Granbury History

3 yrs

Granbury’s Greatest Newspaperman

It was a cold day in January 1938. The octogenarian pulled on his overcoat, put on his hat, and retrieved his cane. He left the upstairs office and walked down the flight of stairs better than most 81-year-olds. Reaching the street, he never saw what hit him. Mrs. A. D. Smith could not stop her car in time. Ashley Crockett lay in the street. Everyone knew the legendary newspaper editor and grandson of David Crockett. He was hurt, but Crockett did not want people making a fuss. Folks helped him return to his home, where he recovered. He was anxious to get back to the work that
meant so much to him.

The young man walked confidently along the dusty street. He turned down the alley between two stores on the square. There he saw the side door stenciled with the words, ”Granbury Vidette.” A bell tinkled as he entered.

A moment later, Edward Garland emerged from the backroom in an ink-stained apron, vigorously wiping his blackened hands on a rag. He and W. L. Bond published Granbury’s first newspaper starting in November 1872.

”What can I do for you, son?” Garland asked.

”I’m Ashley Crockett, sir, ” the lad responded. “I want to be a newspaperman.” (I don't know if this is precisely what he said to Edward Garland, but I do that a few years later, he told the 1880 census taker his occupation was “newspaperman.”)

Ashley did not have much education since he lived all of his early life isolated on the Texas frontier. He was too frail for rigorous farm work. Due to a congenital disability, Crockett had sight in only one eye. Ashley remembered that at age 12, his father suggested that he go to Weatherford Trading Post and learn the printer’s trade from a man named Duke. Col. R. W. Duke started the paper just three years previously.Isaac Duke put Ashley to work as a printer’s “devil”, and entry-level job. Ashley recalled that he had no place to stay in Weatherford. Col. Duke gave him a buffalo robe and told him to sleep in a lean-to barn. ”I heard (horse thieves) at night, moving through the brush,” Ashley recalled. ”I remained breathlessly quiet, so they would not find me.”

Crockett was a fast learner and a conscientious worker. So enterprising was the young man that he bought the Vidette in 1883 and changed its name to the Granbury Graphic. In 1907 someone must have made Ashley an offer he couldn’t refuse. He sold the Granbury paper and moved to Glen Rose, where he worked on the local gazette. But after some years, he returned to Granbury. Crockett got a job at the Post Office.

During this time, Ashley married Anna Marie Walkup, 22, in Red River, Texas. Between 1898 and 1913, the Crocketts had four girls, Gladys, Elizabeth, Margetta, and Hellen. He had been married once previously to Onalda Hayes with whom he fathered a son, Chester, and a daughter, Virginia.

In 1919 Ashley bought back his old paper and renamed it the Granbury Tablet. He continued working on the Tablet until he retired due to poor eyesight in 1930.

Ashley Crockett, the one-eyed editor, worked for eighty years in the newspaper business in Granbury. The current paper, The Hood County News, is a direct descendant of Ashley Crockett’s publication.

Mr. Crockett lived to be 97 years old. He died in 1954. He was the oldest resident of Hood County at the time of his death. Anna Marie passed away in 1935. They are buried in Granbury City Cemetery.

Dr. David K. Barnett
Granbury History

Sources:

Granbury News, January 8, 1938.

“David Crockett’s Grandson Edits Hood County Paper, ” Fort Worth Star Telegram, December 7, 1937.

Hendricks, Kenneth, ”Remember the Crocketts.” Lecture transcribed by Tex Dendy, April 2008. Hood County Texas Genealogical Society.

Wharton, Clarence R., Texas Under Many Flags, Volume III. Clarence R. Wharton, Author, and Editor. 1930: The American Historical Society, Inc., Chicago & New York.

3 yrs

The Jail (1885-1978)

It’s hard to believe that the Hood County Jail on North Crockett Street was in operation for more than ninety years. It wasn’t the first hoosegow in Granbury. The first lockup was a log house built in 1873 near the Brazos River. As the County grew, the Commissioners recognized the need for a more spacious and secure facility. They raised $9,500 in bonds and put out a call for bids. During 1885, J. N. Haney, a local miller, designed and oversaw the new jail's construction just off the northeast corner of the Square. Stonemasons hand-cut limestone from a nearby quarry, shaped the stone into uniform blocks, hauled them to the site, and laid them in place. The walls are nearly two-feet thick.

The shape of the structure came from a unique feature -- an inside execution room. In the event of a hanging, the second floor had a tall ceiling to allow a drop sufficient to snap the neck of a condemned prisoner. But no one was ever hung in the gallows room upstairs. Texas law eventually required all executions to be held at one central location (Huntsville). So, the execution chamber became a meeting room for prisoners and their attorneys.

