simply gain more knowledge about the cultures that settled throughout Texas.

The ITC is more interactive than a typical museum, delivering a more personal and firsthand encounter with history. The ITC draws from a pool of docents willing to share their personal heritage, such as quilters who will spin cotton and then weave it into fabric on a Swedish loom. The complex provides an immersive multicultural experience for appreciating how different cultures blend together in Texas.

Through research, collections, exhibits and programs, the ITC serves as the catalyst for the understanding and appreciation of Texas and Texans. Its 182,000-square-foot complex affords 65,000 square feet of interactive exhibits and displays. The Institute library on the third floor houses manuscripts, rare books, personal papers, more than 3.5 million historical photos, and more than 700 oral histories.

The ITC exhibits and displays represent many cultures and their impact on the history and development of Texas.

The main exhibit floor is divided by cultures and ethnicity, starting with Native

Americans, continuing with sections dedicated to twenty-six other cultural and ethnic groups such as German, Filipino, Norwegian, Jewish, Danish, Lebanese, Polish, Chinese . . . and more.

Just pick out the cultures that interest you most, then read, interact with, and digest everything in that section to learn how those particular groups contributed to Texas history.

The Dome Theater combines twentysix overhead screens into a 360-degree theater, which is positioned as a focal point surrounded by the main exhibit floor and cultural sections. The screen images are synchronized to tell the cultural stories of Texans. The multiple projectors are digital today, but just imagine trying to keep up with multiple film projectors! The first show begins at 11 a.m., with subsequent different shows along different themes, roughly timed to start with the completion of guided and thematic tours in a grand way.

AN INSTITUTE FOR THE PEOPLE While the term “institute” might first bring to mind society or organization that carries on a particular work or educational character—perhaps research or humanitarian interest—in the ITC’s case it’s a different kind of undertaking.

HEMISFAIR ORIGINS The ITC has changed and evolved over the years, both inside and out, since first opening in 1968 as the Texas Pavilion at HemisFair.

General Photographs Collection, UTSA Special Collections.

Texas’s 59th Legislature, in May 1965, established the ITC as a permanent state agency. The next biennium followed through with further funding for a total $10 million investment.

Sharing a fifty-year legacy with the Heritage Trails program, originally the ITC opened as the Texas State Exhibits Pavilion for the HemisFair ’68 celebration. The Institute of Texan Cultures Library was established in 1965 as a repository for books and images of artifacts being collected by researchers preparing exhibits for the Texas Pavilion.

The legislature further tasked the ITC with designing and constructing a building over the next three years to house the exhibits for use long after the fair, the first world’s fair to be held in the American Southwest.

Considering the civil unrest at the time, heightened by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, just two days before the ITC opened, understanding cultural differences would prove vitally important.

designed to entertain, inspire, and educate. The institute further educates through outreach programs to schools, other groups, and teacher-training workshops.

For visiting school groups, the ITC offers guided and non-guided tour options of the main exhibit floor, the Back 40 Living History Area, and the Geometry Lab (SAVIG). The Texans One and All tours explore why and where different cultural groups came to Texas, including their stories and traditions.

The one-hour tours address the requirements of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), but if a field trip isn’t feasible, teachers may contact the ITC for TEKS field kits that bring the ITC to the classroom.

Once a rural term referring to farm acreage, the Back 40 of the ITC draws students into a turn-of-the-century outdoor living history area, complete with a one-room schoolhouse, adobe house, army fort barracks, log cabin, and hay barn. The Back 40 Experience tour,

“The Texas Pavilion showcased the many cultures that came together to build Texas,” explains James Benavides, director of ITC Communication and Marketing. The institute used exhibits of artifacts and personal memorabilia that were focused solely on telling the story of people across ethnic groups.

After HemisFair concluded, the Texas Pavilion was turned over to the University of Texas System in 1969, officially designated the University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio. The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) assumed control of the ITC in 1973, and the institute eventually became a UTSA campus in 1986.

EDUCATION AT ITS CORE Education, in fact, is the continuing mission of the ITC. The ITC serves as the state center for multicultural education by continually investigating the ethnic and cultural history of the state and presenting the resulting information with a variety of offerings

COMMON CHORD “Music is common to every culture,” says ITC staffer James Benavides. “Instruments were important enough to bring along, much like religion is often a common theme, components that make up our identities.”

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TIME TRAVEL Students visiting the Back 40 can take their pick of decades, from the 1870s dogtrot log house, the 1880s frontier fort, and the 1890s one-room schoolhouse, to the 1900s Hill Country barn and the 1910s West Texas adobe house.

where living historians and docents depict the lives of Texas pioneers, gives students the immersive experience to compare their lives to the past.

PROGRAMS FOR THE PUBLIC By far, the annual Texas Folklife Festival is the largest event hosted by the institute since 1972. The annual June weekend event draws more than 35,000 people to celebrate the food, dances, arts, and music of more than forty different cultures. The institute also hosts various other annual and seasonal events, including the Asian Festival, Spring Break on the Back 40, Texas Frontier Week, Pioneer Sunday, and Memorial Memories, an annual musical tribute to American military personnel.

Throughout the year the institute hosts exhibits, educational programs, and special events that encourage kids and adults to explore the cultural and ethnic roots of Texas. Temporary and traveling exhibits highlight specific components of Texan culture, such as mil52

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itary history and the people who made it, stories on immigration, and ethnic groups that have come to Texas since the ITC opened in 1968.

The ITC offers Free Second Sunday programs (with few exceptions, such as the Texas Folklife Festival weekend). The ITC also participates in other admissions programs, such as the North American Reciprocal Museum membership, San Antonio Museum Month in October, and the Blue Star Museums free military admissions between Armed Forces Day and Labor Day. The ITC is a unique venue that can host a variety of different events throughout the year. The institute offers multiple indoor and outdoor event spaces for corporate training, non-profit organization strategy meetings, and private events such as mixers, performances, weddings, or family gathering. The Dome Theater, with its large screens, can accommodate large gala and party events. The ITC has outdoor Back Patio, Veranda, and Back 40 areas for excellent event spaces as well.

The Institute of Texan Cultures 801 E. Cesar E. Chavez Blvd.

San Antonio, TX 78205 (210) 458-2300 texancultures.com Hours Monday–Saturday 9 a.m.–5 p.m.; Sundays noon–5 p.m.

Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center 900 E. Market St. San Antonio, TX 78205 sahbgcc.com Tower of the Americas 739 E. Cesar E. Chavez Blvd.

San Antonio, TX 78205 toweroftheamericas.com The Alamo 300 Alamo Plaza San Antonio, TX 78205 thealamo.org HemisFair Park hemisfair.org

MUSEUM FOR THE MASSES In 2010, the ITC formalized an affiliation agreement with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., recognizing a level of professionalism granted to only a few museums throughout the nation.

The Smithsonian has a long and proud relationship with the ITC, dating back to 1972 and the first Texas Folklife Festival. As an affiliate, the Institute gains access to the Smithsonian artifacts and other valuable resources to complement and broaden exhibits.

As most museums serve a local or regional audience, the ITC seems focused at least partially on building the visitor experience and marketing itself as the presenter of San Antonio and ethnic history of south-central Texas. The continual modernization of the exhibits and the entire visitor experience positions the ITC to be a place of compelling intellectual dialogue. As a state museum, for instance, the ITC can support current conversations about Mexican border movements in Texas now and in the past.

Recognizing the continuing relevance of immigration, the portrait-photography project “Huddled Masses; Who We Are” is prominent at the entrance to the ITC. San Antonio photographer Ramin Samandari created the collection of three hundred portraits featuring people holding whiteboard placards bearing written details of their ethnic heritage.

The exhibit’s title is drawn from the most often-quoted lines of the famous Emma Lazarus poem: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me....”

AN ACTIVE ROLE IN CIVICS AND CITIZENSHIP Far from resting on its laurels as a static repository, the ITC plays a dynamic role in the society it reflects, partnering with U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services to hold numerous citizenship swearing-in ceremonies per year.

The ceremonies are held in the Dome Theater, surrounded by patriotic images. “The ITC essentially becomes a federal courthouse where a judge typically administers the oath of allegiance to over 250 candidates who become U.S. citizens,” according to Benavides.

When opened in 1968, the ITC was defined as a permanent research and production center dealing with the history of the people who make up Texas.

While UTSA plans greater emphasis on creating more engaging educational and cultural experiences, over the past half century the ITC original mandate has not changed. The institute looks forward to adapting to serve new generations of

Texans and Texas visitors, redeveloping classic exhibits, adding engaging new exhibits, developing new digital assets, and pursuing a long-term sustainability plan.

For the next fifty years, the ITC expects to continue upholding its charge to serve as the premier center for learning about the diverse cultures and ethnic groups of Texas. The new and renovated exhibits of the ITC will exemplify what a museum and teaching institution should aspire to become, while immersing children and inspiring adults to explore their own heritage and dive deep into the stories of Texas and Texans.

“We need to pick information, and make it relatable, make it memorable, and turn it into an experience,” Benavides believes. “Docents regularly have visitors get enthusiastic when they recognize someone, maybe a family member mentioned in an exhibit— and that is the experience we are hoping for.”

HUDDLED MASSES Three hundred photographs of individuals with details of their ethnic heritage present an ideal introduction to everything the ITC represents.

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T H I N G

INVASIVE WEED, INDELIBLE ICON

By Eric Miller

It immigrated to America with Russian farmers. It lives, spreads, and dies in a life cycle that is ideally suited to the Texas Panhandle, the Permian Basin, and West Texas. It just may be the perfect weed.

