APRIL 2018
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CONTENTS
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Marjorie Hagy History Marjorie is a bibliophile, a history nut and an insomniac, among several other conditions, both diagnosed and otherwise. When she's not working tirelessly to avoid getting a real job, she nurses an obsession with her grandson and is involved in passing legislation restricting the wearing of socks with sandals. She is an aspiring pet hoarder who enjoys vicious games of Scrabble, reading Agatha Christie, and sitting around doing nothing while claiming to be thinking deeply. Marjorie has five grown children, a poodle to whom she is inordinately devoted in spite of his breath, and holds an Explore record for never having submitted an article on time. She's been writing for us for five years now.
Old Timer Just Old Timer The Old Timer tells us he's been a resident of Boerne since about 1965. He enjoys telling people what he doesn't like. When not bust'n punks he can be found feeding the ducks just off Main St. or wandering aimlessly in the newly expanded HEB. Despite his rough and sometimes brash persona, Old Timer is really a wise and thoughtful individual. If you can sort through the BS.
Kendall D. Aaron Spiritual I’m just a normal guy. I’m not a theology student, I don’t preach in church, and I’ve never written a book. I’m just a normal guy that thinks, and feels, and is on a never-ending journey attempting to be the best person I can be. I fail frequently at this quest, yet each day, the quest continues. I’ve lived in Boerne since the late ‘80s, I’ve got a most beautiful wife, three wonderful children, and just really, really love God. Thanks for going on my spiritual journey with me.
10 From The Publisher
26 Texas Reads
12
28 History
EXPLORE magazine is published by Schooley Media Ventures
16 Art of The Vow
34 Spiritual
Ventures are not responsible for any inaccuracies, erroneous
20 This Month in Texas History
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Calendar
in Boerne, TX. EXPLORE Magazine and Schooley Media information, or typographical errors contained in this publication submitted by advertisers. Opinions expressed
Old Timer
do not necessarily reflect the opinions of EXPLORE and/or Schooley Media Ventures. Copyright 2016 Schooley Media
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DEAREST EXPLORE READER, Plato once said, “He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.” The concept of “injustice” is a topic that I’ve spent a little time on lately. I’ve even written about it in these little Publisher letters, and I’m not sure I’ve made a lot of progress with the whole concept, but maybe I’m getting a little closer to finding some sort of conclusion. I am not entirely clear on exactly why I’ve spent time thinking about injustice (guess I’m weird), but it’s just been a topic that I think can actually contain some extraordinary growth for us as humans and how we respond. As a lover of people, I suppose I find that pretty interesting. In today’s media-driven world, the word “injustice” can sometimes mean “I didn’t get into the college I wanted because I identify as a tomato!” or “I dress like a gangster and those darn police profiled me while I was doing gangster activities!” In centuries and millennia past, it sure meant something else. Is injustice a word with different levels? Is it injustice to one person when it is simply a nuisance to another? Has our definition changed altogether? When I was probably 14, I went to the little gas station that is there across from Boerne High School (yes, it’s been there that long). My mom doesn’t even know this story, but a group of us kids went in and we were horsing around and being idiots when suddenly the owner grabbed my wrist firmly and said “Give me back the candy you shoved in your pockets!” Wide eyed and frightened I stared at her and said “What? I don’t have anything!” She called me a liar, patted at my pockets, and wouldn’t stop until the police arrived. As a terrified 14 year old kid, they took me aside and with their very large and scary personas, proceeded to interrogate me and get me to spill my pockets. They threatened me with arrest, they were going to call my parents, and spoke to how much trouble I was in. Trembling, I emptied my pockets and out poured a few coins, an old pen, and some lint. With one final pat down, they patted my head and wished me good day. I don’t think I had taken a breath for 15 minutes. My silly story isn’t a story of injustice in the sense that I was facing the death penalty and was being framed by the prosecutor, but I’ll tell you, I didn’t do anything wrong. I was a kid being a kid and for whatever reason, the shop owner THOUGHT she saw me do something. I was accused, interrogated, threatened, ultimately found innocent, and released. Was it injustice? Probably. Did I survive? Yeah. I’m sure that there are some pretty staggering stories of “injustice” in the history of this world, but for me, the Hebrews and the Egyptians is at the top of the list. For
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400 years the Egyptians beat and terrorized the Hebrews simply because they could. Generation upon generation of people born into slavery and tortured from birth until death. Of course, the Nazi Holocaust is up there, too. American slavery. And countless other stories of people inflicting injustice on one another. Nobody is meaner to people than other people. It’s pretty depressing when you think about it. There’s a line in the classic Shawshank Redemption where Red says, “Did I do it? Yep. I’m the only guilty man in Shawshank.” I also read a parable (or tall tale or whatever) that Abraham Lincoln visited a prison and after asking countless prisoners about their crimes (and being told over and over that they were all innocent), one man confessed his guilt and ol’ Abe released him on the spot. It’s a dark joke about the innocence of convicts, but I’ll admit I’ve spent more than one evening awake, staring at the ceiling and thinking about the insane numbers of men and women in our penal system that are, in fact, innocent. One of my recurring nightmares is about being thrown in prison so the idea of being innocent and tossed into prison makes me break out in a cold sweat. Yet I know that it happens. More than any of us probably want to admit. Is that “injustice”? Yes. Probably in its purest sense. I read a quote once that said “I would rather let 1000 guilty men go free than for one innocent man to be imprisoned.” Some people might gasp at the idea of 1000 guilty men being set free, but I focus more on the power and reverence that it applies to the JUSTICE for the one innocent man. Which is more important? The mercy for the 1000 guilty or the justice for the one innocent? The acceptance of injustice in our own lives is one serious journey of frustration. Ask me how I know. When you KNOW you are right, and yet you are still proclaimed to be WRONG…and there’s literally nothing you can do about it. All you can do sometimes is flop back into your easy chair, throw your arms up and just shout “Well, that’s that.” You’re rendered weaponless, and while you might know the truth (and your innocence), you’re forced to allow the proclamation to read that you are GUILTY (or wrong). Man, it’s frustrating.
realize that, at the end of the day, the only thing that you can really focus on is YOU. I know I’m rambling, and I apologize. I suppose I’ve just spent the past couple of years having to unpack this concept, and through all of the ups and downs, the clinched fists of frustration, and the foreheadslapping confusion, I can now look around and know that things might not always be what you THINK they are. The guilty can actually be innocent. The innocent can actually be very, very guilty. The persecuted can be undeserving, and the tormentors can be unjust. People are sad, and glad, and broken, and tired…and they are experiencing injustice. Sometimes it’s small, and sometimes it’s huge. Sometimes it messes up their Friday, and sometimes it messes up their lives. Sometimes it even messes up the lives of those around them. It happens, and I suppose, it’s life. I’m sitting on the small patio of my office that overlooks Blanco Road. Dozens of cars zoom past me each few minutes, and I watch as you stare intently down the road. How many of you are guilty and have been granted mercy from your crimes? How many of you are innocent and been wrongly condemned? How many of you are seeking justice, yet no matter how many rocks you look under, are unable to find it? How many of you, like me, are out there looking at your friends and neighbors with a newfound sense of empathy and compassion? Right or wrong, I suppose we’re all guilty. Of something. Maybe if we saw one another as guilty and equally as condemned, we’d all enjoy this ride called “life” just a little more. I’d like that a lot. Welcome to April. Life springs eternal, as do the wildflowers. Take a minute to smell them all, friends. Your innocence is fleeting, and your guilt is assured when you really think about it. EXPLORE the beauty you might find, even if it’s from behind your bars.
