ROAD TRIP: A BBM Game

[MaineWriter]

Grit, TX

Settled by cotton farmers around 1889. When the time came to open a post office the town wanted to be named after General Frederick Funston, Spanish American War Hero. Saddened to discover that Funston had already been so honored in Texas, the town settled on the more earthy name of Grit - said to be the texture of the local soil.

The post office opened in 1901, the first store opened around 1903, and the town had its first school building in 1908.

The Baptist church met in the Grit school until it built its own building in1924. Telephone service began around 1914 when the town had 30 people. It remained at 30 until the 1960s when 63 people lived in Grit. This number held into the mid 80s, but it has since declined back to the 1914 level of 30 citizens. The post office has since been discontinued, but Grit remains on state maps.

L

[belbbmfan]

Twin Butte, Alberta

[jpwagoneer1964]

Evadale, Tx

EVADALE, TEXAS. Evadale is at the junction of U.S. Highway 96 and Farm roads 105, 1131, and 2246, twenty-five miles northeast of Beaumont in southwestern Jasper County. During the 1830s and 1840s the site was called Richardson (Richardson's) Bluff, for early settler Benjamin Richardson, who operated a ferry on the Neches River and who also served as postmaster in 1839. Town lots for the area were listed in county tax rolls as early as 1859. After Richardson's death in 1849, the land was sold to John A., Philip U., and Charles T. Ford. At this time the site was often referred to as Ford's Bluff. Hoping to establish a sawmill, Philip Ford went to New Orleans to buy machinery but contracted yellow fever there and died shortly after returning to Jasper County. Nonetheless, Ford's Bluff became an important collection point for logs, which were floated down the river to Beaumont mills. In 1893 John Henry Kirbyqv chartered the Gulf, Beaumont and Kansas City Railway and rebuilt a tram line that already ran from Ford's Bluff to Buna as part of his larger common carrier project. Kirby renamed the site for Miss Eva Dale, a teacher at Jasper's Southeast Texas Male and Female College, and constructed a mill there by 1904, when the post office was established. By 1914 the Evadale plant, known as Mill U, included kilns, a circular sawmill, and a planing mill with a daily capacity of up to 70,000 board feet. Evadale had a population of 300 by 1920. The Kirby mill closed during the Great Depression,qv and by the late 1940s the town's population had fallen to 100. Economic revitalization began in 1948, when the Champion Paper and Fiber Company acquired riverfront acreage for a pulp mill. By the 1970s the giant Temple-Eastex pulpwood and paper mill dominated the local economy. With the new activity, the population in Evadale reached 700 by the early 1960s. In 1984 the town had twenty-two businesses and an estimated 715 residents. In 1990 its population was 1,422 and in 2000 it was 1,430.

Mark

[MaineWriter]

Engle, TX

The area was settled in the 1850s by Czech immigrants. Nearby Praha became the cultural center of the area - especialy after the church was constructed in the 1880s. Engle residents worshipped in Praha and the Praha cemetery made a separate one for Engle unnecessary.

J. E. Engle, an engineer for the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway was the namesake of the community after a railroad stop was established in the late 1870s.

A post office was established at Engle in 1888 and closed in the 1930s. By 1900 Engle had a blacksmith, a tinsmith, a lumbersmith, and three saloonsmiths. Historic photos reveal that a photography studio also operated in Engle.

The 1950 census showed Engle had a population of 250. Today much of "downtown" Engle is occupied by a machine shop utilizing many of the town buildings. The population retains strong community ties with nearby Praha.

The Engle Depot:



L

[Front-Ranger]

Yes, it was.  Signal Butte is this butte/bluff IMMEDIATELY west of Ten Sleep, about a mile west of the middle of town.  The ONLY other use of the name "Signal" in the entire state is Signal Peak in the Tetons.

I never thought much of Signal Butte till the movie came out but I did take this quick photo not too long ago...but I guess I might get a better one when I'm up there in a week taking care of ranch business.

The old rodeo ground along Nowood Road before the bends is a dead-ringer for the corrals in the movie (when we came down off the mountain in 63 and Aguirre got all upset at us)






  -Ennis

Do you have a map that shows the relationship of Ten Sleep to the canyon and Brokenback Mountain??

(By way of explanation, this is in reference to a post on page 4 of this topic!!)

[Meryl]

Echeta, WY

Echeta is in Campbell County, in the Gillette metro area.   Elevation is 4,081 feet.

The community name derives from the Indian term for "horse."