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DRIFTING ALONG Gene Autry sang Bob Nolan’s tune in the 1935 flick Tumbling Tumbleweeds

oes being a native Houstonian qualify me as a native Texan? I couldn’t answer that question until 1998 after moving to Amarillo.

One winter morning I opened our garage door and there it was, a small, round package that had rolled and jumbled its way through the maze of alleys to my driveway.

It was my first tumbleweed. With it came all sorts of images, no less the highly memorable tune and lyrics of the classic song. But being from Houston, I had never seen a tumbleweed.

Years later I am writing about this Texas icon. But now it’s called bad for business and a scourge because it may be the perfect weed. It lives, spreads, and dies in a life cycle that is ideally suited to the Texas Panhandle, the Permian Basin, and West Texas. It could find its way east of I-35, too.

Here is what I learned about Salsola tragus. It was a freeloader. Its seeds were mixed in with winter wheat sown

by Russian immigrants in fields near Scotland, South Dakota, in the 1870s.

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the turn of the 20th century, it may have reached California and Texas. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had already relegated “Russian thistle” to its list of noxious weeds.

In the Texas Panhandle the plant’s spread may have been fueled by the wheat immigration at the turn of the 20th century. Trainloads of people were lured to the area by an abundance of land, reliable moisture, and strong crop prices. Soon acres of native grassland, capable of resisting tumbleweed, went under the plow, and by 1930s the area became ground zero for the Dust Bowl.

What was under the dirt that devoured the landscape? Piles of tumbleweed.

Michael Grauer with the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum says that cowboys in the late 1800s and early 1900s realized that tumbleweed was a pest, straining the region’s valuable water resources.

Yet before we had any idea of the problems it would cause, Grauer says, tumbleweed came to represent the wide open spaces of the West. Hollywood romanticized the weed in classic Westerns where the cowboy rides horse-

back while a tumbleweed or two rolls by (chances are a coyote is howling in the background).

The music industry contributed a tune that mimicked the tumbling motion. Written by Bob Nolan, “Tumbling Tumbleweed” has been frequently recorded, perhaps most famously by Gene Autry, who sang it (from horseback) in the 1935 movie of the same name. The heart of that Top 100 Western Song are the lyrics I’ll — keep rolling along Deep — in my heart is a song Here — on the range I belong Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.

Today, tumbleweed has become Texas chic. A long-distance bike race in Dumas (Moore County), a festival in Colorado City (along the Bankhead Highway west of Abilene), and a new Amarillo bakery use the name to attract attention. Tumbleweed Smith, a longtime resident of Big Spring, is one of the best storytellers in the state.

Tumbleweed recalls socializing with a resident asking (hopefully in jest), “Is it rude to throw them over the fence

COLORADO CITY, TEXAS, once celebrated the infamous tumbleweed with an annual parade in its honor. | KVMC/KAUM Radio

onto a neighbor’s property?” Yes. Kay Ledbetter of the Texas A&M Agrilife Extension and Research Center in Amarillo remembers a time in elementary school when she located and brought in the biggest tumbleweed. It was flocked and served as the class Christmas tree. Now, the former Amarillo Globe-News agriculture editor has written a press release to warn the public about tumbleweed of a different sort. Why? Resource conservation is so important for all Texans, especially farmers and ranchers in West Texas.

Tumbleweeds have a very large tap root that aggressively seeks water, each plant produces thousands of seeds, and tumbling in the wind is a very efficient way to propagate, Ledbetter explains.

Invasive species are such a problem that there is a web site, TexasInvasives. org, sponsored by a handful of Texas organizations. On the site, Salsola tragus can be found on a list of the “Dirty Dozen Terrestrial Invasive Species.”

There was a project to see if tumbleweeds could be used as cattle feed. The answer was, regrettably, no. There are indications they may resist herbicides,

too, according to Ledbetter.

So what to do when folks grumble about the humble tumbleweed?

We can admire it. It represents a romantic representation of Texas and the West. As such it stands alongside the cowboy, the ten-gallon hat, wide open spaces, and everything good about Texas.

But we have to be honest (Texans admire honesty) and recognize tumbleweed as the hitchhiker it was and the invasive species it is. In modern Texas, where water is most precious, tumbleweed uses more than its fair share. So learn how to help stop its spread from the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service or at TexasInvasives.org — even while you dodge them in the highway or gather them up for holiday decor.

HUMBLE WEED The Russian thistle, Salsola tragus, earned the name “tumbleweed” after making its way from the Asian steppes to the American plains and lodging itself firmly in lore of Texas and the West.

TEXASINVASIVES.ORG is a partnership to manage non-native invasive plants and pests in Texas. The partnership includes state and federal agencies, conservation organizations, green industry, academia, and other private and public stakeholders who share in the common goal of protecting Texas from the threat of invasive species.

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Photo Courtesy Trammell Crow Collection

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Trail Drive

Deep In the art

Nazareth

E at s & D r i n ks

From San Patricio to Dublin to Shamrock, the Irish have left their mark on the Lone Star State.

After visiting Dallas’ Crow Collection, dine on Asian cuisine in the Arts District

In a Panhandle village of 300, some 150 local folk have staged a beloved Christmas pageant since 1972

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The Pluck of the Irish The Emerald Isle Comes to the Lone Star State

In this 1972 tempera painting by Bruce Marshall, Irish-born horse-trader and freebooter Philip Nolan watches Spanish soldiers approach his fort on a tributary of the Brazos River in north central Texas, 1801. | UTSA Special Collections

by Bob McCullough

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hen people from Irel and began populating Texas, they arrived packing courage, toughness, and resilience as a result of previous persecutions and domination by England. The newcomers encountered similar difficulties under Spanish colonial rule, yet they persevered and ultimately helped Texas win its independence.

“The first Irish settlers came in the eighteenth century,” says Joan Moody of San Antonio’s Harp & Shamrock Society of Texas, which celebrates Irish culture and contributions to the Lone Star State. “A major figure was Hugo Oconor (O’Connor), who was interim governor of Texas and who laid the cornerstone of Mission San José in San Antonio in 1758.”

Irish families settled throughout Texas in the days before the Texas Revolution, but a large percentage congregated in San Patricio and Refugio counties north and northeast of Corpus Christi. In honor of Ireland’s patron saint, surveyor William 60

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PLAINS TRAIL REGION TROPICAL TRAIL REGION

FORTS TRAIL REGION

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INDEPENDENCE TRAIL REGION

O’Docharty laid out the community of Villa de San Patricio de Hibernia, which was known simply as San Patricio. The Mexican government viewed the predominantly Catholic Irish as a neutralizer for the difficult-to-deal-with Anglo colonists, according to the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Institute of Texan Cultures (ITC), which includes an Irish exhibit among displays spotlighting contributions by nationalities that settled Texas.

Today, the 1855 McGloin Homestead, along the river north of Corpus Christi, stands as the only remaining empresario home. The Ed Rachal Foundation, the new owners of the property, in cooperation with the Corpus Christi Area Heritage Society, are developing plans to give periodic tours.

Contrary to the hopes of the Mexican government, the Irish ultimately joined other settlers in Texas’ struggle for independence. Eleven Irishmen died defending the Alamo in 1836, and approximately a hundred fought at the Battle of San Jacinto to secure Texas’ independence from Mexico. In the decades that followed, more Irish escaped to Texas to avoid economic woes and famine in their homeland. Recent Census informa-

tion indicates more than half a million Texans claim to have Irish ancestry.

“Irish culture is celebrated statewide, primarily on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17,” Moody says, “and there are Irish dance classes, music groups, Gaelic language groups and sports groups under the auspices of the Gaelic Athletic Association.”

FESTIVITIES AND FROLICS AROUND THE LONE STAR STATE In San Antonio, the Harp & Shamrock Society dyes the San Antonio River green and transforms the waterway into the River Shannon for a Saint Paddy’s Day parade, with floats that actually float. The Central Texas community of Dublin, proclaimed by the state legislature in 2005 as the “Irish Capital of Texas,” stages a celebration the Saturday before Saint Patrick’s Day. Festivities include a parade with Irish-themed floats and bands playing Irish music, an Irish stew cook-off, and a banquet with “Lucky to Live in Dublin” as the theme.

And Austin hosts a music-and-dancecentric celebration with authentic brews and bagpipes — but lacking in leprechauns.

Houston, home of the University of St. Thomas Center for Irish Studies,

Dallas | North Texas Irish Festival Fair Park, Dallas Fri.–Sun., March 6–8, 2020 www.ntif.org Shamrock | Texas Saint Patrick’s Day Celebration Fri.–Sun., March 13–15, 2020 facebook.com/shamrocktxspd shamrocktexas.net A festive parade starting at the intersection of Route 66 and U.S. Highway 83 winds downtown to the tallest historic water tower in Texas, as part of a weekend with games, beauty pageant, art and crafts, rodeo, car show, music, and more in this celebration first staged in 1938.

Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Celebration Downtown Dublin, Dublin Airport, Lucky Vines Vineyard and Winery Sat., March 14, 2020 dublintxchamber.com facebook.com/Dublin,TXChamberofCommerce “The Future is Bright in 2020 – Dublin Shines!” as the community’s St. Patrick Day festivities include a parade, Celtic entertainment, festive food, contests, classic cars, museum tours, “Day of Dub Pub,” Dublin airport activities, and a carnival—as well as happy hour at Lucky Vines Vineyard & Winery.

Houston St. Patrick’s Day Festival Luck of the Irish Pub Crawl Sat., March 14, 2020 San Antonio | Dyeing of the River Walk Sat.–Sun., March 14–15, 2020, 1–3 pm Two-and-a-half mile route along downtown River Walk www.thesanantonioriverwalk.com/events Each year since 1968 the River Walk is magically transformed into the River Shannon in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. A bagpiper plays on a barge as the river is transformed—and for those who can’t make it in person, the event is captured on Facebook Live.