When first opened, the Jail was advanced for its time. It had indoor plumbing on both floors. There was a washbasin and a toilet for prisoners. The sheriff or jailor lived in the four rooms downstairs. During construction, someone realized they had neglected to provide a kitchen. So, the stonemasons built a detached cookhouse behind the jail. Later, an enclosure covered the walkway from the kitchen to the prison. The inmates received two meals a day. Fern Baker, the wife of Sheriff Owen Baker, said, ”The prisoners ate the same thing we did. If we had a fancy dinner, so did they. And if we had bread and milk, that's what they had.”

The cells were free-standing iron mesh cages. These were more secure because they minimized the opportunity for tunneling through a wall or floor. The Jail had two cells like this. One was designed to hold only one person at a time and accommodated women and the mentally ill. The main cell could hold four men and their bunks.

Most early jail records have disappeared. What has survived comes from 1891 and later. A historical presentation by Vance J. Mahoney delivered in 1966 noted that people were held in jail for charges such as ”going too fast across the bridge, ” ”cruelty to dogs, ” and ”drunkenness.” Of course, there were many more serious offenses such as ”shooting a cow, ” ”adultery, ” ”forgery, ” and ”assault and battery.”

Most prisoners were tramps, transients, and people who committed crimes elsewhere but were held in Hood County for pick up. There were some escapes from the jail. The first may have been H. B. Harley, who was being held for Johnson County police on a horse-stealing charge. The seventeen-year-old trustee worked in the kitchen. One day when he was left alone, he grabbed an ax, struck off his chains, and ran out the front door.

The last escape was in October 1978, just three weeks before the new jail on West Pearl Street opened. By then, the 1885 jail was in bad shape. Two prisoners named Hawkins and Adams used simple plastic spoons to scrape away the aging mortar. They removed several stones and shinnied down the north wall of the jail using bed sheets tied together. The police later apprehended the pair in Benbrook. Deputy Doug Johnson said of the $440,000 new facility on West Pearl Street, “They won’t get out of that one.”

The historic Jail now houses the Hood County Museum. The second floor appears much as it did in the 1970s when the jail was in the final days of operation. The dispatch radio from that time still sits on the table where the call went out to apprehend Hawkins and Adams. The downstairs contains many historical artifacts of the sheriffs who worked there and other Granbury history antiques.

David K. Barnett
Granbury History

Sources
“Jails, Charges Vary as Co. Grows,” Hood County News-Tablet, August 11, 1966

”The Old Jail Museum, ” Hood County Historical Association website.

Granbury Vidette, June 25, 1874.

“Second Hood Escapee Captured Today in FW,” Fort Worth Star Telegram, October 11, 1978

Photo credit: Granbury Jail 1981, Texas Historical Association, University of North Texas Portal to Texas History.

3 yrs

What Did They Do with All the Manure in the Streets?

Global Warming. Acid Rain. Plastic in the ocean. Global Pandemic. Our news is filled with environmental emergencies. One of the first predicted eco-disasters was that dependence on the horse was going to bury cities in manure. London and New York each utilized over 200,000 horses for transportation. Each horse produced about two buckets of manure and one bucket of urine per day. At the current rate of growth, said the London Times, in 50 years, London and New York would each be buried under nine feet of horse dung and dead horses. (I’ll take global warming any day.)

Rural towns had fewer horses, but the output of manure and urine was the same. Walking along the sidewalks of many frontier towns, dust from dried manure filled the lungs and ammonia from horse urine stung the eyes. Many shopkeepers and other townsfolk in Texas communities kept manure forks and scoop shovels near at hand for removing unsightly deposits. It was simply a regular part of building maintenance -- just as mowing a lawn is today.

If there ever was a problem with horse manure in Granbury, none of the newspapers that have survived wrote about it. When I look closely at those old-time photos of Granbury street scenes (like that above), I don't see a lot of droppings.

So, what I want to know is, who kept Granbury's streets clean? And what did those people do with all the manure? In addition to horses, there were mules and dogs and cats, and even human waste was thrown into alleys and thoroughfares of the frontier town.

As to who kept the streets free of muck, most Texas towns did not have the budget for road crews. If the jail had inmates, prisoners could earn time off their sentences for cleaning streets. If no one was in lock up, the sheriff might hire an adolescent for 10 cents an hour to shovel manure into a wagon or wheelbarrow.

As to where they dumped the manure, I can think of two places. One might have been nearby farms which needed fertilizer for their crops. Farmers deposited dung in a harvested field to dry and later be plowed into the soil before planting season. Another solution for towns built on major rivers was to dump the waste in the river and let it wash downstream. Our ideas of water conservation never occured to the frontier mind. Pioneers believed that natural resources were unlimited. Pollution only became a concern after World War 2 when citizens began to demand cleaner water. In Northern Ohio, for example, the Cuyahoga River was so polluted, it routinely caught fire as late as 1969.

