LBJ’s Boyhood Home

Posted on March 17, 2016 by admin

Some years ago, I visited the “Texas White House,” that part of the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park where President Johnson used to entertain politicos of various kinds, talk on the phone constantly, and perhaps watch all of the network news programs at the same time, though the picture I’ve seen of him doing that was at the regular White House. The Texas White House is on the LBJ Ranch near Stonewall, Texas, along with a number of other structures.

Not far away, in Johnson City, Texas, is another unit of the National Historic Park, which includes the Johnson’s boyhood home. En route from Austin to San Antonio on March 6 — I didn’t take the most direct way — I stopped at the boyhood home and caught the last tour of the day.
“Lyndon Johnson’s family moved from a farm near Stonewall, Texas, to Johnson City (a distance of about fourteen miles) two weeks after his fifth birthday, in September 1913,” the NPS says. “For most of the next twenty-four years, this was their home…

“In February 1937, Lyndon Johnson returned home from Austin to seek the advice of his father — should he run for Congress? It was the first week of March, 1937, when Lyndon Johnson stood on the porch of his boyhood home to announce his candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives for the Tenth District of the State of Texas.”

We too stood on the porch — me and the two other people on the tour. Our docent was knowledgeable, which is always good to find in out-of-the-way presidential sites. He was able to convey some sense of the Johnson family, and their Hill Country environs, during LBJ’s younger years.

Lyndon might have asked his father for advice, but Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr wasn’t entirely successful as a politician, or as a businessman. This might have been the source of some tension in the household, and perhaps spurred the younger Johnson to think bigger in terms of a political career, though plumbing the motives of historic figures involves speculation. In any case, it was probably important to the future cast of LBJ’s mind that his father entertained other local politicos on that same porch, within earshot of the boy.

The house itself is handsome and fairly spacious, which indicates that the elder Johnson had some financial success. A few of the items currently inside belonged to the Johnson family, but most of them are period pieces. During Johnson’s boyhood, none of the houses in Johnson City were electrified, including their house. That part of Texas was ultimately electrified through the efforts of Congressman Johnson via a Rural Electrification Administration loan.

According to the LBJ Library, he wrote in a 1959 letter, “I think of all the things I have ever done, nothing has ever given me as much satisfaction as bringing power to the Hill Country of Texas.”

The National Museum of the Pacific War

Posted on March 16, 2016 by admin

The National Museum of the Pacific War is a complex of structures at a short distance from each other in Fredericksburg, including the restored Nimitz Hotel, which now houses a museum about Adm. Nimitz; the George H.W. Bush Gallery, which focuses on the war in the Pacific; and more: the Veterans’ Memorial Walk, the Plaza of Presidents, the Japanese Garden of Peace, the Pacific War Combat Zone, and the Center for Pacific War Studies.

The Nimitz Hotel building used to include the war exhibits, but now they’re in the much larger (32,500 square feet) Bush Gallery, open since the 1990s, and expanded in 2009. Outside its entrance is the conning tower of the USS Pintado, a submarine that conducted a number of a patrols against the Japanese.
The museum, organized chronologically beginning before the war and ending at the USS Missouri, is incredibly detailed, and home to a large array of impressive artifacts. That includes some impressively large artifacts, such as a Ko-hyoteki-class midget submarine that participated on the attack on Pearl Harbor, which actually seems pretty large when you stand next to it.
The pilot of this particular vessel, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki, survived its beaching and became the war’s first Japanese POW, having failed at suicide. According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 2002, “When the war ended, he returned to Japan deeply committed to pacifism. There, Sakamaki was not warmly received. He wrote an account of his experience, titled The First Prisoner in Japan and I Attacked Pearl Harbor in the United States, and thereafter refused to speak about the war.” (He died in 1999.)