IRISH ROOTS A 1936 Texas Centennial historical marker was installed at the James McGloin Home in San Patricio, Texas, on a site jointly managed today by the Ed Rachal Foundation and the Corpus Christi Area Heritage Society.

St. Patrick’s Day Austin Sun., March 15, 2020, noon to 6 pm 10621 Pioneer Farms Dr. Austin, TX 78754 stpatricksdayaustin.com The Celtic Cultural Center of Texas invites visitors to their annual display of Irish culture and pride, with music, dancing, and family fun.

University of St. Thomas Houston Center for Irish Studies stthom.edu/Academics/Centers-of-Excellence/Centerfor-Irish-Studies Harp & Shamrock Society www.harpandshamrock.org

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hosts one of the nation’s largest Irish parades, and since 1983, Dallas has held the North Texas Irish Festival, with emphasis on Irish music and dance. In the Panhandle community of Shamrock, the state’s official Saint Patrick’s Day Celebration includes a beard contest and the crowning of Miss Irish Rose. The Texas Folklife Festival in June at the ITC in San Antonio’s HemisFair Park also spotlights various elements of Irish culture.

“In 2014, Irish activities in Texas got a boost when the government of Ireland established a consulate in Austin,” Moody says. “Austin was chosen as site for the consulate because it’s the state capital and also the location of the University of Texas, a major player in the global computer industry.”

Today, Texas continues to admire and celebrate the determination to succeed that was imported by Emerald Islanders almost three centuries ago. Call it the pluck of the Irish.

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Tower Station and U-Drop Inn Café in Shamrock, Texas.

Visitors are welcome to the station, which is now operating as a visitor center, chamber of commerce office, and community center.

The Germans’ Journey to Boerne Adapted by Wendy Little from Bettie Edmonds’ “Journey to Boerne” “Colonel Bettie Edmonds,” wrote Robin Stauber in a 2018 newspaper tribute to the Kendall County historian and artist, “has pained our past.” A retired Air Force nurse and amateur archivist, Edmonds originally published the story of Boerne’s founding for the celebration of its sesquicentennial in 1999.

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n the 1840s German y was plagued with overpopulation. There was barely enough farmland to raise food for the masses because the Industrial Revolution was squeezing out the small farmers. Jobs were scarce, laborers were poorly paid, taxes were high, and there was widespread poverty. Most educated professionals were paid “in kind” with exchanges of food, clothing, and lodging.

The times saw political unrest, revolutions, military conscription, and the oppressive rule of the church. Young students, German writers, and intellectuals who dared to oppose the present system were imprisoned or forced into political exile. Such outspoken people wrote of the people’s rights to search for freedom and encouraged their fellow countrymen to flee.

One such writer who had a large following among the radical young German liberals was Ludwig Börne, a GermanJewish political writer and satirist. He was the first whose writings exclusively criticized the political order of Germany.

Although Börne died in 1837, his writings inspired many Germans to make the move to what was then the Republic of Texas.

It was in this time of chaos, in the early 1840s, that the

In the group photo of the Boerne Tacky Band, the performer with bass fiddle (middle front) is Max Beseler. | Dietert Historical Archives, Patrick Heath Public Library; photo loaned for digitization by Kevin Jay Meckel

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Adelsverein (Society of the Nobility) was founded to provide assistance and protection for the immigration of thousands of Germans to Texas. In 1844, the Adelsverein undertook the first large immigration by sailing ship. For many of the nobility, it meant leaving their titles and luxuries behind to face the unknown. There they would find a “gloriously promised future.” Three hundred twenty acres of land was promised free to families, 160 to single males over seventeen, plus transportation by ship, food, shelter, and transportation to the colony.

It took two months to cross the Atlantic, longer if storms or unusually calm weather prevailed. Most passengers were totally unprepared for the experiences. The ships were overcrowded and sanitary conditions were quite poor. Indianola and Galveston were the major ports in the Gulf, and both were used during the immigration. The first three ships from Germany arrived in 1844 in Indianola with 292 colonists.

Between October 1845 and April 1846, 36 ships brought over 5,000 immigrants.

During the largest German immigration of its history, the Republic of Texas joined the United States. In 1846, war broke out between the U.S. and Mexico and every form of transportation was confiscated by the U.S. Army. By this time, the Adelsverein was bankrupt and could not afford transportation, even if there was any. Wealthy immigrants who had deposited large amounts of money with the Adelsverein in Germany—with the understanding that it would be given on demand in Texas—were told that the money was not there. These immigrants endured great hardships because of this deception. Over 4,000 were left on the beach with virtually no shelter. Heat, rain, impure water, and contaminated food, along with exhaustion from the arduous journey, contributed to epidemics. Dysentery, typhoid, typhus, and malaria took the lives of 1,400 people that summer.

Weeks later, land was purchased

by Prince Carl-Solms, Adelsverein Commissioner General, about two hundred miles inland. While some immi64

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grants were too sick to move, others against all odds started the long walk, using oxen cart and wagons for their belongings, and leaving prized possessions behind on the beach as they made their way toward their new home, which they called New Braunfels after Braunfels, Germany. During the journey of several weeks, many immigrants continued to perish from disease, exposure, and starvation.

In truth, the Adelsverein was a poorly organized, uninformed, and badly underfinanced organization. Prince Carl-Solms mismanaged the inadequate funds and was $20,000 in debt when he asked to be relieved. He was eventually replaced by Baron Otfried Hans von Meusebach, a respected, practical, and organized man. Realizing the need to fan out to relieve congestion and the spread of disease, Meusebach chose a new site about 80 miles away and named it Fredericksburg, after Prince Frederick of Prussia.

The pioneers liked what they saw: rugged, verdant hills, crystal clear

German settler Nicolaus Zink at cabin, 1847 | Sophienburg Museum, New Braunfels

rivers, and streams and small valleys.

When the immigrants began to settle in the colonies, they gathered together where they could enjoy their common interests in music, literature, philosophy, and politics. At least five of these so-called “Latin Settlements’ were established, the largest being in Sisterdale.

It was said that practically every house had a library and the men gathered every evening for songs and political discussions in Latin. Disillusioned with almost everything, these German immigrants decided that “the quest for learning was the only occupation in the world.”

Think of these broadly contrasting sights to visitors of these “Free Thinkers”...coffee in a tin cup on a Dresden saucer...a Beethoven concert on a grand piano in a log cabin...a bookcase half filled with classics and the other half with sweet potatoes. Unfortunately, such Latin Settlements were not successful because these intellectuals knew nothing about farming or manual skills.

Later immigrants included more

working-class farmers, bakers, butchers, and craftsmen who knew how to work and get things done. Other groups started fanning out to settle more sites beyond the Hill Country German belt stretching to the east in Kerrville, Mason, and Hondo, and by the 1880s German ethnic-islands dotted north central, northern, and western Texas.

As time went on the immigrants also became more diverse, including groups of Wends, Mennonites, and Alsatians.

One Latin Settlement along the Llano River was named Bettina after a female radical thinker. After this colony failed in 1849, five intellectuals organized a group on a communistic farm named Tusculum. Like Bettina, it broke up after a year, but some of the men stayed on as early settlers, and in 1849 Gustav Theissen and John James platted the land and named the town Boerne, after Ludwig Börne (doing away with the inflected vowel and employing American spelling).

The town of Boerne quickly developed as businesses became organized.

Stagecoach routes began to go west and in 1856, the first post office and stage stop was opened. Many of Boerne’s first businesses were established by William Dietert and included a sawmill, gristmill, blacksmith shop, livery stable, butcher shop, general store, and saloon.

The first homes were log cabins with thatched roofs, but since limestone was so abundant, the pioneers learned that it could be easily quarried nearby for building homes and businesses. Skilled rock masons built structures which remain today as historic sites.

Another developing town nearby was Comfort. In 1852, Ernst Altgelt established a gristmill there as a first business, just as Dietert had in Boerne. The town was settled by Altgelt and a group of “free thinkers” who quite openly left Germany to escape religious persecution. Between 1852 to 1892, no churches were built in Comfort, and no prayers were allowed. Neither were churches allowed within the town of Boerne.

Folklore tells of a sign supposedly posted along Cibolo Creek indicating that

GERMAN LIFEWAYS Harz Family (top) | Patrick Heath Public Library

Treue der Union Monument, Comfort (above, bottom) Comfort Chamber of Commerce

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preachers caught in town after sundown would be shot.

By the time of the Civil War, German settlers signed an oath of loyalty to the United States though they were now living in a Southern Confederate state.

Their decisions of whether to support the North or the South in the battle created rifts that divide German families even today. Many Germans came to Texas to avoid war and now were forced to make a choice. They were also anti-slavery, thus anti-Confederate. The story of the Treue der Union Monument in Comfort, the only monument dedicated to Union soldiers below the MasonDixon Line, brings home the intense German feelings during the Civil War. Following the war, families concentrated their efforts toward the peaceful existence they had originally sought. It was a struggle to survive because economic conditions were poor. Another problem plaguing the settlers was the Indians, who were quite active in the area until about 1872. Some of the first burials in the Boerne Cemetery were the Bickel family, who were massacred by Indians in 1865.

In the early days, trips to San Antonio for supplies took a full day oneway by horse and buggy or oxen wagon from Boerne, and when the stagecoach came it was still a grueling seven-hour trip. In 1887, the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad (SA & AP) brought the first train from San Antonio. In the 1960s the advent of Interstate 10 provided easy accessibility to the German towns across the Texas Hill Country.