[moremojo]

Arlington, Texas

--city located in Tarrant County; part of the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area. Arlington, which is home to both the University of Texas at Arlington and the noted theme park Six Flags Over Texas, had a 2000 population of 332,969. Here is a bit of the place's history I found online:

White settlement in the Arlington area dates back at least to the 1840s. After the May 24, 1841 battle between General Edward H. Tarrant (Tarrant County is named for him) and Native Americans of the Village Creek settlement, a trading post was established at Marrow Bone Spring in present-day Arlington. The rich soil of the area attracted farmers, and several agriculture-related businesses were well established by the late nineteenth century.

The city was founded in 1875 and is named after General Robert E. Lee's Arlington House (in present-day Arlington County, Virginia). After the arrival of the railroad in 1876, Arlington grew as a cotton-ginning and farming center, and incorporated in 1884. The city could boast of water, electricity, natural gas, and telephone services by 1910, along with a public school system. By 1925 the population was estimated at 3,031, and it grew to over four thousand before World War II.

Large-scale industrialization began in 1954 with the arrival of a General Motors assembly plant. Automotive and aerospace development gave the city one of the nation's greatest population growth rates between 1950 and 1990. Arlington became one of the "boomburbs," the extremely fast-growing suburbs of the post-World War II era. U.S. Census Bureau population figures for the city tell the story: 7,692 (1950), 90,229 (1970), 261,721 (1990), and 359,467 (2004 estimate). Tom Vandergriff served as mayor from 1951 to 1977 during this period of explosive development. Six Flags Over Texas opened in Arlington in 1961, and in 1972 the Washington Senators baseball team relocated to Arlington and began play as the Texas Rangers. A noted heavy metal band from Arlington, Pantera, formed in 1981.

[MaineWriter]

New Moore, TX
AKA Nurmoore

In 1892, Samuel F. Singleton and Marion Virgil "Pap" Brownfield filed on 16 sections of land along the present-day Lynn and Terry County lines for future cattle, railroad and township purposes. In 1896, Singleton sent his son, Willie and a cook to the area to set up camp. As with many business propositions, the men had different ideas about the use of the land. The men decided to part ways and divided the land. Singleton ended up with the Lynn County territory and Brownfield, the Terry County land.

Singleton then purchased the nearby Slash L Ranch, consisting of 30 sections, in 1898. He put more than 5,000 head of cattle on the land. However, the problem of drought and poor watering holes forced the rancher to spend $19,000 to dig wells. The most successful and least tainted water came from present day New Moore.

After Singleton's death in 1922, the family decided to sell the ranch. W.McCarty Moore from Dallas purchased approximately 17,000 acres and commissioned G.O. Newman of Newman Bros. Land Development Co. in Fort Worth to market his purchase. To prove the worth of the land the company broke and planted 3,000 acres in cotton in 1924. Within the year, the company sold inexpensive land of 13,240 acres to about 50 farmers who came largely from the Nolan County area.

As families with the names of Rogers, Bevel, Crutcher, Strasner, Light, Pharr, Parker, Fails, and Isreal came to western Lynn County, the company dubbed the settled area New Moore in honor of Newman and Moore.

In 1924, Moore built the Slash L School on the west side of the land that later came to be known as the Marshall place, about five miles southwest of New Moore. The school was to take care of the many children of the new farmers. The school building was a crude, one-room structure, without water or electricity. It had many windows to let in light, according to Hoskins' New Moore, Texas account.

"Mesquite wood was used in the stove to warm the building. The room held from five to seven grades with one teacher for all students. Mrs. Ella Walker from Wolfe City was an early teacher there. Moore personally paid her salary, as well as the salaries of other teachers out of his own pocket as long as the school existed," according to Hoskins.

Another school was authorized by Lynn County Commissioners later in 1924, a wooden structure built at New Moore, across from the Frank Rogers home, which was the old Singleton Ranch headquarters. Both the Slash L school and the New Moore school operated until they were consolidated in 1928.

In the fall of 1928, another school was started one mile north of New Moore. In 1929, the modern four-room brick building was opened and the two other schools were closed and consolidated into the new larger school.

Unfortunately this was also the first year of the depression so families began to move to towns to seek employment. The population continued to dwindle in subsequent years.

The New Moore school closed in 1953. The last business to close in New Moore was the cotton gin, which ginned its last bale in 1986.


Leslie

[belbbmfan]

Egremont, Alberta

[EDelMar]

Ten Sleep Canyon!

(The car route to Brokenback from Signal...not the sheep-herding route)

  -Ennis

Map showing Ten Sleep, Brokenback Creek (with north and south forks), the mountain (marked with red square) and the Canyon across the middle: