ROAD TRIP: A BBM Game

[Lynne]

Ecatatpec, MEXICO

seems to be an ugly suburb of Mexco City, lots of inner-city, poverty problems.

[MaineWriter]

Concord, TX

(note: this article was written in 2002)

Forty years ago this year, Concord vanished.

Not the one in Massachusetts; the one in East Texas.

In 1962, the waters of the Angelina River rolled out of their banks to form Sam Rayburn Reservoir. In the process, they swallowed up a settlement that had existed in Angelina County for more than 125 years.

As a young reporter for the Houston Chronicle, I stood a few hundred yards from Concord¹s muddy main street and watched the town¹s 100 or so families -- the Moses, the Motts, the Hopsons and others -- weep over the loss of the homes their ancestors had hewn from logs in the river bottom. Concord¹s families fought the U.S. Corps of Engineers as long as they could.

In the end, they gave up and watched as the dam builders pulled down their log houses, destroyed their school, moved their church, dug up the bodies of their ancestors in Concord Cemetery, and finally rolled behemoth tree crushers into the community to flatten its last remains.

When Forest Hopson realized he would have to leave, he moved his small frame home with the help of neighbors. He then ripped apart the other buildings on his land and carried the lumber to his new homesite in his old, battered pickup truck.

But Hopson couldn¹t carry with him one of his proudest possessions, a 12-foot cedar tree in his front yard. For ten years Hopson had decorated the cedar as his Christmas tree.

One of the first homes to go was a log cabin built by Colonel T.L. Mott, one of the community's first settlers.

Mott pitched a tent in the river bottom in the early 1800s and soon built the cabin for his family and for later use as a post office for the town. In 1878, Mott was buried where his tent once stood. The site became Mott Cemetery, one of five graveyards relocated by the dam builders. One of Colonel Mott¹s sons, Rev. R.L. Mott, founded Concord Missionary Baptist Church, which marked its 99th anniversary just before it was moved. One of the old colonel's grandsons owned Concord¹s only store, a combination grocery and service station. Before the dam builders demolished it, the store was used to store wooden coffins for transporting the dead from Concord¹s cemeteries to a new graveyard several miles away on Texas Highway 63.

The relocation of the graves bothered Concord¹s families the most. Matthew Mott, another of the old colonel¹s kin, said: "When they move the graves, the souls of our pioneers won¹t have any place to rest. They¹ll just roam around, never leaving Concord." Today, forty years later, maybe Concord's spirits are still there.

How sad....

Leslie

[jpwagoneer1964]

Dalhart, Tx

DALHART, TEXAS. Dalhart, the county seat of Dallam County, straddles the border of Dallam and Hartley counties in the northwest corner of the Texas Panhandle. The original settlement was platted early in 1901 by W. J. Blair and Charles W. Thornton when the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway built west from Liberal, Kansas, and crossed the Fort Worth and Denver City line. The site of the crossing was known for a time as Twist Junction. J. H. Conlen supervised the laying of the Rock Island tracks and made an old boxcar into a section house on the site. Later the settlement was named Denrock, a combination of the names of the two railroads; in 1901 Robert B. Edgell named his new newspaper the Denrock Sun. But when postal authorities objected, the town adopted the name Dalhart, combining the first syllables of the names of the two counties in which it is located. On June 11, 1901, Ora D. Atkinson and other promoters incorporated the Dalhart Town Company, and the first and only sale of lots was held on July 20. Dalhart was incorporated as a town on May 6, 1902, and as a city on April 6, 1904. It replaced Texline as Dallam county seat, as a result of an election on February 21, 1903. From that time on, Dalhart quickly grew as a shipping center for the XIT Ranchqv and other area ranches. The activities of the W. P. Soashqv Land Company also contributed significantly to Dalhart's progress. C. E. Williams, a noted well driller, built the town's first water tower in 1906. Previously, it had been necessary to buy water at twenty cents a barrel from barrels lining the railroad tracks.

By 1912 Dalhart had a population of 3,500. The two railroad lines, which erected machine shops, roundhouses, and a lever control tower, contributed to the town's prosperity, and Dalhart played a major role in establishing the Enid, Ochiltree and Western and other small railways. In addition, it had three banks, a flour mill, a large grain elevator, a planing mill, a modern utilities system, a hospital, an ice plant, several hotels and churches, and a high school athletic program serving an ever-expanding agricultural area. When oil companies began drilling in the Panhandle,qv Dalhart was among the first towns to sell oil leases. The Dallam County Public Library, the first county library in Texas, opened for circulation in January 1921. Dalhart's population was further increased with the development of its East Heights addition in 1928.