During the 1990s and 2000s the population of these Hill Country communities had grown exponentially, as others coveted the rugged beauty of the land just as the early settlers did. The fields are disappearing as new developments emerge from old German homesteads of the early immigration. At the very core of the Texas Hill Country’s distinctive character and culture is its unique history of the struggles and the courage of the immigrant families to make it their new home.Â

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Costumes of the Americas Museum Brownsville’s colorful collection reflects the heriage of the Pan American Union Photographs and story by Valerie D. Bates

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celebr ation of color, shape, and texture greets the view of visitors to a unique cultural experience in Brownsville: the eye-popping Costumes of the Americas Museum.

Inspired by a spirit of cooperation and understanding among countries going back to roots in the Pan American Union (today’s Organization of American States), the museum opened in 2005 in Brownsville’s Mitte Cultural Education Center.

Topical in that it is all things textile, and geographical in that it is based on the Pan American Union, the museum collects, catalogs, preserves, and exhibits authentic indigenous textiles, accessories, and folk arts of the Americas for the enjoyment and education of the public.

The core of its collection of more than 600 complete costumes and thousands more pieces of hand-woven textiles, lace, velvets, cottons, and leather articles was the inspiration of Bessie Kirkland Johnson, a U.S. expatriate in the 1930s. Johnson’s Pan American Round Table (PART) group, like other such women’s round tables that had flourished since the origin of the pan-American movement in the 1910s, sought

Costume of the Americas Museum

Located in the Mitte Cultural Education Center #5 Dean Porter Park 501 Ringgold St. Brownsville, TX 78520 (956) 547-6890

cotam.net

Hours Sundays noon–4 p.m.

Mondays noon–5 p.m.

(Summer and Spring Break only; closed Mondays during the school year) Tuesday–Saturday 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

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PAN AMERICAN The Costume of the Americas Museum has its origins in the Pan American Round Table (PART) group of Bessie Kirkland Johnson, a U.S. expatriate in the 1930s.

to share harmony and appreciate diverse cultures among nations of the western hemisphere.

Today the Costumes of the Americas Museum brings together one of the finest costume assemblages in the Western Hemisphere, representing twenty-one countries. Exhibits and panels identify the country of origin and interpret each indigenous costume.

Among many points of pride, the museum’s inventory, spanning seventy years of collecting, contains the charro outfit for the director of the first annual Charro Days held in Brownsville in 1938. Each costume and each piece are carefully catalogued and preserved and cared for by a museum administrator and a volunteer board with a passion

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PAN AMERICAN The Costume of the Americas Museum has its origins in the Pan American Round Table (PART) group of Bessie Kirkland Johnson, a U.S. expatriate in the 1930s.

for the city’s culture and history and the special community events that define the City of Brownsville.

With a lifelong interest in Latin American textiles, Carmen Lita Pashos has been a member of the Pan American Round Table since 1964 and served as the museum’s director and costume chairman. “I enjoy helping educate our community on the interesting histories behind the wonderful traditional textiles and costumes of all the Americas,” said Pashos, “and I am pleased to help preserve their cultural value for future generations.”

Part of that mission also includes guided tours, narrated costume revues, and educational presentations.

This museum’s expression of textiles in a cultural and historical context is breathtaking. Museum board chair and volunteer Norma McKnight has favorites—those in the Guatemala and Honduras collections for their “intensity of color,” she says. This year’s exhibit, “The Pan American Union; A Showcase of National Treasures in Textiles,” draws

visitors into the gallery to take in a brilliantly hued array.

The world’s oldest international organization representing a region of the world, the Pan American Union was formed from the First International Conference of American States, in 1890. The twenty-one original member countries were all located in the Western Hemisphere; all were former European colonies; and all had fought for and won their independence. They promoted commercial cooperation, and arbitration as alternatives to war.

Currently, costumes of the original Pan American Union countries are on display beneath their flags in the museum’s gallery. The array of garments reflects a history of vibrant colors, painstakingly created patterns of beads and threadwork, and rich textures.

Located in the Mitte Cultural District, the Costumes of the Americas Museum shares a building with the Children’s Museum of Brownsville.

Self-guided and narrated tours are available.

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Crow Museum of Asian Art of the University of Texas at Dallas

2010 Flora St., in the Dallas Arts District, Dallas, TX 75201 (214) 979-6430

crowcollection.org Hours

Tuesday–Sunday 11 am–5 pm Closed Mondays Admission to the museum is free, but suggested donations of $7 for adults and $5 for seniors can be made by cash or credit card.

A Cultural Collection of Asian Treasures Dallas’ Trammell Crow Collection of Asian Art

by Patty Bushart

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An exquisite collection of Asian art from Trammell and Margaret Crow on permanent display in the museum, including its sculpture garden and traveling exhibits on temporary display.

Dallas Arts District dallasartsdistrict.org Visit Dallas visitdallas.com

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Dallas real estate tycoon who never had the chance to attend college and his wife of sixty-six years, Trammell and Margaret Crow endowed their native city with a singular collection of Asian art that today is one of the most popular destinations in the Dallas Arts District.

The Crows purchased their first piece of Asian art in the mid-1960s. During their world travels they acquired other works, assembling an impressive collection along the way. In 1998 the pavilion at the downtown Trammell Crow Center, headquarters of the firm said to have once held interests in more than 300 million square feet of developed property nationwide, was renovated to house the Crow Collection of Asian Art, dedicated to the arts and cultures of China, Japan, India, and Southeast Asia.

The museum today houses two permanent collections, one showcasing the art and culture of Japanese samurai and an exhibit titled “Immortal Landscapes: Jade from the Collection,” featuring objects depicting nature and all forms of Chinese symbolism and daily life. Current holdings represent the ancient to the contemporary, from the nations of China, Japan, India, Korea, Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar, and the Philippines.

The museum has three traveling exhibits currently on display. “Hands and Earth: Contemporary Japanese Ceramics” is set to close January 5, 2020; “The Art of Lacquer” is open now through May 3, 2020; and a vast exhibit of painting, poetry, carving, and calligraphy by a contemporary master of classical Chinese art titled “Future Retrospective: Master Shen-Long” remains on display through August 22, 2020.

DON’T MISS If your visit to the Crow Museum has you in the mood for udon and sake, you’re in luck with a range of Asian eateries near the Dallas Arts District.

Black Ship Little Katana 665 S. Lamar St., #130 Japanese, Korean, and American fare meet Asian-inspired cocktails in a warm, wood-lined space Fine China 1914 Commerce St. A hip eatery with vintage prints and mid-century furnishings, offering elevated Chinese cuisine and cocktails Musume 2330 Flora St., Ste. 100 Sushi and contemporary Asian fusion dished in a beautiful darkwood dining room with colorful murals Sapa House 1623 Main St., #102 A laid-back Vietnamese spot for pho, sushi, sake, and cocktails served late, plus quaint sidewalk patio Zenna 300 N. Akard St. A modern setting for classic Thai and Japanese fare, including sushi and celebrated happy-hour deals Five Sixty by Wolfgang Puck 300 Reunion Blvd. E. Views and floor-to-ceiling windows complement refined Asian fare and sushi from the celebrity chef Nobu Dallas 400 Crescent Court noburestaurants.com/dallas Asian Fusion restaurant in the heart of the Arts District, with bar and lounge featuring cocktails and sushi bar

ART OF ASIA Sculptural and twodimensional works in the Trammell Crow collections include The Real of Shen-Long 2010 wood seal carving and print by Master ShenLong, from his personal collection.

Guardian Lion, Nepal, Shah Dynasty. Tall Neck Jar, from the Jerry Lee Musslewhite Collection of Korean Art. Warrior, China, Qing Dynasty. On page 70, Buddha, Lin Yonggang. | Patty Bushart

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It Takes a Village Nazareth’s Long-running Christmas Pageant Returns December 22–23 Story and photographs by Jim Steiert

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ome De ce mber , the place to intimately know Christmas and all of its meaning is the tiny Texas Panhandle German and Irish Catholic village of Nazareth, 76 miles southwest of Amarillo. This rural community dates to 1902, and a large portion of its populace of all ages is involved in some way in telling the story of Christmas and the birth of the child it celebrates.

In a town of some 300 souls, the Nazareth Christmas Pageant is a source of community pride and common purpose for residents who first created and staged it nearly half a century ago.

With life in Nazareth revolving around the historic Holy Family Church, it’s not surprising that multiple generations in this community named for Jesus Christ’s Galilean hometown 72

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have, for decades, poured themselves into presenting a Christmas pageant depicting the birth and childhood of Christ.

The locally written pageant was first produced in 1972, filled with home-crafted music and props for a lavish presentation of the Christmas story in 14 scenes and 14 songs. It was performed intermittently 16 times from 1972 to 1994, then languished in prolonged hiatus until 2009, when it was revived with performances through 2015.

Following another three-year hiatus,

DON’T MISS Nazareth Christmas Pageant Sunday, Dec. 22 and Monday, Dec. 23, 2019 7:30 p.m.

Holy Family Catholic Church, 210 Saint Joseph St., Nazareth, TX 79063 (806) 452-3140 No charge for admission; donations welcome

Lisa Schulte (left), who helped revive the Nazareth Christmas Pageant in 2009 and has directed each pageant since, works in coordinating music and narration from the choir loft of Holy Family Church in Nazareth during the 2015 pageant. Below, Melina Birkenfeld and her infant son, Ian, appeared in the 2009 revival of the Nazareth Christmas pageant, which renewed a holiday tradition in the village.