Smiling, But I think that it can also be one serious moment for growth. If you ultimately find that, despite your best efforts, you are to be found the “guilty” party, what do you have left? I’ll tell you exactly what you have left: YOURSELF and that’s just about it. While that might sound crummy, the strength that it requires of you to stand and accept that it’s “you against the world” is also wildly satisfying. You begin to learn a few things about yourself. When faced with your new reality, you realize the control that you have over your own life, despite the best efforts of others. You
Benjamin D. Schooley
ben@hillcountryexplore.com
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AREA EVENTS
BANDERA April 3 Cowboy Capital Opry Grand Old Opry-style entertainment hosted by Gerry and Harriet Payne. Refreshments and door prizes. Silver Sage Community Center, 803 Buck Creek. April 7, 14, 21, 28 Bandera Cattle Company Gunfighters Experience the excitement of the Wild West with the award-winning Bandera Cattle Company Gunfighters, re-creating shootouts and daily life of the Old West. Shows are at high noon and 2 p.m. Bandera Visitors Center, 126 SH 16 S. April 7 Bandera Market Days Arts and crafts vendors on the courthouse lawn in downtown Bandera. Bandera County Courthouse Lawn, 500 Main St. April 8 Second Sunday Music Fest Spring Showcase The Frontier Times Museum and the Bandera Music Hall of Fame join together to present an afternoon of music, food, and fun. 11th Street Cowboy Bar, 307 11th St. April 19 Third Thursday Cowboy Camp Pickers who play cowboy, Texas, or Western swing music are welcome to sit in. Public welcome. Bandera Beverage Barn RV Park, 1407 SH 16 N. BLANCO April 13, 20 Arts in the Park Enjoy a free spring concert series featuring music representing all interests, from blues and gospel to Western and El Tule. Food will be available to purchase from local restaurants. Bring your chairs, your dancing shoes, and enjoy an evening under the stars. BOERNE April 14 Harpeth Rising in Concert Three classically trained musicians play original music, intricately arranged as a string quartet, lyrically rooted in the singer/songwriter tradition, and wrapped in threepart vocal harmonies reminiscent of both Appalachia and Medieval Europe. Cave Without A Name, Throne Room, 325 Kreutzberg Road. April 14-15 Texas ChuteOut Hosted by and benefitting Littlegrass Ranch, whose mission is to create a transitional sanctuary where victims of domestic abuse—with their children, horses, livestock, and pets—can develop a plan to rebuild their lives. Events include wild horse racing, bareback bronc riding, saddle bronc riding, barrel racing, mutton bustin’, steer dressing and calf dressing (yes, in clothing), world-famous trick roper Kevin Fitzpatrick, and cowboy church. Kendall County Fair Grounds, 1307 River Road. April 28 2nd Annual Cave Fest Cascade Caverns presents their 2nd Annual Cave Fest 10:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.. Come enjoy children’s activities, food trucks, cave tours, live music, and more. Vendor booths available. Proceeds benefit the “Save The Cave” legal fund. visit www.cascadecaverns.com for more information. COMFORT April 21 Townwide Garage, Plant, and Bake Sale Local residents will hold garage sales at their homes and at Comfort Park. This annual event draws local vendors and area visitors. One person’s trash is the treasure of another. The Comfort Garden Club will hold their plant and bake sale at Seventh and High Street downtown. Various locations. DRIPPING SPRINGS April 27-29 Founders Day Festival The three-day festival celebrates the 1850 founding of the Dripping Springs community and offers a variety of family-friendly activities. The festival kicks off with the grand parade on Friday followed by live music on two stages. With a carnival, cookoff competitions, and arts and crafts vendors, there is something for everyone. Downtown Dripping Springs, Mercer Street.
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Get out and enjoy the great Texas Hill Country!
The most comprehensive events calendar. Send submissions to info@hillcountryexplore.com
FREDERICKSBURG April 5-7 ACWA Championship Cook Off 2nd annual ACWA Championship Cook Off hosted by American Chuck Wagon Association starts Thursday April 5th with an education day for area students and concludes on Saturday with 21 chuck wagon teams from 7 states competing by cooking a meal of chicken fried steak, beans, potatoes, bread and dessert for the public. Check out our website for information and to purchase tickets! Thursday 9-2; Friday 8-3 and Saturday 8-3
KERRVILLE March 30-April 1 Easter Hill Country Bike Tour Experience the charm and hospitality of the Texas Hill Country and three days of the best riding Texas has to offer at the 44th annual event. Quiet, well-paved roads, fully-stocked rest stops, and panoramic scenery have made this ride one of the premier cycling events in Texas with routes suitable for all categories of participants, from novices to experienced riders. Schreiner University, 2100 Memorial Blvd.
April 6-7 American Chuckwagon Association National Championship Cookoff Enjoy championship-level traditional chuckwagon cuisine. Gillespie County Fairgrounds, 530 Fair Drive.
April 6 Kerrville Farmers Market Downtown A producer-only market offering a variety of locally sourced produce, meat, eggs, bread, cheese, beer, wine, and more. Dallas Daughtry Boardwalk Pavilion, 805 Water St. kerrvillefarmersmarket.com 830-928-4261
April 6 First Friday Art Walk Fredericksburg Tour fine art galleries offering special exhibits, demonstrations, refreshments, and extended viewing hours the first Friday of every month. Various locations. April 6-22 Texas Hill Country Wine and Wildflower Journey Enjoy the Texas Hill Country wineries and wildflowers. Self-guided tour includes special events, tastings, and discounts. Various locations. texaswinetrail.com 872-216-9463 April 6-7 Waltstock & Barrel Wine and Music Festival Large music, wine, and craft beer festival with headliner Walt Wilkins. Artists and food trucks, too. Texas Wine Country Jellystone Park Camp-Resort, 10618 E. US 290. April 7-21 Wildflower Celebration at Wildseed Farms Celebrate the arrival of spring and Texas wildflowers with colorful fields, great shopping, butterfly gardens, and special activities. Wildseed Farms, 100 Legacy Drive. wildseedfarms.com 830990-8080 April 14-15 WWII Pacific Combat Program at the National Museum of the Pacific War Brings history to life with equipment and weapons used during WWII and a battle re-enactment set on an island in the Pacific. Pacific Combat Zone, 508 E. Austin. pacificwarmuseum.org 830-997-8600 April 20-22 Fredericksburg Trade Days Shop more than 400 vendors or relax in the biergarten while listening to live music. Sunday Farms, 355 Sunday Farms Lane. fbgtradedays. com 210-846-4094 GRUENE April 6, 13, 20, 27 Friday Afternoon Club A Gruene Hall tradition, now in its 20th year, where hipsters, oldsters, suits, locals, and drifters mix it up to start their weekend rite (pun intended). This quintessential Friday happy hour celebrates the warmer weather with great beer prices, prize giveaways, and the best in Texas tunes broadcast live by KNBT 92.1 FM Radio New Braunfels. Gruene Hall, 1281 Gruene Road. April 8 Gospel Brunch with a Texas Twist In the tradition of a New Orleans-style gospel brunch, this event features aweinspiring gospel music coupled with a mouth-watering buffet catered by the Gristmill River Restaurant and Bar. One complimentary Champagne drink and a long stem rose for your sweetheart included. Gruene Hall, 1281 Gruene Road. April 19 Come and Taste It: Meet Texas’ Best Winemakers A featured winemaker showcases three of its newest released, top-selling, or hardest-to-find wines, alongside a craft brew hand-picked by The Grapevine staff. The complimentary tastings are held on the patio and garden. Samples of food that is offered for sale will be provided, and each event features live music and prize giveaways. The Grapevine, 1612 Hunter Road. April 21-22 Old Gruene Market Days Nearly 100 vendors offer uniquely crafted items and packaged Texas foods. Free admission. Gruene Historic District, 1601 Hunter Road. gruenemarketdays.com 830-629-5077 or 830-832-1721
April 7 Kerr County Market Days Features an indoor marketplace for vendors of original handcrafted goods, artwork, and home-grown plants and produce. Pets on a leash are welcome. Kerr County Hill Country Youth Event Center, 3785 SH 27. kerrmarketdays.org 830-895-7524 April 14-15 Texas Gun and Knife Show New and used guns, knives, gold and silver coins, jewelry, camping gear, military supplies, and several businesses under one roof. Kerr County Hill Country Youth Event Center, 3785 SH 27. texasgunandknifeshows.com 830-285-0575 NEW BRAUNFELS April 28 CrawFest Rock out to Whiskey Myers and Austin’s own Vejello, and taste the awesomeness of the Battle of the Roux Gumbo Cookoff. Can last year’s crawfish-eating champions hold their crown for another year? Enjoy live zydeco, a Dock Dogs competition, crawfish races, and live Tejano music from Siggno. Camp out on-site. Comal County Fairgrounds, 701 Common St. crawfishfestivalnewbraunfels. com 210-827-2222 WIMBERLEY April 7 Market Days The oldest outdoor market in the Texas Hill Country and the second-largest in the state, featuring more than 475 booths filled with art, crafts, antiques, and treasures. Stroll the tree-shaded paths, listen to live music, and shop to your heart’s content. Lions Field, 601 FM 2325. shopmarketdays.com 512-847-2201 April 14 Second Saturday Gallery Trail On the second Saturday of every month, come early and stay late for wine, light bites, and an art-filled evening at many of the galleries in and around Wimberley. Various locations. gallerytrail.com 512847-2201 April 21 Butterfly Festival At the 20th annual event, more than 3,800 butterflies will be released throughout the day after a moving opening ceremony at the Veterans Memorial, which will include a butterfly release to honor those who have lost their lives in the past year. Attendees can enjoy crafts, games, bounce houses, wonderful food, an exotic butterfly flight house, and more. There is no admission charge, but donations are greatly appreciated. EmilyAnn Theatre and Gardens, 1101 FM 2325. April 28-29 Wimberley Arts Fest The 10th annual event kicks off with more than 100 artist booths, a vintage car show, continuous live music, and lots to eat and drink. Relax alongside the Blanco River, and enjoy the sights and sounds of beautiful Wimberley. The Waters Point, 13401 RR 12. wimberleyartsfest.com 512-952-0098
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Premier Custom Home Builder in the Texas Hill Country For over 40 years, KCN has been building beautiful custom homes of all sizes in Boerne, Comfort, Bandera, Pipe Creek and throughout the Texas Hill Country. Our reputation for honesty and integrity, combined with our commitment to deliver excellent quality, expert craftsmanship, and customer service, has afforded us the opportunity to build many long lasting relationships with our clients. In fact, we have constructed two or more jobs for 32 different customers.
