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BIG THICKET LEGACY
BIG THICKET LEGACY
Compiled and edited by
Campbell and Lynn Loughmiller
Foreword by Francis E. Abernethy
Number Two in the Temple Big Thicket Series
Big Thicket Association
The University of North Texas Press
Denton, Texas
Copyright © 1977 University of Texas Press
Copyright reverted 1999 to Campbell and Lynn Loughmiller
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Permissions:
University of North Texas Press
P.O. Box 311336
Denton, TX 76203-1336
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Ubrary
Materials, z39.48.1984. Binding materials have been chosen for durability.
Big Thicket legacy / compiled and edited by Campbell and Lynn Loughmiller;
foreword by Francis E. Abernethy.
p. cm. - (Number two in the Temple Big Thicket series)
ISBN 1-57441-156-X (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Big Thicket (Tex.)-Sociallife and customs-Anecdotes. 2. Country
Iife-Texas-Big Thicket-Anecdotes. 3. Big Thicket (Tex.)-Biography-
Anecdotes. I. Loughmiller, Campbell. II. Loughmiller, Lynn. III. Temple Big
Thicket series; no. 2
eISBN 9781574415216
"This electronic book made possible by the support of the Vick Family Foundation."
Few books are able to catch the spirit as well as the sound of a
place, especially when that place has as strong an identity and
personality as the Big Thicket has. But Campbell and Lynn
Loughmiller have, and they have been able to catch the speech
patterns and figures and rhythms without resorting to cracker-
barrel dialect writing. They have also kept honest. They haven't
tried to make the people com-pone folksy nor have they laun-
dered the language for polite society. They wrote down what
these old settlers said in the way that they said it, so if some of the
terms used jangle the sensibilities, remember that they are writ-
ing fact not fiction.
The people in this book come from a real dimensional and
historical place also, an area that is as much a part of them as
they are of it. The Thicket is a part of the creative process of one
way of life. Those who are native to the area have a share in the
humanity that is common to all mankind, but their ancestors'
generations in these woods have molded them to a slightly dif-
ferent form.
In spite of alien historians and biologists, of dollar-eyed land
promoters and chambers of commerce who among them have
stretched the Thicket to cover every county in East Texas, the
old timers generally agree on its location. At the outside, the Big
Thicket is about forty miles long and twenty miles wide. It is flat
land, gray clay and sand, that is a part of the Pine Island Bayou
drainage system. It begins in the southern parts of Polk and Tyler
counties where the creeks flow out of the red dirt hills. It ends in
the south below Sour Lake where the dense woods thin out in
stands of pine and in the rice farms of the coastal prairie. The
eastern and western boundaries were easier to define in the old
days before the loggers got hold of it, but east of Cypress Creek
the elevation is higher, the land is sandy, and there used to be
great climax stands of yellow pine, five and six feet in diameter.
The western boundary of the Thicket was marked by big open
pine stands along the spoil banks of the Trinity River and by
Batson Prairie on the southwest.
The land that holds the Big Thicket has been born and reborn
xii through the last million years and has continued submerging
Francis E. and emerging with the ebb and flow of the great glaciers of the
Abernethy Pleistocene. During the Ice Age the shore line that eventually was
to hold the Big Thicket rose and built, taking soils from the
overflow of some great ancestral Trinity River to form layers of its
land. As it grew higher and away from the sea, the marsh grasses
and salt cedars gave way to pines and hardwoods drifting down
from the north; and the animals that roamed and hunted the rich
new land were the old ones, the ones we know only through their
bones-the mastodons and elephants, the American horse and
Taylor's bison, camels, tapirs, sabre-toothed tigers and the dire
wolf, and giant versions of present-day sloths, beavers, and ar-
madillos. That part of Texas that later settlers were to call the Big
Thicket was rich in life, and perhaps some early man lived off its
riches, but so far no one knows.
The earliest people that we can associate with the Thicket
were the Indians, the Caddos to the north and the Atakapans to
the south. Other tribes, some from as far away as Colorado and
Kansas, came to the Thicket to hunt bear for the meat and the
tallow and to meet peacefully around the springs of medicinal
water that flowed near what is now Sour Lake. The Thicket be-
came the meat house and common hunting ground for many
tribes. Toward the end of the eighteenth century the Alabama
and Coushatta began drifting in from Louisiana and the Thicket
became theirs for a few decades.
But the Indians didn't own the land; it was a part of them as
was the air they breathed. The first man to own the Thicket lands
was Lorenzo de Zavalla, who held a personal claim to that area
through an 1829 Mexican land grant. No Mexicans came, how-
ever, nor did any settlers come under his grant. The first to come
were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who began settling on the
fringes of the Thicket in the 1830's and living off the bounty of
the land as independently as the Indians who preceded them.
As time passed, settlers began pushing into the Thicket to
build their cabins on the islands of high ground and to hunt the
buck and the bear as had their predecessors and to raise corn
and sweet potatoes and cane. The generations that were shaped
by their lives in the Big Thicket were as rugged as the Thicket
itself.