Also on display were a B-25 — as part of a exhibit about the Doolittle Raid — a Japanese N1K “Rex” floatplane, an F4F Wildcat fighter, and a replica of Fat Man, just to name some of the larger items.
The exhibits also included a lot of smaller weapons, tools, posters, uniforms, model ships and airplanes, military equipment, and sundry gear and items associated with the fighting and the people who were behind the front. Plus a lot to read. Campaigns and incidents both well known and obscure were detailed, such as the effort to salvage the ships in Pearl Harbor in the months after the attack, which was often dangerous work. Other Allied efforts weren’t ignored, such as the Australian advance on Buna-Gona, a campaign that incurred a higher rate of casualties than for the Americans at Guadalcanal.

All in all, a splendid museum. But exhausting. If I’d had time on Sunday as I went from Austin to San Antonio, I would have gone back (the tickets are good for 48 hours). It’ll be worth a return someday.

Fredericksburg Stroll & Der Stadt Friedhof

Posted on March 15, 2016 by admin

March 4 was sunny and pleasant in Fredericksburg, a settlement dating back to the efforts of German immigrants to Central Texas before the Civil War. A good day for a small town walkabout. As I walked, looking into the Main Street boutiques and wine shops and jewelers (James Avery has a shop there) and bistros and art galleries, it occurred to me that there needs to be a term for a town that partly or mostly lives off of upper middle-class day-tripers, retirees many of them, from near but not-too-near major metros.

Not tourist traps exactly, though there’s an element of that. I’ve been to a few of these towns, such as Galveston and Galena, Ill., and Sturgeon Bay, Wis., and Portsmouth, NH, and now Fredericksburg. Its locational advantage is proximity to Austin and San Antonio, and the town has a pleasant Main Street, a.k.a. Hauptstrasse, sporting a lot of repurposed 19th-century structures, many of historic or architectural interest.

The building on the left below was once the White Elephant Saloon, dating from 1888, featuring a whitish elephant above the entrance for reasons probably lost to time.
This was once a hospital.
I didn’t try for an exhaustive photo record of the many fine buildings in Fredericksburg. These visitors did a much better job of it, including many things I missed.

According to one source at least, St. Mary’s Catholic Church — which is off Fredericksburg’s Main Street by a block — counts as one of Texas’ Painted Churches, most of which are east of San Antonio. Some kind of adoration was ongoing at St. Mary’s, so I was able to drop in to see the lovely interior. Painted, yes, but also featuring stained glass and other objects of beauty.

“Still known as ‘new’ St. Mary’s, the church provides a classic example of Gothic architecture and was consecrated on November 24, 1908,” KLRU tells us. “Its principal architect was Leo Dielmann of San Antonio, with the contractor and builder, Jacob Wagner of Fredericksburg. Built of native stone quarried near the city, the total cost of building and furnishing the church was around $40,000.

“Still fully functional is the original pipe organ built by George Kilgen & Son of St. Louis, Missouri. It was installed in 1906 as a pump organ and has been completely electrified. The beautiful stained glass windows were added around 1914 and 1915.”

Further away from Main Street — and with absolutely no day-trippers or anyone else (alive) around — was the Der Stadt Friedhof, a cemetery established in 1846.
It’s more interesting than picturesque. For one thing, there are no trees or other large plants to speak of on the grounds, except out at the periphery. There’s a little funerary art, but its presence is fairly muted.

Still, I enjoyed looking around. The further you get from the boundary roads, the newer the stones become. Among the older stones at the edge of the cemetery are a number of graves surrounded by iron fences.
Many of which are neglected.
Almost all of the oldest stones are German, with ethnically appropriate names, such as Durst, Kallenberg, Keidel, Kramer, Lochte, Schmidt, Schuchard, Stein, Weiss, Zincke, usw. Adm. Nimitz’s parents are somewhere in the cemetery, though I didn’t look for them, and the admiral himself is buried at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Fransisco.

South Texas Flora, Early March

Posted on March 14, 2016 by admin

While walking along in Fredricksburg, Texas, on March 4, 2016, I noticed bluebonnets beginning to bloom. Not a sweeping field of bluebonnets, as you see in Hill Country paintings, or occasionally in person, but those emerging from a small green patch ‘tween concrete and asphalt. It was a pleasure to see them all the same.

