ROAD TRIP: A BBM Game

[jpwagoneer1964]

Onion Creek, Tx

ONION CREEK, TEXAS. Onion Creek was a farming community on Onion Creek and the Rock Island and Pacific line, seven miles from Ennis in Ellis County. During the 1930s and 1940s the population there was estimated at twenty-five. County highway maps from the 1980s showed the Onion Creek community with two railroad stations.

Mark

[MaineWriter]

Knickerbocker, TX

 The town was once second only to San Angelo in size and political influence in the county after Ben Ficklin was washed away in the great flood of the Concho River.

The name comes from two of the town's early settlers who were related to Washington Irving, the American writer who was at the peak of his popularity at that time.

Diedrich Knickerbocker was the fictitious narrator of Irving's History of New York.

In 1875 the three Baze brothers donated land for a church, school, and cemetery on the northwest side of Dove Creek. They installed an irrigation ditch to grow hay, and melons to sell to the Fort Concho soldiers.

In 1877 Joseph Tweedy, J. Barlow Reynolds and the Grinnell Brothers drove their herds of sheep from their camp near Brackettville.

They established the Knickerbocker ranch / store on the SE side of Dove Creek.

A post office was opened in 1881. In the 1880s the Tweedy Mercantile Company dealt in oats, wheat, and corn. Second only to the crops was sheep production.

After a collapse in wool prices, the original settlers left, leaving only J.Tweedy. He platted a townsite on his land, and set up his own irrigation company for farms along Dove Creek.

Stephen Dexter Arthur planted cotton as an experiment in 1887 and produced Knickerbocker's first bale. The ruins of his water-driven gin can be seen near the bridge at Dove Creek. Arthur built a Methodist church on land donated by Joseph and Elizabeth Tweedy. In 1889 the town relocated to a site with better water.

The town had twenty-five residents in 1884, fifty in 1890 but by the late 1890s the population had swollen to 250.

During its boom times, Knickerbocker seemed to have two of everything. The town had two gins, two saloons, two blacksmiths, two hotels and two stores. It also had an undertaker - just one.

Kinckerbocker also had an early sanitarium since doctors all across the country were sending people to dryer climates. Later, nearby Carlsbad became a huge facility for tuberculosis patients.

Knickerbocker's adobe store / post office, built in 1896 remained standing until 1936. Knickerbocker got its first school, in 1889 and a school for Mexican children six years later.

A lawless element hung out near Knickerbocker and two members of this group staged a train robbery near Sanderson, Texas.

A brick school built in 1926, served until the school consolidations of the 1950s. In 1956 Knickerbocker merged with Christoval.

Today there isn't much left in Knickerbocker except for the brick community building.

Leslie

[Meryl]

Rek Hill, TX

[jpwagoneer1964]

Lusk, Wy

In 1918 the Buck Creek Dome oil strike briefly boosted Lusk's population to ten thousand.  Today, only three thousand people live in the entire county.  The Stagecoach Museum in Lusk is a wonderful place to explore another piece of Wyoming's history -- the glory days of the Cheyenne-Deadwood stagecoach route during the Black Hills gold rush.

A local character who epitomizes that era was Mother Featherlegs, an auburn-haired woman who wore red pantalets, ruffled drawers that tied at the ankle and flapped in the wind when she rode.  An admirer said she looked just like a feather-legged chicken, and so she was christened.  She and her cohort, Dangerous Dick Davis, ran a saloon and brothel out of their cabin southwest of Lusk.  It was a favorite gathering place for those on the wrong side of the law.  Her local fame soared in 1879 when she was discovered shot dead at her spring, with the missing Dangerous Dick's footprints all around.  She was rumored to have had a lot of money hidden away.  Whether it was stolen by her murderer or still waits to be found depends on whose story you believe.  Either way, she is remembered fondly by local residents.  A marker stands at the site of her cabin, and her famous pantalets have had adventures of their own.  Stolen from the historic site in 1964, they graced a Deadwood saloon until 1990, when a determined posse of Lusk residents raided the saloon and got the pantalets back.

If you take Highway 85 north out of Lusk, you'll pass through the most dangerous and desolate section of the Cheyenne-Deadwood stage route.  Horse thefts, stage coach robberies, and other misfortunes were fairly normal, starring westerners with colorful names like Persimmons Bill Chambers, a famous outlaw, and Stuttering Brown, the man sent by the stagecoach company to stop outlaw depredations.  Although many of these stories are tragic, some are triumphant, others are simply funny.  In 1876 Persimmons Bill held up the stage and murdered the Metz family.  Either plucky or foolish, Mrs. Thomas Durbin road the next stage north from Cheyenne with $10,000 in her handbag.  She arrived safely in Deadwood and delivered the money to her brother-in-law who started up a bank, and hopefully treated his sister-in-law well the rest of her life.