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WWW.HILLCOUNTRYEXPLORE.COM | APRIL 2018
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ART OF THE VOW BY BEN SCHOOLEY
K
Kristen Voss and her family began with a simple idea to build a small wedding chapel on their family property off of Ralph Fair Road. As lifelong residents, they wanted to put down even deeper roots and establish a small business…but none of them had any idea the size that it would soon reach and truly how deep their roots would eventually get.
Voss begins, “I was born and raised in Boerne and there’s absolutely nowhere else I would want to live. After my husband and I graduated from Southwest Texas State, we ended up in corporate jobs outside of New Orleans and, well, we were both just miserable. We definitely wanted to come back home.” So with this mission in mind, the family began to brainstorm on what they could do on the property. Voss continues, “It was a lunch at Bum’s with my dad and we begin to think through some options, and the whole 8 hour drive home we were talking about how to do it. This was before venues were crazy popular and there really wasn’t much else out here. This is my dad’s property and everyone still lives here on approximately 300 acres. We initially wanted to build a small wedding chapel on the property, and we toured the country doing all the Southern Homes tours we could find.” Voss laughs, “The next thing that we knew, our plans had turned into a 400 person building!” And with that, Kendall Plantation was officially born. What started as a quaint wedding chapel eventually became a 16,000 square foot, 400 capacity, state of the art “Southern Plantation” style facility geared to accommodate the Hill Country’s most elegant weddings. Built on the family property, overlooking an original pond that includes records going back almost 200 years and features an exquisite building, multiple verandas, wildflower fields, romantic swings, staircases, and literally everything that any bride could want. As for response from the public, Voss and her family had 37 weddings booked before the slab was poured. “Facebook was just blowing up in 2011 when we opened, and I started using it to simply create a vision for brides about what we were doing. As soon as word started getting out, things just exploded.” Averaging 110 weddings a year (which is unheard of), Kendall Plantation has quickly become the area’s premier destination for weddings and has plans to only continue with their growth. “We have plans to expand, but I’m not ready yet to talk about it. We are considering what our clients want and will have something soon to complement the Plantation and we trust that it will be equally as impressive.” As their business grows, we all know the area has grown equally as fast. “We call Hwy 46 as the Wedding Mile now. Hopefully Boerne recognizes a great influx of customers on the weekends so when they’re coming from Dallas, Midland, the Valley…. they’re eating sleeping and shopping in Boerne and that’s a big deal for us. We send our dinner parties to all sorts of local businesses. That said, we have a huge concern about growth. We have a lot of acreage so we’re pretty safe. Cordillera is outside my back door and they’re beautiful but there’s so much stuff coming into Bergheim and who knows what it will look like soon.” Heavily involved in Cibolo Creek Community Church, and perhaps equally involved in the coordination, volunteering, and coaching of their children’s baseball teams, Kristen, her husband Jeremy, brother Jonathan, and her entire family continue to set the standard for Hill Country wedding venues in the area with a history of deep roots and an even deeper appreciation not only for their business, but for their family as well. 20 Guthrie Rd, Boerne, TX 78006 • 830-229-5090 • www.kendallplantation.com
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WWW.HILLCOUNTRYEXPLORE.COM | APRIL 2018
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314 Schweppe St $479,000
129 Mustang Run $282,500
Charming cottage on .66 acre lot one block off Main Street. 3/2 Main house 2403 sq. ft. 1/1 Guest suite off garage (not included in footage). Mature trees and meticulous landscaping.
Very clean, well maintained 4 bedroom, 2.5 Baths. Open concept kitchen, breakfast area, family room and Master bedroom downstairs. Other 3 bedrooms, full bath and loft upstairs. Home not far from pool, playground, and near walking trails.
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WWW.HILLCOUNTRYEXPLORE.COM | APRIL 2018
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H
History is a popular topic with our readers. Marjorie Hagy’s HISTORY piece is probably the most popular article in our illustrious publication month after month. With that fact, we thought we’d share some broader Texas history each month. Nothing earth shattering, but we hope you might find something to make you pause and say, “Huh. Well I’ll be.”
April 4, 1689 Spanish explorer and governor Alonso De León, marching from Coahuila in response to news of a French settlement in Texas, crossed a river in what is now Dimmit or Zavala County which he named Río de las Nueces (“River of Nuts”) for the pecan trees growing along its banks. The Nueces River, although not explored in its entirety until the eighteenth century, was the first Texas river to be given a prominent place on European maps. It is identifiable as the Río Escondido (“Hidden River”), which first appeared on a 1527 map attributed to Diogo Ribeiro, signifying the obscure location of the river mouth behind its barrier island. It was to this river that René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle--confused by the period’s inadequate maps--sailed in 1685, believing that it was the Mississippi. De León discovered the remains of La Salle’s Fort St. Louis on Garcitas Creek eighteen days after crossing the Nueces.
April 5, 1917 The first planes landed at Kelly Field, San Antonio. The site was selected in 1916 to expand the facilities of the fledgling Aviation Section of the Army Signal Corps. It was initially called Aviation Camp, then Kelly Field, and finally Kelly Air Force Base. During World War I almost all American combat aviators earned their wings at Kelly, which expanded dramatically. In 1928 the movie Wings was filmed at the base. World War II brought further changes, and the base became a major logistical center for the separate United States Air Force in the postwar period. In 1993 came news that the base was to be closed. At the time, Kelly was the oldest continuously operating flying base in the United States, and was the largest employer in San Antonio. Subsequently, the massive Kelly Air Force Base Redevelopment project converted the base to an industrial complex and inland port now operated by the Port Authority of San Antonio.
April 8th, 1968 A crowd of nearly 10,000 watched as Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Johnson, wife of President Lyndon Johnson, dedicated Padre Island National Seashore. It is the longest seashore in the national park system and
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encompasses a portion of the largest barrier beach in the United States. The history of the park was long and contentious. Efforts to establish a state park on Padre Island began in 1936, but proved unsuccessful due to a struggle between public and private interests over ownership of the land. In 1958 Texas senator Ralph Yarborough introduced a bill to establish a national park on the island, and the proposal was finally signed into law in 1962. The dedication of the park followed five years of condemnation proceedings. Today the park is a popular tourist destination, with attractions including a wide, sandy beach for swimming and fishing; a plethora of shore birds and migratory waterfowl; and a variety of legends involving pirates and hidden treasure.
April 13, 1902 The first council of the Knights of Columbus in Texas was founded in El Paso. The Order of the Knights of Columbus, a fraternal and service organization of Catholic men, was founded in Connecticut in 1882. By 2002, the Texas State Council comprised 643 local councils. In the early 1920s the Texas State Council of the Knights of Columbus formed a historical commission to oversee the publication of a history of Catholicism in Texas from its beginnings under the Spanish flag. Documents collected for that purpose grew into the Catholic Archives of Texas at Austin. This and other collections were used for the writing of Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, by Carlos E. Castañeda.