A PAGEANT IS BORN The Castro County News of December 13, 1973, published the first photos of the Nazareth Christmas Pageant, staged for a second year. Wise men Bernard Wethington, the late Johnny Schacher, and Weldon Wilhelm were depicted at the humble manger scene with Mary portrayed by Mary Lou Schmucker and Joseph by Leonard Schulte.

Above: The Castro County News published a dramatic advance photo of the pageant in December 1974, showing the distinctive look of the firefighter helmets the soldier headgear was made from. The lantern was “a fruit jar-and-funnel affair,” while the rear soldier is carrying a shield fashioned from a garbage can lid shield.

Portraying soldiers are Kent Birkenfeld (foreground) and the late Claude Annen (background). Above, center: This scene is from a 2015 performance of the pageant.

the High Plains is in luck as on December 22 and 23, 2019, the 21st anniversary performances of the Nazareth Christmas Pageant will be staged in the community’s elegant church with performances at 7:30 each evening. Church seating is on a first-come basis for the pews that seat just over 700, so arriving early is advised.

Nazareth’s first Christmas Pageant brought to fruition a notion of the late Father Stanley Crocchiola, well-loved former pastor, that Nazareth, named for Jesus Christ’s biblical hometown, should share a staged drama with the Panhandle. Father Stanley worked with the late Donna Benke Birkenfeld, a

homegrown and gifted writer and musician. Father Stanley wrote a script, and worked with Birkenfeld to select music.

Birkenfeld composed two of the songs that are an enduring part of the pageant, the chilling “Soldier Search” that accompanies a foray into the audience by burly soldiers on a quest for innocent infants, and “Magnificat.” Noreen Kleman Carson, who directed the fifth through eighth pageants, wrote the music “Chosen by God.” Father Stanley’s art students painted stage backdrops to depict a temple, open fields outside of Bethlehem harboring WINTER 2019

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Left: Angels surround the nativity site in a scene from the 2015 production of the pageant. Angel garb has changed through the years of the production; in 2019 child angels will be wearing wings that were upgraded for the most recent pageants.

Matt Overa (below) carried on a family tradition as his father before him when he portrayed a wise man in the revival of the Nazareth Christmas pageant in 2009.

shepherds, and the humble manger site in Bethlehem. The late Ernie and Florine Brockman between them coordinated participants, costuming, seamstresses, electricians, lighting, funding, and advertising for the original pageant.

Through the years generations of parish families have served as choir and musicians, set and lighting crew, costumers, carpenters, welders, electricians, actors, and narrators in the can-do manner of rural farm folk.

While the pageant was staged annually from 1972 to 1982, the exhausting effort required caused it to be performed intermittently from 1984 to 1994, and then a fifteen-year hiatus ensued. The pageant, an heirloom event, was revived in 2009 when community residents realized a generation of Castro County youngsters had grown up without experiencing it. Alternating-year performances were adopted through 2015, with a year off in 2017. This Christmas season is an “on” year for the production.

This year, over 150 parishioners from multiple generations will herald the story of Christmas, depicting a progression of events from the annunciation to Mary by the Angel Gabriel in the Galilean village of Nazareth through the 74

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birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, the appearance of an angelic host to shepherds huddled around a campfire, a visit by wise men (adorned in robes made from priest vestments and communion railing cloth), the flight of the holy family to Egypt, and their eventual return to Nazareth, where Jesus spent his boyhood.

Music, pantomime, and narration intermingle to relate the story, enhanced by lighting emitted from slide-projector spotlights filtering light through slides made of washers that dictate the size of the spot of light. Handmade costuming and scenes created by gifted hometown artists and craftsmen move the story along, and hosts of sparkly-winged child angels enhance numerous scenes.

Many of the women who are working on this year’s pageant portrayed angels in their own childhood. Sharon Brockman (who serves as choir director), Jim Hoelting, Delores Heiman, and Kathy Birkenfeld, who are all involved in this year’s production, are veterans of all twenty previous stagings of the pageant.

As always, the presentation is faithful to the original productions in 1972 and 1973. Directors of this year’s pageant are Nicole Schulte and Lisa Schulte. Patti Kern serves as an assistant director.

Special staging to enhance the viewing experience for those in attendance was crafted by parishioners.

From the instant the lights dim and the opening organ chords prompted by the fingers of the talented Mary Lynn Wilhelm Olvera herald “Welcome, welcome, child of Bethlehem, welcome newly-born king,” guests at Nazareth’s Christmas Pageant will feel that gracious greeting and the warmth of this unique community effort welling within.

Rest ye merry travelers, the pageant’s scenes and songs will be faithfully rendered, fully inspiring, and well worth a holiday pilgrimage to the village of Nazareth.

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Eats & D r i n ks

Green Pastures at Green’s Sausage House German and Czech Immigrants Established Cultural Roots That Thrive Today

by Coleman Hampton

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n eastern Bell County, Green’s Sausage House is a veritable institution. Located in the small community of Zabcikville (on Texas 53, thirteen miles east of Temple), the local eatery and market has served visitors from across the state since 1946.

The restaurant, bakery, and meat market highlight Green’s Czech roots, a heritage that runs deep throughout the county.

The history of Zabcikville and Green’s Sausage House are closely linked. In 1923, Frank Zabcik bought the only saloon and 76

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general store in town and tied his name to the community. After the construction of Texas highway 53 in 1932, Zabcik built a service station and café. Jerome and Della Green began managing the café in 1946.

Once Mr. Green began making sausage from a Czech family recipe, the café’s reputation quickly spread.

The popularity of Jerome’s traditional Czech sausage would come as no surprise to residents of eastern Bell County, many of whom boast Czech heritage. Beginning in the late 1800s, Czech farming families

YOU NEVER SAUSAGE A PLACE The cured-meat selection at Green’s rivals any in the state; pickles and other preserved goods are available, too. | Coleman Hampton photos

DON’T MISS Temple Chamber of Commerce templechamber.com Czech Heritage Museum and Genealogy Center 119 W. French Ave. Temple, TX 76501 (254) 899-2935

czechheritagemuseum.org Tuesday–Saturday, 10a.m.–4 p.m.

were attracted to the rich, loamy soil of the region’s blackland prairie. Over time, immigration through the port of Galveston solidified Czech populations in Central Texas. That heritage can still be seen in the Temple SPJST Home Office, the Czech Heritage Museum and Genealogy Center, and Green’s Sausage House.

Both the café and market offer an enormous array of mouth-watering options. Upon entering the expansive ranch-style building, visitors are greeted by a meat market that rivals any in the state. It features forty-four items, including braunschweiger and knackwurst sausage, smoked jowl bacon, scrapple, and smoked hocks, along with more traditional fare such as smoked turkeys and hams. (On a personal note, my wife and I purchased our first Thanksgiving turkey from Green’s Sausage House several years ago, and a new family tradition was born after the first bite.) When you visit, friendly employees are always eager to help you find the best selection for any occasion.

The bakery and grocery at Green’s have all the additional fixings you need for a true Texan dinner. Green’s freshly baked bread, fifteen varieties of fruit kolaches, nine options for meat-filled kolaches, and a wide assortment of cheeses keep the customers rolling into this rural eatery.

If you’re a first-time customer, don’t fill up on kolaches before visiting the café for a famous Green’s sausage burger. Visitors come in droves for the sausage burger. The smoked sausage patty, served on a fresh bun with mustard and all the fixings, is a delicious combination of flavors. Rumor has it that a cold Shiner Bock is the perfect complement for this unique burger.

Locals and out-of-towners alike enjoy the laid-back, homey atmosphere of Green’s restaurant. The ten-table dining room and neon beer sign hanging on the wall bring home this truly Texan dining and grocery experience. The history of this eastern Bell County eatery is authentic; its traditions and the food are as genuine as the people.

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Beehive Brothers Iranian-born Esfandiarys serve up traditional West Texas fare with the best of them

OLD WEST BUZZ The rustic walls and boardwalk of the original Beehive Restaurant & Saloon, in Albany, Texas, hark back to the frontier days of old Fort Griffin. | beehivesaloon.com

by Loretta Fulton

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li and Nariman Esfandiary may not sound like typical Texas names, but try telling that to the thousands of more-than-satisfied diners who have chowed down on the duo’s chicken fried steak, ribeyes, pork chops, and so much more at one of the Beehive restaurants owned by the Iranian natives.

“As Texas As Longhorns,” Southern Living magazine once proclaimed.

“This restaurant in the windswept West Texas town of Albany is the best country steakhouse in the state,” Texas Monthly boasted.

Today, there are two Beehive Restaurants to rave about. The original opened in Albany, located about thirty-five miles northeast of Abilene, in 1982. The Esfandiary brothers later added a second restaurant in Abilene in a building that was renovated to resemble the original.

Both locations serve as the perfect spots to celebrate Texas history, great food, and an appreciation of the immigrants who have added to the state’s cultural and 78

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Visit Abilene abilenevisitors.com Visit Albany albanytexas.com Beehive Restaurant Abilene 442 Cedar St. Abilene, TX 79601 (325) 675-0600

Albany 517 U.S. Highway 180 Albany, TX 76430 (325) 762-3034 Lunch, dinner, and catering

beehivesaloon.com

LICENSE TO SERVE Restaurateurs Ali and Nariman Esfandiary may have decorated the original Beehive’s walls with Texas memorabilia — but patrons have eagerly added dollar bills.

culinary diversity from its beginning.

Both Esfandiary brothers will tell you that that have been graciously and enthusiastically welcomed to this stretch of Texas since they arrived.

“We didn’t have any problems,” Nariman, the younger brother, said.

And it’s no wonder. Both brothers did military service at Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene after leaving their home country. Ali arrived in America first in 1968, at age 17, and Nariman followed in 1972. Their parents, Jamshid and Rosa Esfandiary, were becoming concerned about the political unrest in Iran and began thinking about how the family of six could leave the country. Jamshid had close family ties to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. When things began unraveling for the Shah, Jamshid and Rosa

started planning.

Ali was sent to San Jose, California, and started college. He also worked illegally at night in restaurants and hotels.

When he was threatened with deportation, Ali left for Kansas City, Missouri, and started college again, working quietly on the side. Eventually, all the family left Iran and settled in Kansas City. Ali met his future wife, Patty, there.

Looking for a better life, Ali enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed at Dyess. After four years of military service—and earning his American citizenship—Ali left the military.

Both Ali and Patty worked at various jobs until coming across a restaurant that was for sale in Albany, the Fort Griffin Merchandise Restaurant and Beehive Saloon. They bought the restaurant and became culinary stars in Albany—and eventually well beyond.

Nariman later joined the enterprise, and the rest is history.

But the brothers’ history is just part of the heritage of the two Beehive restaurants. The original in Albany is located at the site of a general merchandise store and saloon that served historic Fort Griffin near Albany and the town that grew up around it. The bar in the Albany restaurant was the old soda fountain in the store.

“The Beehive Saloon was a very famous saloon back in the day,” Nariman said. “All the outlaws used to hang out there.”

“Infamous” might be a better word.

The saloon was well known for the upstairs “pleasure house” and drew legendary names like Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, according to a Texas historical marker.

Today, both Beehive Restaurants are known for outstanding food and service, charming decor, and the welcoming smiles from the owners. The experience has been great so far, and the owners expect it to only get better.

“Every day is a new day,” Nariman said.

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T e xas H i s to r i ca l Co m i s s i o n

T e xas originals

T e x a s S tat e L i b r a ry & Archives

T e xas d ow n tow n a s s o c i at i o n

Maps and documents trace the history of immigration to Texas

From log cabin to doll house in historic Seguin

Kreische Brewery and Monument Hill State Historic Sites beckon in Fayette County

Dr. Malouf Abraham’s family hailed from Lebanon, his wife’s from Boston. Together they’ve transformed Canadian

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TEXAS HISTORICAL COMMISSION

Finding Fayette County German and Czech Immigrants Established Cultural Roots That Thrive Today

by Andy Rhodes and Rob Hodges

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lance at a Fayette County map, and you’ll see German and Czech community names dotting the landscape. Schulenburg was named for a German land donor, Roznov honors a Czechoslovakian hometown, and Flatonia is the namesake of German immigrant Friedrich Flato.

German pioneers immigrated to Spanish Texas in the 1830s, fleeing religious and political persecution and seeking economic opportunities. Over the years, especially after the Civil War, their immigration numbers increased exponentially in the Lone Star State. By the end of the 19th century, Germans were the largest European immigrant group in Texas. They settled dozens of towns and influenced nearly every aspect of Texas culture, including business, politics, music, religion, food, and education. When Czechs began immigrating to Texas in the 1850s, they gravitated toward German communities due to the cultural similarities.

Many of these settlements are in Fayette County. The Texas Czech Heritage and Cultural Center is located in La Grange, one of the state’s most significant Czech-based communities. The museum includes a replica of a Czech village, with several homes depicting the lifestyle of immigrant Czech families. The 1870s Hoelscher residence houses the Polka Lovers Club of Texas Museum with vintage instruments and memorabilia, and the restored Migl House includes family heirlooms and photos.

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BEER BLUFF German immigrant Heinrich Ludwig Kreische built a three-story house (right) on 172 acres south of LaGrange and, in 1860, began building a brewery. By 1879, it was the third largest brewing operation in Texas, with its flagship product being “Kreische’s Bluff Beer,” inspired by the dramatic overlook (below) on the property.

At the center of this Texas Main Street city is the Fayette County Courthouse, a grand 1891 Romanesque Revival structure designed by master courthouse architect J. Riely Gordon and restored in 2005 as part of the Texas Historical Commission’s (THC) Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program. Among the notable historic businesses on and around the often-bustling square are two with German and Czech ties: Prause Meat Market and Luka’s Bakery, both recipients of the THC’s Texas Treasure Business Award.

A reminder of German heritage in the area is the THC’s Kreische Brewery State Historic Site, which contains remnants of the Bluff Beer brewing operation started by German immigrant Heinrich Ludwig Kreische in the 1860s. The property also features a monument marking the tomb of men who died in the 1842 Dawson Massacre and ill-fated Mier expedition. The THC’s Monument Hill State Historic Site is located on a picturesque bluff on the Kreische property.

Perhaps most often associated with Czech heritage in Texas are the remarkable Painted Churches. Several Fayette County churches feature brilliant sky-blue ceilings and gold-leafed detailing surrounding shiny marble columns. A scenic driving tour through rolling hills and farmland surrounding Schulenburg includes St. Mary’s Church of the Assumption in Praha, St. John the Baptist Catholic Church WINTER 2019

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in Ammannsville, Saints Cyril and Methodius Church in Dubina, and St. Mary’s Catholic Church in High Hill.

Fayette County’s German and Czech heritage is also proudly displayed in its dance halls. Among the most notable remaining structures is the 1894 Sengelmann Hall in Schulenberg, an impressive building that was meticulously restored to feature its original plank flooring, carved marble pillars, and pressed tin ceilings. Just a few miles away is Swiss Alp Dance Hall, a 1900-era venue. Located on a prairie near La Grange is the rustic-yet-endearing Freyburg Hall. Like Swiss Alp, the 108-year-old hall has a Texas-flag painting on an exterior wall that has become a distinctive draw for explorers and Instagrammers.

To learn more about cultural heritage in Fayette County and the entire state, visit the THC’s texastimetravel.com.

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Sites of German and Czech heritage in Fayette County include St. Mary’s Church of the Assumption (right and below left) and Luka’s Bakery (below right).

LEGACY

One Patient at a Time, One Painting at a Time

o r i g i nals

Malouf and Therese Abraham have made their homes in Canadian, Texas, sanctuaries of art. Barbara Brannon | Texas Plains Trail

The Abrahams of Canadian trust in art “to make the world a better place”

by Barbara Brannon

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n an October afternoon among tree-lined heights of Canadian, Texas, a hint of fall in the air puts one in mind of the legendary cedar forests of the eastern Mediterranean. Perhaps it’s a stretch to compare this Panhandle river valley to the Orontes, but a visit to the stately home of Malouf and Therese Abraham draws my imagination to faraway places.

Only two generations back, Malouf’s ancestors were born in Lebanon and Syria.

Therese’s were Irish Catholics in Boston. Together in Canadian the couple have made a uniquely American life—and a uniquely Texan one.

The story of how their paths crossed, and how these two aficionados brought their aptitudes and acquisitions to transform a city of less than 3,000 into a model arts community, is a multi-generational story of migration across place and culture.

COMING TO CANADIAN Canadian, a railroad-and-ranching town and seat of Hemphill County, has always been a place apart, though.

When Malouf Abraham’s grandfather Na’im Ibrahim Ma’alouf, a “rag merchant”

FAMILY ALBUM Malouf Abraham’s parents, Malouf Sr. (“Oofie”) and Iris Lewis Abraham (above), set an example of philanthropy in Canadian and Hemphill County, where Malouf Sr’s father, Na’im, first set up shop as a clothing merchant (page 86). | Abraham family photograph collection

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o r i g i nals stuff, not the fruit. “She didn’t care about the grapes.”

The second generation of Abrahams were generous, too, giving much of their good fortune to philanthropic causes.

The third generation, says Malouf, developed career interests quite different from carpets and ready-to-wear lines.

Malouf pursued medical studies, while Bill Ed chose banking. Malouf’s medical internship took him to Greensboro, North Carolina, where his next chapter would begin.

looking to escape Ottoman oppression roiling his region of Lebanon in 1912, brought his sample case full of fabric wares west from Amarillo, the housewives of Hemphill were the first along the route to cotton to his goods. Many kept homes in town though their husbands ranched on the broken lands along the Candian River. Elegant linens, lace tablecloths, and fine scarves suited their tastes.

“They wanted fancy stuff,” says Malouf, his fine physician’s fingers gesturing in the air as though drawing out a shawl for a prospective buyer’s appraisal.

Within a year Na’im had set up shop on Canadian’s Main Street near the Santa Fe depot. The Fair Store sold clothing in the front and provided living quarters in the back. Thus equipped, Na’im sent for his wife and two young sons—who had no lack of trouble getting through Ellis Island under the family name of Ma’louf when the patriarch had already anglicized his to Nahim Abraham.

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The Abrahams preserved the lost surname, bestowing it on their first U.S.-born son, Malouf, known lifelong as “Oofie” for his childhood pronunciation. Oofie fit right into life in the Texas Panhandle, in due time marrying a descendant of early Hemphill County settlers and making a splash in oil and gas leases. Oofie and Iris gave the family name again to their eldest son, Malouf, Junior.

By then the first Abrahams had built an impressive three-story home in town, where they grew flowers in front and vegetables in back. And on the feast night of St. George, they invited friends and neighbors for a meal followed by a giant bonfire in the alley. Fatayer, kibbe balls, tabouli are some of the piquant dishes his grandmother served, Malouf recalls. “She ordered olive oil and pine nuts in bulk from the Europa Market in New York City, ingredients you couldn’t get in Canadian,” he says. She’d asked a local nursery, however, where to get vines to plant—only for the leaves to

A MARRIAGE MADE IN MEDICINE Therese Browne’s father had come to the Appalachian foothills town of Mount Airy, North Carolina, to manage the world’s largest open-faced granite quarry. White granite from Mount Airy had been prized for decades for street curbing and civic buildings, monuments and mausoleums. Fourteen miles from the Blue Ridge Parkway on the Virginia line, the city was known for its fall foliage, old-time music, and fine furniture-making; it would soon come to be known as the inspiration for television’s Mayberry, setting for The Andy Griffith Show.