The only place in Granbury where manure may have been a public nuisance was in the courthouse square on market day, like that depicted in the photo above. In this case, it would have most likely been the job of Andy Zweiffel to clean up after the horses. Zweiffel was the courthouse janitor.

Andrew Zweifel was born in Switzerland in 1853 and came to Texas when he was 14 years old. He married Sarah E. Smith in 1882 in Granbury. Of the eight children born to the couple, only three survived to adulthood. Andy died in 1912; Sarah in 1936. Andy’s death certificate said he died from ”enemia” (sp) complicated by paralysis. Interestingly, his son, Henry, who provided the family information for the death certificate, listed his father’s occupation as stonemason. The janitor job may have been necessary in later life when he could no longer work in the building trade.

So, before sewers, septic systems, waste treatment plants, and trash collection, Granbury’s first sanitation department was one unsung hero who traded his mallet for a mop, and his chisel for a shovel.

David K. Barnett
Granbury History

Sources:
Flowers, Erik, quoted in Muslim, Peter, ”Pollution – Why we replaced horses with automobiles, ” greenprojectmanagement.com

Trimbull, Marshall, ”Who was in Charge of Keeping Western Streets Clean?” True West: History of the American Frontier website, July 16, 2019.

3 yrs

Fannie

America Frances Sims is one of those people who would have entirely disappeared from history had she not married Hiram Granbury. He was 27, and she was 20. Known as Fannie, she was born in Alabama in 1838. Nothing else is known about her early life or family. The next data point we have is that she married Hiram at Waco in 1858.

When the Civil War began, Hiram went to Marshall to join the 7th Texas, and decided that Fannie would travel with him. Hiram went north to fight with the Army of Tennessee. On his way, he arranged for her to lodge with a family in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Unfortunately, Hiram was one of many Confederates taken prisoner after the fall of Fort Donelson. Major Granbury asked Union General Ulysses S. Grant to delay his imprisonment until he could situate his wife, who was then in Clarksville, Tennessee. Grant agreed.

Dr. Charles MacGill was also taken prisoner. Both men were to be incarcerated at Fort Warren Prison in Boston Harbor. MacGill arranged for Fannie to stay with Mrs. MacGill at their home in Hagerstown, Maryland.

Fannie had always been frail and in poor health. In Maryland, her condition worsened. Mrs. MacGill made an appointment for Fannie to meet with a famous surgeon. He diagnosed that she suffered from ovarian cancer and scheduled her for surgery in Baltimore. Hiram was paroled in August 1862 to allow him to go to Baltimore and comfort Fannie.

The surgery never took place. Fannie’s cancer was too far advanced, and she only had a few months to live. Hiram took her back to her father's house in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She suffered terribly until her death on March 20, 1863, just five days before their fifth wedding anniversary. The poverty of her family compounded the tragedy. Unable to purchase a headstone, Fannie was buried in an unmarked grave which, despite repeated efforts to locate, has never been found.

Hiram became a tragic character, haunted by the death of his father, his college mentor and best friend, and, most of all, by the loss of his dearest Fannie. I think on the night before what he knew was a suicide mission at Franklin, he thought about his life. The ghosts of grief haunted his memories. He decided he would obey his orders, accept John Bell Hood’s death march, and find his Fannie waiting for him.

Dr. David K. Barnett
Granbury History

3 yrs

General Granbury’s Last Words

General Granbury was one of six Confederate Generals killed at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, on November 30, 1864. Although not as well-known as Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, Granbury’s brigade was at the very center of the biggest and deadliest advance in the Civil War. General John Bell Hood, for whom Hood Country is named, planned to attack the heavily fortified center of the Union line with his entire infantry, more than 22,000 soldiers (Pickett had only 7,000 men). Granbury knew the maneuver was suicidal, but he followed his orders anyway.

Granbury bravely led his troops, flags flying and drums beating, walking the mile and a half across open fields toward the Union earthworks bristling with porcupine-like tree limbs carved into spears. Andrea Sutton, in her book, Lone Star General: Hiram B. Granbury, cites Granbury’s final words, as reported by a Lieutenant Mangum, who was near Granbury in the assault. ”Forward men, ” Granbury shouted. ”Never let it be said that Texans lag in a fight!” As he spoke these words, a mini ball shattered his skull. Mangum remembered Granbury throwing both hands to his face as he sunk to his knees and remained in that position until the evening when his body was finally removed from the field of battle and laid in a mass grave.

Dr. David K. Barnett
Granbury History