April 16, 1947 The ship SS Grandcamp exploded at the docks in Texas City. The French-owned vessel, carrying ammonium nitrate produced during wartime for explosives and later recycled as fertilizer, caught fire early in the morning. While attempts were being made to extinguish the fire, the ship exploded. The entire dock area was destroyed, along with the nearby Monsanto Chemical Company, other smaller companies, grain warehouses, and numerous oil and chemical storage tanks. The concussion of the explosion, felt as far away as Port Arthur, damaged or destroyed at least 1,000 residences and buildings. The ship SS High Flyer, in dock for repairs and also carrying ammonium nitrate, was ignited by the first explosion; it was towed 100 feet
from the docks before it exploded the next day. The ship’s anchor monument records 576 persons known dead, only 398 of whom were identified. Probably the exact number of people killed will never be known.
April 21st, 1836 Texas forces won the battle of San Jacinto, the concluding military event of the Texas Revolution. Facing General Santa Anna’s Mexican army of some 1,200 men encamped in what is now southeastern Harris County, General Sam Houston disposed his forces in battle order about 3:30 p.m., during siesta time. The Texans’ movements were screened by trees and the rising ground, and evidently Santa Anna had no lookouts posted. The Texan line sprang forward on the run with the cries “Remember the Alamo!” and “Remember Goliad!” The battle lasted but eighteen minutes. According to Houston’s official report, the casualties were 630 Mexicans killed and 730 taken prisoner. Against this, only nine of the 910 Texans were killed or mortally wounded and thirty were wounded less seriously.
April 25, 1838 The United States and the Republic of Texas signed the Convention of Limits, which recognized Texas claims to disputed territory in Red River County (the present Bowie, Red River, Franklin, Titus, Morris, and Cass counties). The agreement also set the west bank of the Sabine River as the eastern boundary of Texas. However, tension continued between the two countries regarding Indian depredations along the republic’s northern border. U.S. chargé d’affaires Alcée La Branche protested Texas army crossings of the border in pursuit of Indians. In the twentieth century the exact location of the Texas-Louisiana border became the subject of a dispute between the two states.
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E
SWEET EATS Easter may have been on April 1st, but we’re willing to bet you’re still wading through the piles of wrappers and finding that fake Easter basket grass in places you never thought possible. We thought it would be fun to enlighten our readers with some Easter candy facts so that next year you can impress all your friends with your wealth of knowledge. Providing you still have all of your teeth.
$2.4 BILLION
That’s how much Americans have spent on candy alone. When you factor in clothing, food, decorations, and other items such as gifts, the number jumps to roughly $17 billion.
87%
Percentage of parents who will buy or make Easter baskets for their kids. And 81% of them will steal candy from them. The other 19% live in California, Oregon, and Washington state.
90,000,000
That’s how many chocolate Easter bunnies are produced each year.
16,000 lbs.
The weight of the largest Easter egg ever made according to the Guinness Book of World Records. The egg was made in 2011 and was just over 34 ft. tall.
6 grams less
The amount Cadbury Creme eggs weigh in the US opposed to its native UK.
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PEEPS
JELLY BEANS
Each Easter season, Americans buy more than 700 million Marshmallow Peeps, shaped like chicks, as well as Marshmallow Bunnies and Marshmallow Eggs, making them the most popular non-chocolate Easter candy.
Americans consume 16 billion jellybeans at Easter, many of them hidden in baskets. If all the Easter jellybeans were lined end to end, they would circle the globe nearly three times.
As many as 5 million Marshmallow Peeps, bunnies, and other shapes are made each day in preparation for Easter. In 1953, it took 27 hours to create a Marshmallow Peep. Today it takes six minutes. Yellow Peeps are the most popular, followed by pink, lavender, blue, and white.
Jellybeans did not become an Easter tradition until the 1930s. They were probably first made in America by Boston candy maker William Schrafft, who ran advertisements urging people to send jellybeans to soldiers fighting in the Civil War. Children indicate their favorite Easter jellybean flavors are cherry (20%), strawberry (12%), grape (10%), lime (7%), and blueberry (6%).
TEXAS
READS Books that are either written by Texans or about Texas.
FINDING DOROTHY SCOTT
BLOODLINES Melissa Del Bosque With extensive access to investigative evidence and in-depth interviews with key players, del Bosque turns more than three years of research and her decades of reporting on Mexico and the border into a gripping narrative about greed and corruption. Bloodlines offers us an unprecedented look at the inner workings of the Zetas and US federal agencies, and opens a new vista onto the changing nature of the drug war and its global expansion.
Sarah Byrn Rickman More than eleven hundred women pilots flew military aircraft for the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. These pioneering female aviators were known first as WAFS (Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron) and eventually as WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots). Thirty-eight of them died while serving their country. Dorothy Scott was one of the thirty-eight. She died in a midair crash at the age of twenty-three. Born in 1920, Scott was a member of the first group of women selected to fly as ferry pilots for the Army Air Forces. Her story would have been lost had her twin brother not donated her wartime letters home to the WASP Archives. Dorothy’s extraordinary voice, as heard through her lively letters, tells of her initial decision to serve, and then of her training and service, first as a part of the WAFS and then the WASP. The letters offer a window into the mind of a young, patriotic, funny, and ambitious young woman who was determined to use her piloting skills to help the US war effort. The letters also offer archival records of the day-to-day barracks life for the first women to fly military aircraft. The WASP received some long overdue recognition in 2010 when they were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal-the highest honor that Congress can bestow on civilians.
THURSDAY NIGHT LIGHTS Michael Hurd At a time when “Friday night lights” shone only on white high school football games, African American teams across Texas burned up the gridiron on Wednesday and Thursday nights. The segregated high schools in the Prairie View Interscholastic League (the African American counterpart of the University Interscholastic League, which excluded black schools from membership until 1967) created an exciting brand of football that produced hundreds of outstanding players, many of whom became college All-Americans, All-Pros, and Pro Football Hall of Famers, including NFL greats such as “Mean” Joe Green (Temple Dunbar), Otis Taylor (Houston Worthing), Dick “Night Train” Lane (Austin Anderson), Ken Houston (Lufkin Dunbar), and Bubba Smith (Beaumont Charlton-Pollard).Thursday Night Lights tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of African American high school football in Texas. Drawing on interviews, newspaper stories, and memorabilia, Michael Hurd introduces the players, coaches, schools, and towns where African Americans built powerhouse football programs under the PVIL leadership. He covers fifty years (1920-1970) of high school football history, including championship seasons and legendary rivalries such as the annual Turkey Day Classic game between Houston schools Jack Yates and Phillis Wheatley, which drew standing-room-only crowds of up to 40,000, making it the largest prep sports event in postwar America. In telling this story, Hurd explains why the PVIL was necessary, traces its development, and shows how football offered a potent source of pride and ambition in the black community, helping black kids succeed both athletically and educationally in a racist society.
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TEXAS BLOOD Roger D. Hodge What brought the author’s family to Texas? What is it about Texas that for centuries has exerted a powerful allure for adventurers and scoundrels, dreamers and desperate souls, outlaws and outliers? In search of answers, Hodge travels across his home state--which he loves and hates in shifting measure--tracing the wanderings of his ancestors into forgotten histories along vanished roads. Here is an unsentimental, keenly insightful attempt to grapple with all that makes Texas so magical, punishing, and polarizing. Here is a spellbindingly evocative portrait of the borderlands--with its brutal history of colonization, conquest, and genocide; where stories of death and drugs and desperation play out daily. And here is a contemplation of what it means that the ranching industry that has sustained families like Hodge’s for almost two centuries is quickly fading away, taking with it a part of our larger, deep-rooted cultural inheritance. A wholly original fusion of memoir and history--as piercing as it is elegiac--Texas Blood is a triumph.
THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF GERMAN TEXANS Kenneth Hafertepe German immigrants of the nineteenth century left a distinctive mark on the lifestyles and vernacular architecture of Texas. In this first comprehensive survey of the art and artifacts of German Texans, Kenneth Hafertepe explores how their material culture was influenced by their European roots, how it was adapted to everyday life in Texas, and how it changed over time—at different rates in different communities. The Material Culture of German Texans is about the struggle to become American while maintaining a distinctive cultural identity drawn from German heritage.
