The History Press [new releases]

A beloved watchmaker, a reluctant politician and a legendary Texas Ranger.

 

The legacy of Burnet County rises from a solid prehistoric batholith of pink granite that built the state capitol, established an industry and is still being quarried. The natural beauty and resources of the region drew the attention of politicians on the path to power, including a U.S. president whose influence built the dams that electrified rural Central Texas. As communities modernized, its citizens made history, electing the first female mayor in the state before women could even vote.

Author Suzanne Freeman, whose own roots sink deep into the rocky soil of Burnet County, chronicles the remarkable people, both famous and forgotten, who shaped the county and the Lone Star State.

Personal stories of life in Galveston in the mid-nineteenth century.

In 1855, Friedrich Gloor was just nineteen when he was sent from Basel, Switzerland, halfway around the world to teach at the First German Lutheran Church school in Galveston, Texas. He spent the next eleven years writing letters to his family about a place that was very different from his Swiss home. The climate was harsh, with stifling heat and bitter cold, droughts and floods. He provides a firsthand account of the treatment of slaves, frontier justice by hangings and burning criminals in the streets, shipwrecks, the yellow fever epidemic and the Civil War. However, Friedrich was haunted by something from his life in Switzerland for which he constantly asks for forgiveness. Friedrich’s secret remains shrouded in mystery, but his letters are a vivid glimpse into the pivotal moments of Galveston’s early history.

After legendary sheriff Pat Ware was thrown from his horse on a very muddy Commerce Street, the Gainesville Daily Hesperian observed that he “had enough mud sticking to his wardrobe to start a land boom in the Panhandle.” The Hesperian had an eye for detail, down to the autumn leaf pen wiper Dr. Arthur Carroll Scott received as a wedding present and the raid on Fount Duston’s watermelon patch. Ron Melugin has pored over thousands of articles from the newspaper’s frontier era, piecing together advertisements for Botanic Blood Balm and a county clerk’s train robbing spree. It is an account of bygone Gainesville so vivid that modern readers can almost see, hear and even (in the case of the 1894 privy ordinance) smell it.

In the 1820s, Texas was a wilderness. Settlers thought it was uninhabited although rich with wild game. But many Native American tribes lived in Texas and were at war with the Spanish in Mexico. Mexico ignored Texas and did not try to inhabit this wilderness. Finally, in the late 1820s and early 1830s Stephen F. Austin was allowed to bring in three hundred Anglo settlers and Texas began to be civilized. But to start there was only one town, no roads, no bridges, no planted fields. Texas was starting from ground zero but started fast. They tamed the wilderness and fought the Indians. They got their independence from Mexico and became a Republic, soon a U S state. They established a stable government similar to the one in the US and developed the infrastructure for business and international commerce. In less than eighty years Texas had tamed the wild frontier and became a modern state in the United States. C. Herndon Williams has found forty-two stories that chart this progress.