Mount Airy was the real-life hometown of the series’ star, who was ten years older than Therese.

Therese chose a career in nursing that brought her into contact with many up-and-coming doctors. But she’d never met one with the personality of Malouf.

Malouf would soon return to Texas to complete his medical training at Southwestern Medical School in Dallas.

By 1963 he and Therese had both secured posts in Dallas, at the city’s largest health-care facility at the time, Parkland Hospital. They were engaged to be married at the end of the year.

One evening in November, the couple went out for an date on the down, to a trendy spot called Ruby’s Carousel Club.

A little over a week later, Therese lined up along Lemmon Avenue with scores of other people craning for a glimpse of President Kennedy’s motorcade making its way from Fort Worth on a rare visit to Texas. Malouf, who was down for a twelve-hour Friday shift at

the hospital, couldn’t make it.

When word of a shooting spread through the break room beside the trauma unit where Malouf was about to grab a quick lunch, he set his tray down where he stood. “I never sat down.

I ran,” he remembers. Treatment of Kennedy’s injuries, and those of Texas governor John Connally, was already under way, and there was little for Malouf to do but watch and pray. He opened the back door to the ambulance bay and saw the black Lincoln convertible rushed there by the Secret Service moments before. “What I remember,” Malouf said of the moment that remains vivid in his mind today, “was flowers and blood.”

Malouf’s professor and Parkland’s chief of neurosurgery, Dr. Kemp Clark, pronounced the president dead at one o’clock in the afternoon.

AIR FORCE PHYSICIAN, SMALL-TOWN DOCTOR Malouf and Therese’s wedding took place December 28, but the groom would soon be caught up in another crisis. Not long after the recovering Gov. Connally conferred the doctor of medicine degree on him, Malouf received

The Citadelle Art Foundation in Canadian grew out of the home Malouf and Therese Abraham, restored from a former Baptist church.

his military draft notice. He served four years in the Air Force medical corps during the Vietnam conflict, given charge of an allergy clinic in which he cared for soldiers suffering from respiratory ailments.

Captain Malouf Abraham developed homeopathic vaccines to inject minute amounts of allergens into his patients to stimulate their immune systems.

For his work he was awarded the Air Force Commendation Medal, and after completing his tour of duty returned to Canadian to establish a successful medical clinic. There he continued to develop improved allergy remedies. By the time he retired in 2001, reported Lubbock’s KCBD-TV, some “46,000 people had traveled from around the country to the tiny Panhandle town to be treated.”

TURNING POINTS IN COLLECTION AND PRESERVATION Investments and inventions had been kind to the Abrahams, to be sure.

But back in the early 1970s they still had young children to raise, and Dr. Abraham had a practice to build.

On a trip to New York City, Malouf and Therese had no expectation of acquiring a major work of art. A famous

magazine illustration by Norman Rockwell, “First Day of School,” spoke to them. Perhaps it was the confluence of themes that resonated with the couple, from public education to blossoming romance to student sheepishness. The painting they purchased launched a passion for collecting that would occupy many more trips to New York and beyond, and a commitment to exhibiting fine art for public edification and enjoyment.

Five years later the Abrahams made a large purchase back home in Canadian that had their neighbors wondering if they’d taken leave of their senses.

Now, Malouf and Therese have made some unusual acquisitions: Gerard Byrne’s jazzy “Light Revelry” alongside a Leyendecker “Madonna and Child.” A Melvin Warren horseback scene, juxtaposed with serene Joseph Stella watercolors. Sensuous works by Viktorija Buklava. And quite a few more Rockwells.

But nothing like rescuing a desanctified church building, complete with Ionic columns, curved balcony, and soaring leaded-glass windows, that was facing the wrecking ball.

The 1910 landmark on Sixth Street at Nelson Avenue became the Abrahams’ home. Resurrected with extensive renovations and rechristened the Citadelle Mansion, the 8,000-square-foot structure became both family residence and art gallery. And when, in 2007, Malouf and Therese were ready to move into more traditional quarters, they simply trucked their personal possessions right down the street to another historic home, Hill Crest, while leaving the art collection behind for visitors’ appreciation.

Therese calls my attention to the many mature trees that line their street and other quarters of Canadian.

Serving on the area’s Regional Planning Commission and observing that the water table in the valley allowed for trees to flourish more readily than in other Panhandle towns, she and Malouf began a tradition of giving away seedlings—more than two hundred each WINTER 2019

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spring, and numbering more than five thousand throughout Canadian by now.

A GIFT OF ART The Citadelle Art Foundation today occupies the former church as well as a purpose-built gallery for touring exhibitions, the Iris and Oofie Abraham Gallery. Gardens and gift shop enhance the site as well. Not many months past, the board of the Texas Plains Trail Region, hosted by Citadelle director and Plains Trail board member Wendie Cook, were privileged to deliberate and discuss business in the gallery as five-hundred-year-old portraits by Rembrandt himself looked on.

My favorite of the treasures housed in the Citadelle’s permanent collection, however, is a sumptuous oil by J. C. Leyendecker, quintessential immigrant illustrator. The “Couple Descending a Staircase” he painted for an Arrow

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Collar advertisement captures the baroque glamour and geometric rhythm of the Jazz Age. It is as American as Rockwell but as exotic as any of the Bouguereaus on the museum’s walls.

The Citadelle brings thousands of patrons and students annually into contact with styles and subjects of art they might not experience outside of major metropolises. From eclectic and ephemeral tape art—installations meant to enliven non-museum spaces like Walmarts—to the world-class exhibition of Rembrandt etchings, the legacy of the Abrahams is to connect diverse cultures and show viewers the humanity they hold in common.

Humanity, indeed, is the common thread I see in their long and productive lives. Malouf indicates a crazy-quilt canvas by Byrne hanging in the back foyer of Hill Crest as we stroll toward the dining room. “See, our guests just party too

much,” he quips, as Therese leads me to a display of a traditional mother-of-pearl inlaid tableau, a relic of Nahim’s Old Country, depicting the Last Supper.

The cloth centerpiece is likewise of Lebanese crafting, its deep green-black velvet embellished with silk threads.

I think of those temperance-minded Canadian wives who longed for the touch of luxury that one Middle Eastern merchant happened to unfold at their door. I know that every corner of city and country needs both beauty and meaning.

Malouf and Therese have sensed this from the start, and have turned their heritage into a gift that continues to give. He raises and then joins his hands, ever expressive, in a summary gesture.

“We just want to leave the world a better place.”

80 John Wallace Cowboy of Color

by Barbara Brannon

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t’s an iron y, no doubt, that the men’s correctional institution operating since 1994 in Mitchell County, located along Interstate 20 on the Rolling Plains of West Texas, honors the name of Daniel Webster Wallace.

For Wallace, who died in Mitchell County in 1939 at age 79, had been born in Texas the year before the Civil War began— in slavery.

Wallace’s resolve to slip those early bonds led him from poverty and illiteracy, from the cotton fields of the Texas coast to pastures of plenty as a wealthy West Texas cattleman. The attachment of his name to the prison unit that would bring jobs and revenue to the county is a measure of the community’s respect for Wallace’s reputation as a leading landowner of any background.

After historian R. C. Crane published an account of Wallace’s life in the West Texas Historical Association Year Book in 1952, and in 1960 Wallace’s daughter, Hettye Wallace Branch, told her own in The Story of 80 John: A Biography

of One of the Most Respected Negro Ranchmen in the Old West, awareness of Wallace’s story grew. But it’s worth retelling here, in the context of the way an entire people arrived in the Lone Star State: in chains.

Though a few Africans arrived in Texas before 1860 as free people, by far the majority had been captured and forced to America by European entrepreneurs, often filling the void in forced labor left by the decline in Spanish-enslaved natives.

On the eve of the Civil War Daniel Wallace’s Virginia-born mother, Mary, had been sold to the family of Josiah O’Daniel, whose father had come to the Gulf coast of Texas via Alabama.

DON’T MISS Heart of West Texas Museum 340 E. 3rd St. Colorado City, TX 79512 (325) 728-8285 Hours Tuesday–Friday noon–5 pm heartofwesttexas museum.org National Ranching Heritage Center on the campus of Texas Tech University 3121 4th St. Lubbock, TX 79409 (806) 742-0498 Hours Monday–Saturday 10 am–5 pm Sunday 1–5 pm depts.ttu.edu/nrhc WINTER 2019

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Daniel’s father, William, had been a slave in Missouri. Young Daniel Wallace, according to Tricia Martineau Wagner’s account in Black Cowboys of the Old West (2010), showed more affinity for horses from an early age than for farming, and in 1876 slipped away from the O’Daniel farm where the freed slaves still labored for meager wages, and finagled his way into a cattle drive up to Lampasas.

Wallace’s way with horses and cattle earned him a place first with Sam Gholson and later with John Nunn’s N.U.N. outfit. Under Nunn’s tutelage he drove cattle to West Texas for the first time. But it was in the late 1870s with Clay Mann, whose holdings included ranches in Mitchell, Kent, and Coleman Counties, that D. W., as he was known, would develop an acumen for the business side of ranching as well as his skill with animals. And it’s where he would earn the nickname that stuck, “80 John,”

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after Mann’s distinctive “80” brand.