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LANDMARK By Marjorie Hagy
A
All of you readers who, like myself, have ever fancied yourself in the role of amateur sleuth, will have already recognized the one big hurdle to getting on in that line of work- namely, the scarcity of murders in one’s close proximity which combine the necessary ingredients of being fabulously complicated- preferably hanging upon a crucial sixty seconds or so in your suspect’s alibi as well as a railroad timetable- and having completely baffled the local gendarme.
My own favorite detective, Miss Jane Marple, had the good fortune, at least as far as her avocation was concerned, of practically stumbling over corpses everywhere she went for the last forty years or so of her life. Over the course of her career, pretty much the entire citizenry of St Mary Mead was either bumped off themselves or at the very least encountered a carcass on their hearthrugs, or witnessed someone being strangled in a passing train, so much so that one wonders why the village constabulary never cast a suspicious eye on the old dame herself. Why, even went she went on vacation to the beach, courtesy of the kindness of her nephew Raymond, twelve or thirteen people immediately dropped dead in her vicinity, and when she ventured as far as the Caribbean you could just about name the villain of the piece by the end simply because he (or she) was the only one left alive besides Jane Marple.
the hunt, the gathering of clues, the step-by-step unravelling of a tantalizing mystery, seriously, all that stuff can be found in history! Ok, hang on, I don’t mean the kind of high school history where the course was dumped on a resentful badminton coach after all the other teachers called “Not it!” and where you’re always reading Unit 3 about the Pilgrims and all of the answers on the pop quiz are “Miles Standish”. What I mean talking about is the unsolved mystery kind of history, discovering an obscure old puzzle where you end up tracking down leads and interrogating John Eddie Vogt and poring over back issues of the Boerne Star and where you might just succeed, finally, in sussing out the solution, the rest of the story, in that moment when all your sleuthing pays off and you end up standing beside a worn headstone in a tiny family plot and you feel this unanticipated, crazy swell of satisfaction.
But friends, I’ve solved the problem for all of you potential snoop sisters and brothers, and the best part is that nobody has to get the old deep-six...actually, my method does involve quite a few dead people, but most of ‘em have been in that condition a good long while and most of them weren’t murdered but just died of things like La Grippe and cholera and other obscure, horrifying diseases. I feel like I’d better clear this up before it gets any weirder- I’m talking about history, and I can actually feel you guys sighing in disappointment right now. I thought she was gonna say something interesting. But
It started for me when I was a teenager and worked at the Hilltop nursing home, which was a 60s-era brick ranch-style place (it’s still there, if you want to check my description for yourself), with a crumbling old mansion standing right behind it (the mansion isn’t there anymore though), and the remains of what had obviously been, in its time, the fancy garden of the mansion. They, whoever owned it at the time, were using it for storage, or more accurately for a place to stash the kind of crap you don’t know what to do with, that you know perfectly well you ought to throw away but you feel vaguely
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guilty about actually taking the step so you cram it into, say, an abandoned mansion, where you never have to look at it again, hopefully, until you die and then it becomes your children’s problem. So there were old wheelchairs in there and old iron hopital bedsteads, inherently creepy items emitting shades of plague wards and dim, sepia-toned ghosts of the Civil War, and if my memory isn’t making this up altogether, there was an old artificial leg stashed in there too, reclining rakishly against the sagging staircase and adding to the general aura of people having limbs amputated in a field hospital in Antietam. This whole macabre menagerie got me very curious all of a sudden as to what this was all about. I knew absolutely nada about the history of Boerne, about the history of anything, really (except the Pilgrims) and as far as I’d been concerned the whole world had sprung into being around 1968 when I was four years old and first began to notice stuff, plus I was a teenager back then so I was of course turbulently, violently selfabsorbed- but all of a sudden I wanted to know. And now to our story of the month, a subject that I think simply everyone must be into: Ghost towns. Not abandoned mansions, but abandoned towns, places that fell off the map, people who blew away like the fluffy little seeds of a dandelion on a windy Spring day. The idea of a ghost town is so alluring- some forgotten place where once there were houses and churches and schools, lives, people laughing, someone chasing their dog down the street. A collection of people, who all once lived and died in this one place to which whatever fate or chance had delivered them, to live with one another with all their separate hopes and thoughts and everything that made them mad, elated them, sustained their lives, all centered in that one living place, where now there’s nothing left to show the world it ever happened at all. A cemetery or a tiny family plot, fragments of a limestone foundation, the relic of a crumbling chimney that was once the center of some family’s home. We all think we know all the little towns that make up Kendall CountyBoerne and Comfort, the two big ones,Welfare, Waring and Bergheim, Sisterdale and Kendalia, and I may have missed a couple, I’m thinking off the top of my head. But other little settlements sprung up and thrived for a while, people did their living and dying and babies were born and children grew up, in places carved out of the landscape that they called their own for a while. One of those places was Brownsboro, Texas. A year ago I told you a story about the Insall family, late of Lavaca County, who repaired to these environs rather hastily in 1864 after Father Insall shot a guy in the back, and I don’t mean a soldier on the other side in the Civil War, but a fella with whom Mr Insall had a beef and subsequently waylaid, at night. Local authorities were showing a distinct inclination to hang Mr Insall from the neck til he was dead, a procedure he passionately wished to avoid if possible. In furtherance of this plan of Senor Insall’s to keep himself on the right side of the noose, he, with his wife and kids, lit out of Lavaca County in the middle of the night and didn’t quit moving until they got to the wilds of Kendall County. Here they holed up in what Mrs Insall later claimed to be the oldest house in the county, and that was located near what is today Hwy 473, on a big bend in the Guadalupe River five miles from Comfort. The area where the Insall family eventually established their seat, Insall Bottoms, is landmarked these days by that wonderful old railroad trestle bridge that spans the Guadalupe and River Bend Road. Well anyway, old Mrs Insall, toward the very end of her long life, sat down with a newspaperman in 1923 and told him the story of her family- or at least as much as she would tell- and she talked about where her children went to school, way out there in the middle of nowhere, in the 1860s and 70s. She said they attended school, “only four miles away from the house” and had been taught by a man named Merritt, whom she considered “a mighty good teacher give [sic] the children all the book learning they really needed and was good and kind to them at the time.” Her kids had ridden their horse to school, “an old gray horse,” she explained, the oldest kid on the front of the horse “and so on, petering on down to DickDick always was the baby- just above the tail. They couldn’t ride very fast ‘count of Dick slipping off in the back.” But- what school was it? Turns out, the Insall kids got their learning in the old one-room schoolhouse in Brownsboro, Texas, where the children of the river bend community were taught their three Rs for a long, long time, from 1848 to 1944, and teacher ‘Merritt’ was most likely a guy named Charles Marriott from Maryland. In fact, the Insalls themselves were citizens- however unofficially- of Brownsboro (which was variously spelled Brownsboro or Brownsborough and sometimes even Brownsburg), even though the little village was never incorporated. It was just where they lived. And worshipped, too- In 1870, a couple of Brownsboro residents, Thomas and Sarah Manning, donated an acre of their land to Methodist Church for the purpose of building a church and a cemetery. Before that, circuit preachers would stop by Brownsboro every month to hold meeting in one of the neighbor’s houses or out under the shade of the cypress trees. IF there were any cypress trees left, which brings us around to how Brownsboro came to be in the first place. For this special edition, my very first interactive article, I need all of you to close your eyes and picture that old movie trope where sheets of a calendar are being torn off to indicate the passage of time, because we’re going back to 1836. That’s the year Joshua D Brown arrived in Green DeWitt’s colony at Gonzales, Texas, from Madison County, Kentucky, via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, through New Orleans, over the Gulf of Mexico and up the Sabine River. His parents and younger siblings had forged the way down a few years before, leaving Joshua and his brother James behind, maybe to wrap up loose ends in Kentucky since they were the oldest sons, but for whatever reason, the boys were to follow shortly. And they did. James Brown, as we all know, went on to enormous fame and success as a funk and R&B artist, earning himself the moniker ‘The Godfather of Soul’, but