During the drought years of the 1930s Dalhart was notorious for its "black dusters" (see DUST BOWL). R. S. (Uncle Dick) Coon, a wealthy businessman who owned the DeSoto Hotel, became legendary for his generosity to depression-stricken farmers and cowboys. In August 1934 Dalhart became the site of one of the first three erosion-control demonstration projects in Texas, sponsored by the federal land bank, and the first to be devoted specifically to wind erosion. The Work Projects Administration and National Youth Administrationqqv also had chapters in Dalhart. Dalhart Army Air Fieldqv was established about two miles southwest of town.

In 1990 Dalhart remained an agribusiness center for a wide area of Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. In addition to cattle feedlots, a bottling plant, and feed and meat processing plants, Dalhart is noted for its schools, hospital, and nursing home. The Dalhart Texan has served as the area newspaper since December 11, 1902. The Rock Island shops continue to help furnish the city's payrolls. Three U.S. highways, 87, 385, and 54, converge at Dalhart. Since 1936 Dalhart has been the home of the XIT Ranch Reunion and Rodeo, held in August. It was the XIT Reunion Association that built the landmark Empty Saddles monument and later established the XIT Museum. Another community event is the annual Railroad Week. Two miles south of Dalhart is Rita Blanca Canyon, site of Rita Blanca Lake. The city's population increased from 5,899 in the 1950s to 6,854 in the 1980s. In 1990 it was 6,246, and in 2000 it was 7,237.
   
XIT
   
What is "XIT" and why is everything in town named after it?  The XIT Ranch (pronounced as initials) was the largest ranch in the world in the 1880s.  It contained over 3 million acres in ten Texas counties and ran 150,000 head of cattle.  The land comprising the ranch was traded by the State of Texas to the Capital Syndicate of Chicago in exchange for building the state capital in Austin.   
XIT Rodeo & Reunion - Held every year since 1925 to honor the cowboys who worked the ranch.  Always the first Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of August.  Ten to twenty thousand attend the Rodeo, World's Largest Free Barbecue, Parade and much more.

[memento]

Tow Texas

TOW, TEXAS. Tow is on Farm Road 2241 and the western shore of Lake Buchanan, twenty miles northeast of Llano in northeastern Llano County. It is the oldest community in the county. It began with the arrival in 1852 of David and Gideon Cowan and their mother, Ruth, from Tennessee. The Cowans were directed by local Indians to a salt bed near the Colorado River, which they developed into a successful saltworks. Significant not only in the local economy, the Bluffton-Tow Salt Works was also known as the Confederate States of America Salt Works for its contribution to the Confederate cause. The operation was destroyed by the "salt works cyclone" in 1871. John F. Morgan arrived in the area with his family in 1853 and soon established a hat business, using beaver and other fur trapped locally. When the Tow brothers, William and Wilson, arrived with their families in 1853, they named the nearby area in which they settled Tow Valley. A post office was established there in 1886 as Tow with Mathew B. Clendenen as postmaster. Tow grew rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s with the addition of retirement and recreation to its economic base. From a population of fifty before 1950, the lakeside town had grown to 305 by 1974, when it had a post office and numerous businesses. In 2000 the population was still 305; thirty-one businesses were reported.

[Meryl]

Winnie, TX

For Mark:



1951 Chevrolet Pickup
Custom Built by Hot Rods & Custom Stuff for "Bubba Nelson" in Winnie, Texas

More pictures here: http://www.hotrodscustomstuff.com/bubba1.html

[belbbmfan]

El Calaboz, Texas

[jpwagoneer1964]

Zepayahutla, Mx

[MaineWriter]

Albuquerque, TX

Located on the Clear Fork of Sandies Creek, Albuquerque was once believed to have been in Wilson County. The discrepancy was cleared by a survey in 1914. The town was only two miles south of where Gonzales, Wilson, and Guadalupe counties joined. The Handbook of Texas suggests that the name was "probably" suggested by "South Texans who had fought in New Mexico under Henry H. Sibley."

Brothers-in-law Henry S. Hastings and Samuel McCracken from Mississippi are regarded as the town's first settlers. The town began in the early 1870s with official recognition coming with the opening of the post office in 1870. Thirteen short years later it was already fading into ghost-town status. The post office closed its doors briefly, reopened and then closed for good in 1883.

The fledgling town had the basic businesses to survive including a cotton gin, blacksmith, store, saloon and school, but with no railroad on the horizon, the odds were stacked against Albuquerque's survival.

It did have it's fifteen minutes of fame when John Wesley Hardin was involved in not one, but two killings.

Albuquerque's decline was attributed to the growth of nearby Union, Texas, aka Union Valley which was two miles south of Albuquerque. Eventually even the die-hard residents abandoned the town and by 1912 the town was totally deserted.

Leslie

[Meryl]

Ekbalab, Mexico

[belbbmfan]

Beiseker, Alberta

Where Jack and Ennis spent the night in the Siesta Motel