Recognizing Wallace’s solid character and devotion to self-improvement, Mann gave Wallace a leg up in founding his own herd, by setting aside enough from the wages he paid for Wallace to invest.

Wallace purchased land in Mitchell County in 1885, marking his Durhams and Herefords with a brand of his own.

By now, though, Wallace realized he’d need more than the rudiments of an education if he was to succeed as a rancher. He returned to South Texas for two winters to enroll in a black school— as a second-grader. He mastered reading and writing skills while courting Laura Dee Owen, a senior, and married her in 1888.

The Wallaces set up housekeeping and raised a family on D. W.’s Mitchell County lands, which he strategically expanded, placing some acreage under cultivation. Windmills and the railroad spurred his enterprises to prosperity,

though he’d survived boom and bust cycles trading aid with his white neighbors. By the time oil was discovered on his land, D. W. “80 John” Wallace was one of the most progressive and successful ranchers in West Texas. Upon his death in 1939 he left an estate valued at more than $1 million.

80 John’s descendants run the Mitchell County ranch today, and they have donated the original circa-1900 ranch house to the National Ranching Heritage Center in Lubbock. Daniel and Laura Wallace, married more than fifty years, are buried on the first section of Mitchell County land he acquired.

And Colorado City, whose segregated black high school was earlier named for its famous African American rancher, has now repurposed the campus as the Wallace Accelerated High School, across town from the prison.

TEXAS STATE LIBRARY & ARCHIVES

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he dr aw of Tex as—a mythic place of ample land and opportunity—is well known today. However, this was not always the case. State elected officials, along with leaders in agriculture, industry, and religious life, have a long history of promoting Texas to draw people to the state.

Many records of this history are preserved in the State Archives.

Some of these records go all the way back to the era of Mexican colonization and the early days of Texas as a fledgling republic. One rich source of information about this early period is the collection of passports issued by the Republic of Texas Department of State.

Passports were issued to allow people to freely leave and re-enter. Passports of well-known figures from Texas history are present, including Sam Houston (issued 1839) and Emily West

Texas’ Diverse

History of Immigration Documented in the State Archives

by Susan Floyd WINTER 2019

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Page 91: Jewish Immigrants landed at Galveston, undated.

William Deming Hornaday photograph collection, 1975/0701483 and 1757.

“Go to Texas! Rapid Development of a Glorious Country, 1871.”

Broadsides collection, 591.

Left: I&GN Railroad Immigrants Home, photograph, 1880 University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, crediting Palestine Public Library.

Below: “A paper on the resources and capabilities of Texas: read by Col. William W. Lang, before the Farmer’s Club of the American Institute, Cooper Union, N.Y., March 8th, 1881.” TSLAC Main Collection, 917.64 L257.

(issued 1837). West was a free AfricanAmerican woman who was kidnapped

by Gen. Santa Anna’s army on April 16, 1836, and forced to accompany the Mexican army to the Battle of San Jacinto. After the Mexican defeat, stories began to circulate that Emily helped the Texan cause by keeping the general occupied in his tent while the Texans attacked. Though the story has no basis in historical fact, it became a popular Texas myth, and Emily West eventually became known as “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” It is thought that she returned to her home in New York in 1837.

In the state archives’ collection of broadsides are many advertisements, including this one printed in 1871 with its explicit invitation to immigrants, a phrase that became well-known after the Civil War, “Go to Texas!” Broadsides 92

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Above: General Sam Houston passport, 1839, Texas Secretary of State records relating to passports issued by the Department of State, Republic of Texas, 1905/007.

are an extremely popular format for reproducing and disseminating news, announcements, official proclamations, political and entertainment events, and advertising throughout history. They often include very large typefaces and striking images, such as the famous phrase and map of the eastern United States seen on page 91. This broadside advertises land for sale in the town of Lawrence in Kaufman County.

By the late nineteenth century, Galveston had become a gateway for immigrants to Texas and the broader Southwest. While many people think of Ellis Island as being synonymous with this period in U.S. immigration history, tens of thousands came to the U.S. through the Port of Galveston. Between 1906 and 1914 alone, nearly 50,000 people arrived. Though these new Americans hailed from all across the globe, the largest group of immigrants were Russian and Eastern European Jews, in a migration known as the Galveston Movement. Directed by the Jewish Immigrants’ Information Bureau in Galveston and managed on the ground by Congregation B’nai Israel’s Rabbi Henry Cohen, this program sought to divert these immigrants from the East Coast—particularly New York City—to stem a rising tide of anti-Semitism. In all, ten thousand people came through the Galveston Movement, many of them staying in Texas and contributing to the state’s development and culture.

More evidence of how Texas has promoted itself as a welcome home for immigrants can be found in transcripts of speeches given by the leaders of civic organizations, such as the speech featured opposite, read by Col. William W. Lang, before the Farmer’s Club of the American Institute, Cooper Union, New York, on March 8, 1881. “A Paper on the Resources and Capabilities of Texas” promoted the advantages of the state for immigration. This copy includes maps of the Southwest, including counties, cities, railroads, and rivers.

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Left: Japanese rice field, Texas. William Deming Hornaday photograph collection, 1975/070-4590

The archive’s William Deming Hornaday photograph collection contains more than 5,800 visual records amassed by Hornaday to accompany the various articles he wrote between 1890 and 1940. These photographs depict people, places, and events across Texas, notably agriculture, cattle, cityscapes, dwellings, factories, harbors, military bases, the petroleum industry, public buildings, and railroads. As documented in this collection (above, undated), Japanese rice farmers helped develop the Texas rice industry. Though farmed as early as the 1850s, commercial rice production spread from Louisiana into Southeast Texas after the southern transcontinental railroad opened in 1883. In 1904 the Houston Chamber of Commerce and Southern Pacific Railroad invited experts from Japan to advise, and these farmers brought with them the first Japanese rice seed—a gift from the emperor. Japanese rice production then began in earnest in Harris County, on the Gulf coast, when Seito Saibara, his family and thirty Japanese immigrants established a commercial operation in Webster.

Japanese men from prominent families began emigrating to Texas and bought land to start colonies built around rice farming, hiring young men in need of work to labor in the fields.

These and hundreds of other collections are open for research at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, open Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. and the second Saturday of each month in downtown Austin.

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The Past Is Present in Seguin, Texas

By Jennifer Sourdellia

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ostalgia remains alive and well in Seguin, Texas, 181-year-old seat of Guadalupe County. Visitors to this charming South-Central Texas community will discover a place deeply rooted in history, with unique treasures and stories of the past left behind by the immigrants who once called Seguin home.

Though Guadalupe County once saw the arrival of people from Mexico, Russia, Poland, England, Wales, Ireland, France, Austria, and Switzerland, Seguin’s cultural identity was largely shaped by the dominance of German American pioneers. These settlers traveled along the German Immigrant Trail in the 1840s and 1850s from Indianola, on the coast, to Seguin and the Hill Country in New Braunfels.

By the 1880s, over 40 percent of Seguin’s population was of German descent. A historical marker dedicated to the

early German pioneers can be found in Seguin’s downtown Central Park on the Square. Today, many German descendants remain in the area.

A few blocks away from the park is the Seguin–Guadalupe County Heritage Museum, where an extensive collection of artifacts, relics, and photographs documenting the area’s history can be explored. Longtime museum director John Gesick is a wealth of knowledge and enjoys sharing Seguin’s story to those desiring to take a journey into the community’s past.

Under the stewardship of the Seguin

The Old Stagecoach Road Mural, painted by artist by Brent McCarthy, depicts the early pioneers and landmarks along the 1800’s route. | Photos by Jennifer Sourdellia

Seguin Main Street/Seguin Chamber of Commerce

116 N. Camp St. Seguin, TX 78155 (830) 401-2448

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Conservation Society is one of Seguin’s most notable points of interest is the historic Campbell Log Cabin founded by an immigrant from a different country.

The one-room cabin was built in 1850 by Joseph Campbell, who came to Seguin from Ireland. A year later, Campbell returned to his native land, convincing twenty-three family members to come back with him to Texas. Working together, the family expanded the cabin to include a kitchen, a second room with a fireplace, front and back porches, and a dog run. Up until 1952, Campbell family descendants lived a simple life in the cabin without the modern conveniences of electricity or running water.

Family members continued to occupy the cabin until 1957. In 1979, the cabin was moved from southwest Seguin to its present location at the city’s Heritage Village, where today it provides visitors a glimpse into the lives of early residents.

Two other fascinating gems, the Dietz Doll House and Los Nogales Museum, are today located across the street from the Campbell Cabin.

The dollhouse was built in 1910

Also located at Heritage Village, the two-room Campbell Log Cabin once housed 24 family members and displays what life was like for many of the first settlers in Seguin. Exhibits at the Heritage Museum (below) provide glimpses into the past.

by Louis Dietz, a German immigrant carpenter, for his five-year-old adopted daughter, Alice, who was herself an immigrant to the city — arriving on an orphan train. A variety of vintage dolls and toys, in addition to a wardrobe and dresser crafted by Dietz, are displayed in the elaborate Victorian-style doll house.

Dating back to 1849, Los Nogales is one of the oldest structures in Seguin.

Within the walls of the 16-by-18-foot building is a treasure trove of Seguin’s oldest artifacts. The one-room adobe structure built for German immigrant Justus Gombert is the last remaining adobe-construction home in Seguin.

No historic tour of Seguin would be complete without a selfie in front of the Old Stagecoach Road mural located on Donegan Street in the heart of downtown. The painting represents the cultural diversity that makes Seguin what it is today, while celebrating the heritage and legacy of yesterday.

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