it’s possible that I may be thinking about a different guy. At any rate, this is where this particular James Brown gets off the bus and we travel on without him. His brother Joshua, who was about twenty years old or so, arrived in 1836, just in time to fight in the pivotal Battle of San Jacinto, and lived near his father and family in DeWitt’s colony. Now Joshua Brown coming to Texas wasn’t the biggest news story of 1836 in Texas, as all this other stuff was going on that kinda stole his thunder. The war for independence from Mexico was raging, and between things like the fall of the Alamo and the aforementioned Battle of San Jacinto, what with Texas becoming an independent Republic- it was altogether a pretty eventful year around here. Well if you paid any attention at all to the badminton coach in high school, you know that Mexico lost the war and with it all these millions and millions of acres of territory, but surprisingly they didn’t mind it too much, they were philosophical about things and wished the new country godspeed and said things like, if you guys ever need anything, our door is always open. Or wait...no no, I’m sorry, it was the opposite of that. In fact, there were a LOT of bad feelings, and raids, skirmishes, invasions, massacres, and all kinds of trouble, kept going on for several years after San Jacinto, for quite a few years, since Mexico absolutely wanted their land back and Texas was just as determined to hang onto it. And Joshua Brown, being a young, able-bodied man and all that, was one of the first to show up when President Sam Houston put out the call for volunteers to deal with Mexico and that’s how, in 1842, he found himself slugging it out in the Battle of Salado Creek. Which is where he fell in love with- or maybe got dollar signs in his eyes about- all the cypress trees growing along the San Antonio River there. An army buddy of Joshua’s evidently noticed his fixation on the trees and, according to Brown descendant and historian Shirley Pieratt, dismissed the inferior Salado Creek cypresses out of hand: “Them trees ain’t nothin’,” the guy snorted. “If you want large timber, you got to go to the War-Loop (Guadalupe).” (There was a recent discussion on a certain Boerne social media page about frequently mispronounced words in our local patois, with the general consensus being that people who say ‘Berges Fest’ with a soft g in the Berges part should immediately cease and desist or face fines and/or jail time. Its Bear-guess, but we’ll settle for Bur-guess. I shall now submit ‘War-Loop’ for the consideration of the panel.) But back to the cypress trees- why would a guy be so fascinated by a bunch of cypress trees? They are quite lovely, especially growing beside a river, especially from below as one gazes up at their towering majesty from a reclining position in a tube floating down the Guadalupe River, but then again, Joshua Brown from Kentucky was no stranger to beautiful, majestic trees. I don’t think our Josh was gazing raptly upon their sublimity, contemplating his place in God’s creation while snippets of poetry flitted through his spirit. Nah, JB was thinking money. Cypress trees could be made into cypress shingles, and cypress shingles could be sold for big bucks in San Antonio. Joshua’s face breaks into a slow grin reminiscent of the Grinch who stole Christmas and he suddenly gives a triumphant shout, EUREKA! Shingle-making was one of the first jobs newcomers turned to when they arrived in the hill country. Their very first priority was to get a crop into the ground, muy fast, because they needed to start making a living. But the crop then had to grow, which took some time, and everybody had to have some scratch in the meantime, so people quite often looked to a little shingle cutting to turn a quick buck. Cypress shingles were likely the very first export of Boerne, and a mainstay of this whole region for a long time, as they had the advantage of lasting simply forever as roofing material, and fetched a cool six bucks a wagonload in the big city. The men who chose the shingle life in a permanent way as opposed to the hobbyist or the between-work kind of guys, were of a singular nature- one description refers to shingle-makers as “antisocial hermits”- and made their home in caves carved out along the riverbank, or in various other kinds of rough-and-tumble shelters at the shingle camp. Julius Dresel, one of the learned settlers of the Latin colony Sisterdale, jotted down a few notes on the shingle men living in his neighborhood: “Several young men were camping out between the rocky wall and the river, some above and some below Behr’s crossing [around where Hwy 474 crosses the Guadalupe nowadays], in order to be close to the cypresses, which they cut into shingles...Cutting shingles soon became the favorite occupation of the unemployed German gentlemen of San Antonio. They could live an entirely independent life, occupying themselves by hunting and reading in jolly company. At times, from half to a whole dozen unattached young men lived in the caves formed by the overhanging rocks in the bottoms...Here they formed an interesting gypsy group in the cool thicket under the giant trees...hunt[ing] deer, turkey, panther and bear, on horseback and on foot. Usually they worked quite hard because money was chronically absent, and one thousand shingles brought in six dollars. But often they had jolly drinking matches, especially when an understanding friend came riding down from town with stuff of rare quality.” Another guy landed in Texas with his brother on Christmas day of 1853, not to settle here permanently but to report on his travels and observations to the New York Times. The man was destined to become famous for designing New York's Central Park, but that was still off in the future for Frederick Law Olmsted as he set out on a two-thousand mile saddle trip across the state. He and brother John traveled from the swamps to the coast, from Austin and Houston and San Antonio and through the hill country, even passing by, “...on the Cibolo, at the road-crossing...a town called Borne [which] had been laid out, and a few houses built.” Out of all the places they saw and everyone they met all across the state, they were most taken with the German towns like New Braunfels and Sisterdale, whose settlers Olmsted called “free-thinking, cultivated, brave men.” In fact,
WWW.HILLCOUNTRYEXPLORE.COM | APRIL 2018
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they admired the "inexpressible" beauty and the fine companionship so much that they seriously considered settling in the hill country, near one of the German colonies. Olmsted reported on the shingle makers he encountered in the “German mountains”: “Next day our road took us over a rugged ridge to the valley of the Guadalupe. From the summit was a wide and magnificent view of misty hills and wooded streams. We were crossing a little creek beyond, when two horsemen, in red shirts and slouched hats, came over the hill upon us at a hand [sic] gallop. They no sooner saw us, than they reined up with a shout, and gave our companion a hearty grasp of the hand...Up and down the Guadalupe, within long walking range, are a dozen or twenty more, single men, living in huts or caves, earning a tough livelihood chiefly by splitting shingles. They are of the same stamp, but of less social disposition, disheartened, or tired of circumstances, a sort of political hermits, who have retired into the woods, and live with one companion, or in complete solitude.” So our hero Joshua Brown set out to explore the Guadalupe westward, searching the riverbanks and the lush river valley for those sweet cypress trees. And he finds them all right, over and over again, in profusion all up and down those German mountains. And all along the course of the river, into present-day Kerr County, Brown established shingle-making camps, and all those loners, those political hermits, those unattached young men, showed up to work. Some of them brought their families, too, or one of the lone young men would disappear for a spell and then show back up with his bride in tow. The pair of red-shirted, slouch-hatted horsemen Frederick and John Olmsted met on the trail near Sisterdale were “two of these singular settlers,” one of whom led the Olmsted bros back to his home, a lean-to out back of the almost-finished new log house. There they were “presented to the lady, who received us with cordial politeness, holding up, in commendation of the climate, a bouncing baby, seven days old, weighing, she said, three times as much as babies back home,” and treated to a luncheon of bread and broth. Hang on, stop reading for a sec right here- yeah you, the one who just kept right on reading. Just think of it, that “magnificent view of misty hills and wooded streams.” They had just crossed one such stream when they met the two horsemen; it was a Spring afternoon, perhaps the mountain laurel was in bloom, that time when every deep breath makes you drunk with the smell, and the two New Yorkers sat down to a simple meal with the shingle maker and his wife and their fat newborn baby, under the clear blue sky in the German mountains. Isn’t that wonderful? Sometimes I read things like that, a little vignette, and I’ll fold it up and stash it away in some drawer in the attic of my brain, so I can hang on to it. Back to Joshua Brown’s shingle camps: he set up his first shingle camp in 1844, at the junction of Curry Creek (aka Curry’s, Currey, and etc) and the Guadalupe, just northwest from where the Guadalupe River State Park is these days. Joshua commuted back and forth between his home base in Gonzales, where his wife and kids stayed, and the Curry Creek camp, with his half-brother in tow, kid named John Caleb Brown, whom Josh had adopted when their father died. John Caleb was twenty-two years younger than Joshua and he would go on to distinguish himself in his own right when he grew up, and maybe I’ll get around to writing about him some of these days. But for now he’s just doing the reclusive bachelor thing in the shingle cutter camp. After a little while, though, the cypress trees in the neighborhood of Curry Creek started to grow scarce since Joshua, John Caleb and co. were busy cutting them down all the time, so it was time for the Browns to head west again. This time they pitched upon a lush, beautiful place in a huge