Up in Illinois, I did see a handful of croci beginning to push out of the earth before I left. But nothing like the early spring flowers of Texas. Such as those emerging from rocky ground.

Or on bushes.

And trees.

Plus the glories of irises, always a favorite, wherever they grow.

What’s the matter,
That this distemper’d messenger of wet,
The many-colour’d Iris, rounds thine eye?

Texas Spring ’16

Posted on March 13, 2016 by admin

I left for my first 2016 visit to Texas on March 3. It was a big wheel, little wheel trip: a few days in Austin and the Hill Country, a week in San Antonio. When I left Illinois, there were patches of snow on the ground; in South Texas in early March, the grass is green and a few trees and leafing, and there are a handful of flowers and other buds. Heavy rain is always a distinct likelihood in early spring down there, and sure enough we had a couple of thunderstorms.

I visited my mother, both brothers and a nephew and his girlfriend. I spent time with a few old friends — in one case, someone I’ve known since 1973, Tom, a longtime resident of Austin. Our friendship might make the 50-year mark with both of us still alive. I think the actuaries would be with us on that, but who knows?

Out in the Hill Country, which is hardly remote and the opposite of sparsely populated in our time, I wandered around a main street designed to please day trippers, took in one of the most detailed war museums I’ve ever seen, visited the boyhood home of a certain president from Texas, pondered a cemetery full of Germans, saw an elegant Gothic church, happened upon a hilltop vista, and ate beans and jalapeño-cheese cornbread at a storefront restaurant.

In Austin, I saw a city that isn’t what it used to be. The thing about Austin, though, is that it’s always been a city that isn’t what it used to be. That doesn’t bother me particularly. I mainly go to visit old friends, such as the aforementioned Tom, who aren’t who they used to be — and yet who are in some ways. Such is the paradox of knowing people for decades. I also saw Blue Healer at Stubb’s Bar-B-Q. My nephew’s in the band. They’re really talented.

Each time I visit San Antonio, I try to spend a few hours outside of the familiar grooves laid down decades ago. I was able to this time. When I started to do so consciously, back around 2009, I thought it would be hard to find interesting things outside those grooves. I was wrong. In a city this size, with a history this deep, it isn’t hard at all. Such places includes tumbledown cemeteries and new green spaces and milestones of another era and the Blue Hole and China Grove, Texas, and a big basilica.

The Waxahachie City Cemetery

Posted on November 3, 2015 by admin

Jay and I passed through Waxahachie in Ellis County, Texas, on October 22, and besides visiting the handsome Nicholas P. Sims Library for a little while, we also spent a few minutes at the Waxahachie City Cemetery a short distance away.

According to a Texas Historical Commission marker on site, “the first burial here occurred on Jan. 1, 1852, after the death of pioneer merchant Silas Killough (b. 1805), one of the founders of this community. The original 4.16 acre tract was given in 1858 to trustees of the Methodist church by Emory W. Rogers (d. 1874), who was Waxahachie’s first settler (1846) and donor of land for the townsite. About 1900, the cemetery was transferred from church to municipal jurisdiction. By gifts and purchases of additional land, the site has grown to 65 acres and contains about 10,000 graves.”
It had been dry in this part of Texas since a wet early summer, so the cemetery was rich in earth tones in October ahead of the massive rains that fell over the next few days.

Not the most ornate cemetery or the shadiest one, but a nice small-town Texas boneyard, something like the one I saw in Flatonia, Texas a half-dozen years ago, and not as tumbledown as the old San Antonio cemeteries I saw earlier this year.

Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo de Zuñigais & Presidio Nuestra Señora de Loreto de la Bahía

Posted on July 29, 2015 by admin

Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo de Zuñigais is on the San Antonio River, but it’s well downstream from the SA metro area, in the modern town of Goliad. It’s been there since 1749 in one form or another, at first doing what missions did in the early days, such as convert the natives, engage in ranching, and be a part (along with the nearby presidio) of Spain’s claim to the region against French and English inroads.