Phatty Thompson's initiative was on a different scale.  In 1877 he decided that Deadwood's population of shady women needed pets, so he purchased a number of cats at twenty-five cents each from enterprising Cheyenne youngsters, packed them in a huge crate, loaded them on his wagon, and set out for Deadwood.  En route the wagon tipped over, the crate broke open, and Phatty's investment escaped.  Fortunately, Phatty had some "tasty morsels" with him that eventually convinced most of the cats to return to the crate.  Upon arrival in Deadwood, Phatty's business instincts proved sound -- his feline companions for lonely ladies sold for ten to twenty-five dollars each.

[MaineWriter]

Kress, TX

 Founded in 1890, the town had been named Wright, after a local preacher. On the stage coach line from Canyon to Plainview, with a school, post ofiice and store, it had everything a 19th Century town needed to prosper.

When the railroad arrived in 1906, the post office / store moved to the rails. The town was renamed for Pioneer George H. Kress.

In 1909 a promotional booklet gave the town's population as 500 - a number that was probably inflated. The first school opened in 1907. In 1915 the first garage and filling station was erected, a grain elevator was built, and a weekend rodeo was organized for local recreation.

The main highway through town (Hwy 87) has moved twice - forcing businesses to relocate as well. Infrastructure in the form of electricity and gas were introduced in the late 1920s.

Kress was home to over 650 people by 1953. A bank opened in 1963 - ending a bank-less period that had lasted from the 30s to that date.


Leslie

[Meryl]

Shepherd, TX

A nice name to celebrate both the season and our own Jack and Ennis. 

Happy Holidays, Road Trippers!  

[memento]

Danevang, TX

Danevang (Danish Meadow or Fields) come into being in 1894. A group of Danes who had already been in the U.S. formed the nucleus. They were joined by others who arrived directly from Denmark. The land was acquired by the Danish People's Society and the Lutheran Church was its anchor and support.

The Danevang Post Office was started in 1895. The hardships of life in Texas drove some of the settlers to California where they formed another colony, which prospers today as a tourist attraction.

 On the church lawn stands a short obelisk which has a chronicle of the community's triumphs and tragedies engraved on it.

The cemetery tombstones are nearly 100% Danish surnames. Some of the stones have the Danish birthplaces engraved on them.

The school taught classes both in English and Danish, but they also had language instruction in Danish during the summer months. They had their own community library and formed several cooperatives which remain in place today.

The community still keeps weather statistics for the weather bureau. There have been only 7 recorders since the records started being kept in 1896.

Happy Holidays to all you Kings of the Road.
Below is a picture from a CD entitled "Christmas from Ennis Road" by the Ennis Sisters.
   

[MaineWriter]

Gasoline, TX

A Very Brief History

A group of settlers got together and sunk a well in the area about 1903. Today only a few houses dot the landscape where Gasoline once was. Even the cemetery (Rest Haven) is two miles north. The unusual name dates from 1907, the date when they got the first post office. How they decided on this unusual name is lost to history, but the Handbook of Texas suggests that the town's cotton gin ran on gasoline and gasoline was still regarded "as a novelty" in the Panhandle.

A Full Day in Gasoline

No population reports were given, however, school expansions indicate that Gasoline was once thriving. Residents could have their horses shod at the blacksmith while they got a haircut or visited with friends at the café. They could then pick up some liver pills at the drugstore and if they had time, they could watch gasoline being poured into the engine at the 'gin'. Even with the town being named gasoline, they were sensible enough to use kerosene for their lighting. They got electricity just in time for the Great Depression (1929) and the Handbook tells us that the town only had one telephone for years.

Perhaps "Fireproof, Texas" should have been considered.

The town's gin burned in 1938 and shortly thereafter, the population dwindled to 20 persons. After WWII, the few remaining schoolchildren started attending classes in Quitaque and the post office closed in 1948.

Leslie

[Ellemeno]

Esmeralda, Mexico

[Meryl]

Alexo, AB



Alexo, Alberta (population ~56) is a hamlet in Alberta.

It is located along the David Thompson Highway, between Nordegg and Rocky Mountain House, at an elevation of 1,200 m. Shunda Creek, a tributary of the North Saskatchewan River runs through the community.

It was named after the Alexo Coal Company, which operated a mine near the community in the 1920s and 1930s.

The former townsite, now known as Camp Alexo, is currently owned by the Youth and Volunteer Centre of Red Deer, Alberta.