U-shaped bend of the Guadalupe, near the site of an old ford, five miles east of Comfort, although Comfort wasn’t there yet, wasn’t even a twinkle in Ernst Hermann Altgelt’s eye and wouldn’t be for another ten, twelve years. We’re not sure exactly when Brownsboro was established, but a lot of things point to the shingle men arriving there about 1844. This new shingle camp would come to be known as Brownsboro, in honor of its founder Joshua D Brown. At first it was just those solitary young men living there, including John Caleb Brown and sometimes ol’ Joshua. But as the years went on and the lonely young men married and brought their wives back to the big river bend, as folks began to build more permanent homes and put down roots, the little shingle camp started looking more and more like a little town. A school was built, (in 1848) and some of the shingle cutters bought themselves a piece of land and tried their hand at farming. A Kerrville man, one John James Starkey, in his 1939 memoirs, characterized Brownsboro as “a neighborhood, settled chiefly by relatives of Joshua Brown, on the Guadalupe River...a few miles below Comfort.” Now I don’t know how many of the families were kin to the Browns, but at least in the 1870 US census there were a lot of new people not named Brown: there were The Bierschwales, Henry and Elizabeth, the Giles family (no relation to architect Alfred Giles), there were the Hauflers and the Howells and our old friends the Insalls, Mannings, Nichols, Nowlins and the Rose family. And on that same census the school teacher is listed as Hampton Smith, and he had the charge of seventy students- ages 7 to 12 years- in the school. There was never a post office in Brownsboro, but the town is included on a list of ‘postal stations’, and I include that information even though I’m not really sure what it means. I will tell you that the US post office didn’t begin rural free delivery until 1896, which might have something to do with this puzzle, or it may not- but I invite you, readers, to fill me in if you know anything about it. Our old friend Caroline Insall recalled that before the San Antonio and Aransas Pass (SA&AP) railroad came through the river bend in 1890, Brownsboro folks only got mail once a month, but that didn’t make any
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difference to Caroline at least, since, as she said, no one ever wrote to her anyhow. In the 1850s Brownsboro was a stagecoach stop on the San Antonio-Fredericksburg Road, which would become Number 9 and Hwy 87 and eventually I10- a pretty important road. In time the SA&AP railroad came along- a major milestone for most of the citizens of the river bend community but not all that thrilling as far as Mrs Insall was concerned: ““It scares the chickens so,” she declared, “and we didn’t really need it at all.” The coming of the railroad in the late 1880s brought a new crop of people to Brownsboro. The men who worked laying the tracks, mostly Hispanic, settled in Waring and Comfort and in Brownsboro too, and when the railroad work was done a lot of them stuck around, trying their hand at farming, working as hands on the ranches- and maybe some of them even putting in a little shingle cutting too. When their lives ended in the river bend, they were laid to rest beside their neighbors in the Brownsboro Cemetery. A lady named Emma Altgelt, descendant of the founder of Comfort, wrote in 1901 about a coup she believed to have taken place among the Brownsboro folks. When Kerr County was formed in 1856 they took a vote to decide where to put the county seat, and Comfort lost to Kerrville. Emma Altgelt felt certain that the “American settlers who resided in the small colony of Brownsborough gathered friends and relatives from all areas of the State in order to out-vote the Germans [of Comfort].” It didn’t actually happen that way, according to the official election numbers, but it does point to a certain friction between the two populations, which definitely wasn’t in Ms Altgelt’s imagination. The Germans who’d founded Comfort were staunch Freethinkers and abolitionists, and had stood with the United States when the whole state seceded and became part of the short-lived CSA. Down the road in Brownsboro, however- by many accounts, a whole lot of them kin to the Browns in some way or another- those American settlers were solidly anti-US. Both Joshua and John Caleb Brown, and who knows how many of their friends and family in Brownsboro- fought on the side of the CSA. Even before the Civil War, in 1856 when Kerr County was formed, there was no love lost between the abolitionist Comforters and the pro-slavery settlers in Brownsboro. Emma Altgelt finished her thoughts on Brownsboro by noting its eventual fate: “After a short duration,” she reported, “Brownsborough ceased to exist with exception of several ruins and lonely chimneys looking over its own apparent demise.” Some little communities grow up around a stage stop, a river ford, a water mill. A shingle camp. In a river bend in the middle of ‘Indian country’, a handful of lone young men, a murderer who fled retribution and a wife who chose to stand behind her man, a whole slew of assorted kinfolk, a squad of railroad workers who stayed when the work was done- all came together, and a community grew around their togetherness. Sometimes little towns grow and flourish, become bigger towns, swell into cities, and sometimes they grow and flourish only for a while, and then the people drift away- like the fluffy little seeds of a dandelion on a windy Spring day. Brownsboro is mostly a memory now, and most of the people who remembered firsthand are gone now, and if it weren’t for people who want to know, who need to know, who are fascinated by the mystery, who are compelled to gather the clues and give chase and go on to tell the story, even the memory of Brownsboro itself would cease to be. That was actually happening to this little town in the big bend, but then the Comfort Heritage Foundation got involved, and people got to work cleaning up the cemetery, replacing broken headstones, restoring what was left. There’s a state historical marker there now, on River Bend Road off Hwy 473, almost to Comfort. And the history, the memory, of Brownsboro, Texas, lives on. Oh, and in case you were wondering whatever happened to the Browns- John Caleb, I believe I hinted, went on to make a name for himself and I promise I’ll tell you all about it someday. I will tell you this, he spent much of his later life, until he died, living along Joshua Creek- he called it Joseway, as do all the authentic old-timers in these parts- which he claimed was named for his big brother, and when he died in 1919 he was buried in the Brownsboro Cemetery. Joshua Brown, though, he’s not buried there. No, ol’ Josh was still restless, still determined to press up the Guadalupe, and in 1845 he kept on going and finally hit on the perfect site for his next shingle camp. He hurried back to Gonzales and rallied all his friends and kinsmen there to go back with him and help establish this new campwhich they did, and for several years Joshua ran back and forth between the new placeanother Brownsborough- and his home in Gonzales, with his kid brother John Caleb in tow. (Joshua Brown may not have possessed a very fertile imagination for thinking up town names, or maybe he was just too darn busy to exercise it.) But somewhere in there, Brown began to take notice of all the new people moving westward up the Guadalupe and got to thinking on things. In 1848, Joshua Brown officially established the town of Brownsborough on what had been the shingle camp of Brownsborough. In May, 1856, Joshua had that land of his on the Guadalupe, surveyed for city lots, setting four acres aside for a courthouse, which four acres he then offered to the use of the newly formed Kerr County (brand-newly formed, created in January of the same year, 1856), free of charge. They took him up on it, and when Joshua died in 1874, he was buried in the new town he founded. But first, Joshua re-christened his new town in honor of an old buddy of his, who would never actually see the place named for him- a Major James Kerr of Texas Revolution fame. Joshua called it Kerrsville, now just plain Kerrville. It’s still there.
WE ALL KNOW THE OLD SAYING “CLOSE ONLY COUNTS IN HORSESHOES AND HAND GRENADES.”
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PEACE By Kendall D. Aaron
I
I live on some property just outside of Boerne that backs up to an enormous hill. I won’t call it a “mountain”, but darn it, it’s pretty tall. It has to be one of the taller hills in the area. My property does not run to the top of the hill, but I got a wild hair the other day and figured that it was about time that I climb that old hill.
I jumped a fence, then another, ducked under countless cedar trees, and after a half dozen stops to catch my breath, I reached the top of the hill. I sat down at the top and was simply overwhelmed. I’m 6 miles outside Boerne and I could see the water tower on School Street clearly. I could see miles in every direction, and it took me minutes to take it all in. The wind was pretty blustery, but the skies were blue and the vistas stretched endlessly. Once my feeble mind had processed the scope of the entire sight, I was able to simply sit and enjoy. Slowly my thoughts melted away like ice cream and eventually it was a most precious moment to simply sit, enjoy, and be peaceful. I thought about how lucky I was, how much I love my family, and how my life was going. I was at peace. After a while I thought about how ridiculous it is that sometimes we must travel to such great lengths to find peace. Why can I not have this feeling of peace while sitting in my warm living room? Why must I climb Mt. Everest to find solace? I realized that sometimes peace can be hard to come by. Author Catherine Marshall tells a story I really like in one of her books: “A king once offered a prize to the artist who could paint the best picture of peace. Many tried, but there were only two the king really liked. One was of a calm lake. It was a perfect mirror for the peaceful towering mountains all around it. Overhead was a blue sky with fluffy white clouds.