The core of the Thicket population is still white, Anglo-Saxon,
and Protestant. The Negro population within its boundaries is
small. The Thicket did not lend itself to plantation farming and
the slaves and field hands that went with it. There are a few
Cajuns on the southwestern edge, in the Batson Prairie area.
There are a few Slavonians left over from the days of tie cutting
and stave making, and some "foreigners" stayed behind after
they drifted in to work for the big sawmills or during the oil boom.
But the natives, the ones whose roots are generations deep in the
Thicket soil, are Southerners by sympathy and migration, they xiii
are conservative politically and socially, and they are Protestant Foreword
fundamentalists in religion.
The strength of these sympathies is increased by the fact that
the blood lines of the old families have frequently overlapped.
The family trees have grown close together with limbs entwined.
The old families loaned and borrowed seed among themselves,
and the result is a kinship by blood as well as a kinship in the
common bond with the land and the way of life it has nourished.
Through the 1930's the Big Thicket way of life remained pret-
ty close to what it had been for a hundred years, and the family
unit was traditionally centered around a small subsistence farm.
Some extra money was brought in from sawmilling or working in
the oil fields. During prohibition moonshine was a money crop
for some. But for the most part, they lived off their land, sweeten-
ing the pot only a little from the outside. They were-and still
are-proud of their independence.
World War II economy and the Gulf Coast industrial develop-
ment were major factors in changing the old way of life to what it
is now. In the early 1940's the shipyards sent out their call for a
labor force. Many of the Thicketites, smarting from the sting of
the Depression, left the area for Houston and the Golden Tri-
angle never to return. At the same time a generation of soldiers
and sailors moved off to new hunting grounds. The accelerated
progress of the war years and the population explosion that fol-
lowed inevitably caused the old ways to change. Those souls that
returned after the war boom and those that never left watched as
an increasing number of cars, paved roads, and power lines
invaded the heart of the Thicket, and television funneled in mas-
sive doses of the outside world.
Except for the most confirmed woodsmen, the population is
now located in the small towns in and around the Thicket, in
Kountze, Honey Island, Sour Lake, Saratoga, and Batson. Ufe in
these towns and in other crossroads settlements is much like
small town life elsewhere. It is a slower world than most urbanites
are used to, and fast traffic and time clocks are pleasantly absent.
The people live casually with time and one seldom gets the
notion that they live to work. A part of the sense of independence
one finds in the Thicket results from the rural tradition of working
enough to live and of not asking too much from life. There is
work enough in and near the Thicket-in the lumber, oil, or
coastal industries-to go around, but there is still no bustling
ant-hill economy. Many of the energized young people find this
speed of life too slow, and they mark time until they can leave for
more exciting urban pastures.
One consequence of this casual pace of life is that conversa-
tion is still a cultivated art form in the Thicket. People have time,
or they take it, to sit around and talk, and the social centers are
xiv the cafes, barber shops, and filling stations where talkers and
Francis E. listeners are provided with a regular flow of people. They analyze
Abernethy the political and social world in the light of old prejudices and a
fairly absolute Hebraic morality. The world's problems are simply
solved. They discuss the weather in detail, with ancestral refer-
ences and a personal concern that reflects a life governed by the
elements and unused to air conditioning and central heat. They
savor a vintage episode or experience as one would a mellow
wine. They value and re-evaluate the past and the people in it as
a connoisseur views a precious antique. Their main topic of
conversation is each other and they share a community of in-
formation that leaves no one out.
The present-day Thicket population has been considerably
diluted by urbanites fleeing the press and pollution that they have
created in the coastal industrial complexes. Lumber companies
and other outside interests control most of the land and have
fenced it and leased it to city-born hunting clubs. Open range
was over during the fifties, and barb-wire fences lattice-worked
the Thicket into well-posted plots of mine-and-thine. Old woods
have been logged and new ones have been planted in their
space, and the result is a modern picture.
In spite of multifarious division, invasion, and dilution much of
the old spirit is still there. The hunting gene is as strong as it was
a hundred years ago, and hound dogs and shotguns are a nat-
ural part of their way of life. In spite of modern game laws and
posted signs many of the old settlers still have the frontiersman's
feeling that time and place should be no hindrance to hunting,
that the time is when they need meat and the place is their
ancestral hunting ground. The old clannishness can still be felt,
along with a general distrust of outsiders. There is the usual
woodsman's snobbery toward a tenderfoot and a mild amuse-
ment directed toward the urban bird watchers who regularly tour
the Thicket. And because they are very satisfied with their own
ways, they are distrustful and sometimes antagonistic toward
philosophies and fashions brought in from the outside.
Those natives of the old cloth are still the soul of the Big
Thicket and the common denominator for their way of life. They
move with a confidence that is born of the knowledge that in a
nomadic world they belong by birth to the land that they live
on. They still walk the land their fathers watered with their sweat
and finally nurtured with their bones. The grass and the myrtle
bushes and the deer that feed on it are all a part of an intermina-
ble past that they still participate in.
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