mountains tumbled a waterfall. This did not look peaceful at all. But when the king looked closely he saw behind the waterfall a tiny bush growing in a crack in the rock. In the bush a mother bird had built her nest. There, in spite of the rush of angry water, she sat on her nest - in perfect peace. Which picture do you think won the prize? The king chose the second picture. Why? ‘Because,’ explained the king, ‘Peace does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. Peace means to be in the middle of all these things and still be calm in your heart.’” After reading that, it really struck a chord with me. Don’t we all complain about the noise that surrounds us? Don’t we all bemoan our stresses at work, our troubles at home, and our empty bank accounts? And I’m probably worst than most. My job is killing me, taxes are wiping me out, and deadlines are constantly looming. Next month is going to be rough at work, this summer is going to be stressful, and next fall will be wild. I stress out about events that are months away and that may not even happen. And then I wonder why I can’t find my “peace”. One of my favorite verses is “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” I can resist temptation, I can be successful, and I can even find peace if I want it. Basically, I can do anything. However, in order to do that, I must understand where my strength comes from. Is it my ambition? Sort of. Is it my perseverance? It helps. But my real strength comes from Christ and my ability to shut my trap for a minute, sit still, and focus on Him. I must close off the world for a moment, my own worries, and my outside distracters and allow Him to put His arms around me and reassure me. The world is a noisy, dirty place. Without the presence of mind to SEEK your solace, you’ll never attain it. As we enter a new year, I pray that you’ll find a “mountain”, pack some water and go on an adventure. Even if your backyard has nothing more than the kid’s jungle gym. kendall@hillcountryexplore.com
The other picture had mountains too. But they were rugged and bare. Above them was an angry sky from which fell rain, and in which lightning played. Down the side of the
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FIRE IT UP
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O
OLD TIMER
As I sat on my front porch the other day yelling at those little punks that run their bikes across my front yard, I got to thinking about a few things. Namely just a few things about Boerne. I know that we all have issues that we have with this town (despite having lots of things we like), but as I sipped my ale, I decided to make a list of new positions that the City of Boerne requires to properly operate this town. Sure, we have a Streets Department and our comically sad Code Enforcement folks, but I
UNDER SECRETARY FOR COMPLAINTS
Lots of people lodge lots of complaints with the City for a variety of reasons, and so I need someone that would handle this when I’m too busy watching Matlock to handle myself. My friend Ray Earl would be perfect for this. He’s at Longbranch most days from 11am till close. His office will be open on the 5th Tuesday of each month, between 12 and 1pm, on any month ending in Z. Otherwise, see #1.
have decided that we need a few additions to our City payroll. Yes, it will add to our expenses, but I trust that you’ll agree with me.
SECRETARY OF PEDESTRIAN TRANSPORTATION
EMPEROR
This one is easy, and obviously, it should be ordained to ME. Who else to sit on my throne inside the $chultz TajMah-City-Hall and render judgement on all things. I want a great scepter, and I always demand the ability to simply banish people upon my decree. This job alone would fix 99.9% of the things that harms Boerne. Just step aside folks, I got this.
MINISTER OF DUCK MANAGEMENT
I bitch about the stupid ducks EVERY month it seems like, yet nobody seems to fix anything. See #1 above. In lieu of that, I need someone that would dish out a little justice to those quacking little bastards. My friend Ira tells me all the time that he speeds up in his giant dually when he sees those stupid ducks waddling across the road. Occasionally I see the squashed remnants of his handiwork. THIS is the man for the job. Oh, and that god forsaken Duck statue is getting thrown in the river.
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This insane city likes to stress itself about how BERTHA can waddle across our Main Street district as safe as possible. A few years ago, $11m was spent ensure that our crosswalks were “improved” to assist her with her journey. It improved exactly 0% of our pedestrian traffic or safety. So I need someone to handle this, also. My buddy Earl would be perfect. He’s 90% blind so he’s the perfect demographic to be thinking about how to cross the street safely. His entire job shall consist of pointing in the general direction of an intersection and proclaiming “Oh my gosh!!! We need a crosswalk RIGHT THERE!” From there, he’ll busy himself with helping little old ladies across the street (and Bertha, too) in the interim.
LOS FEDERALES DE MEXICAN JOINTS
Look, Mexican food is serious business in Boerne. Lord knows we have a lot of them, and I partake in them all. I need someone that will oversee the placement of Mexican joints strategically throughout town to ensure perfect Mexican food saturation for our town. Yes, I know we’re a German town, but Mexican food trumps all. Mi amigo Raul would be great – that guy can cook some serious cabrito, he recognizes that Boerne gringos cannot be expected to drive more than 3 blocks without a Mexican joint, and he will inspect whether they offer free chips/ salsa. If not, prison ensues.
ENVIRONMENT PROTECTION AGENCY
Yeah, that’s right, we need this too. We only have a few simple rules: If you litter at the Cibolo Nature Center, prepare to meet my firing squad. If you play music ANYWHERE that is loud enough for ME to hear it (I don’t give a damn where I am), prepare to meet my firing squad. That said, giant ass trucks with no mufflers that spew black exhaust so bad that grandma starts coughing are perfectly acceptable.
ACTING DIRECTOR OF THE FIREARMS DISTRIBUTION CENTER If you’re not packing, you will be shortly.
OFFICE OF COMPLIANCE AND RE-EDUCATION
Sounds scary, but don’t worry, it’s not. Utilizing our Boerne PD’s massive tank-vehicle, this office shall perform the community service of simply taking new residents and educating them on “the way things work”. If you move here from California, Houston, or San Antonio, a short 90 day stay in one of our “Re-Education” camps should fix you right up. We’ll beat that non-compliance right out of you and remind you that in Boerne we believe that our children have to play 14 different sports (or they are put BACK into re-education), we wear name brand clothes, our wives MUST drive luxury SUVs, and above all else, once we move here you simply MUST bitch about new people moving here. My buddy Ralph, with his twitchy eye and propensity to yell at random people out of his window while driving Main Street is the perfect candidate. That guy is nuts, and THAT’S the kind of guy for this job.
VICE EMPEROR FOR OFFICE OF PROPAGANDA
There is only one man for this job, Mad Money Mike $chultz. That guy has proven he can spin ANY topic into somehow being “an addition to the quality of life in Boerne.” Giant Buc-ee’s? Got it. Taj-Mah-City-Hall? Gotta have it. Zillions of houses as far as the eye can see? Can’t live without ‘em. If I need someone to mind-numbingly explain my proposals in a way that the general public thinks that it’s actually GOOD for them, this is my guy.
PARKS & RECREATION ENFORCEMENT DIRECTOR
In Boerne, we take sports seriously. So seriously that if your kid isn’t filling virtually every hour with some sort of activity, we’ll fix that for you. Little Johnny is lingering outside of Soda Pops instead of practicing in the batting cages? Well, don’t be surprised when one of my unmarked vans screeches to a stop, throws his scrawny butt in the van, and we’ll drop him right off at the soccer fields with strict instructions that he best get to kicking that ball or next time we won’t be so “friendly”.
DIVISION OF BOERNE MOTHERS
When you sign your kids up for our myriad of sport options, we expect you to quickly sign up for your mandatory yoga classes. Followed by required lunches at the Dienger Co, and must conclude with “girl time” at the Boerne Wine Co. All this must be completed while wearing yoga pants. My friend Jackie can do this. That old lady is meaner than a snake, and I swear she carries a switch. She’ll keep you ladies in line.
Am I done? No, I just ran out of motivation.
WWW.HILLCOUNTRYEXPLORE.COM | APRIL 2018
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GROWING SMART
PRESERVING OUR HERITAGE
CONSERVING OUR NATURAL RESOURCES
• Resident of Boerne for 12 years • Married to native Texan, Renée, for 44 years; three daughters (one a resident of Boerne); five grandchildren (three residing in Boerne) • Retired physician and surgeon • Former member Boerne Methodist Healthcare Community Advisory Board • 30+ years experience with for-profit and not-for-profit boards • Experienced business owner and manager • Advisor and consultant to leading health care companies
“ Transparency in the actions of local government should always be the goal, keeping residents as our focus, and seeking to have citizens inform decision-making, not simply informing citizens of decisions.” Thank you for your consideration.
VOTE FOR DR. MAC SATURDAY, MAY 5th EARLY VOTING FOR THIS ELECTION STARTS APRIL 23rd Political advertisement paid for by Joseph N. Macaluso, Jr for Boerne City Council District 5 Campaign.
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