By the early 20th century, it was a ruin. But not forgotten completely, because the CCC rebuilt it in the 1930s. It isn’t as well known as the chain of missions in San Antonio, including the Alamo, which were tapped by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site earlier this month. That agitated a few simple-minded crackpots, since it’s always something. So the NPS felt obliged to include the following sentence in its press release about the honor: “Inclusion of a site in the World Heritage List does not affect U.S. sovereignty or management of the sites, which remain subject only to U.S., state and local laws.”

Ann and I made our way to Mission Espíritu Santo in the late afternoon of July 11. Only one other group was visiting at the time, and in fact the interior was already closed for the day. But we got a good look at the mission and its grounds.
Some parts are still ruins. It adds a certain something to the site.
Other parts are open to the sky.
A short drive away is Presidio La Bahía, the fort that protected the mission. In full, Presidio Nuestra Señora de Loreto de la Bahía, it was the place to go to when Apaches were coming. During the Texas Revolution, Fannin and his men were imprisoned there before they were killed not far away. In our time, that means people tell ghost stories about the place.
We got there after closing time. The presidio, being a fortress, has a wall all the way around — also rebuilt, I assume — so no peeks inside. That just means I’ll have to come back someday for a longer look.

Fannin Battleground State Historic Site

Posted on July 28, 2015 by admin

The easy way to get from the greater Houston glop to San Antonio is via I-10. That route has its interests, such as Flatonia and Schulenburg and not far away, the Painted Churches, a few of which I’d like visit someday. But on the 11th, I had other things in mind, and followed US 59 southwest out of town.

Or rather, the future I-69. Every 20 or 30 miles, a sign told me that the current route of US 59 — which is already mostly a four-lane highway between the outskirts of Houston and Victoria — would someday be a bone fide part of the Interstate system running all the way to Laredo. For ordinary drivers like me, I’m not sure of the value, since on an Interstate you can’t use turnarounds in the medians, as you can — and as I did a few times — on a large US route. But looking at a map, I can also see the advantage of an I-69 through Texas for trucks barreling up from Mexico to points east: they can bypass San Antonio and its traffic.

Just southwest of Victoria is the Fannin Battleground State Historic Site, where Col. Fannin surrendered to Gen. Urrea after the Battle of Coleto not long after the fall of the Alamo. An obelisk marks the site.

Soon after the surrender, of course, Fannin and most of his men were murdered on the orders of Santa Anna, in a move that wasn’t just a crime, but a blunder. The Texas State Historical Association posits: “The impact of the Goliad Massacre was crucial. Until this episode Santa Anna’s reputation had been that of a cunning and crafty man, rather than a cruel one. When the Goliad prisoners were taken, Texas had no other army in the field and the newly constituted ad interim government seemed incapable of forming one.

“The Texas cause was dependent on the material aid and sympathy of the United States. Had Fannin’s and Miller’s men been dumped on the wharves at New Orleans penniless, homesick, humiliated, and distressed, and each with his separate tale of Texas mismanagement and incompetence, Texas prestige in the United States would most likely have fallen, along with sources of help.

“But Portilla’s volleys at Goliad, together with the fall of the Alamo, branded both Santa Anna and the Mexican people with a reputation for cruelty and aroused the fury of the people of Texas, the United States, and even Great Britain and France, thus considerably promoting the success of the Texas Revolution.”

A little further to the southwest is the town of Goliad, seat of Goliad County. It has a handsome courthouse, as many counties in Texas do.
Alfred Giles, a British immigrant who did a lot of work in South Texas, San Antonio in particular, designed the Goliad County courthouse in 1894. A hurricane knocked down the clock tower in 1942, but it was finally replaced in 2003.

On the courthouse grounds is the Hanging Tree.
According to a State Historical Survey Committee plaque near the tree: “Site for court sessions at various times from 1846 to 1870. Capital sentences called for by the courts were carried out immediately, by means of a rope and a convenient limb.

“Hangings not called for by regular courts occurred here during the 1857 “Cart War” — a series of attacks made by Texas freighters against Mexican drivers along the Indianola-Goliad-San Antonio Road. About 70 men were killed, some of them on this tree, before the war was halted by Texas Rangers.”

More on this little-known incident here; it isn’t to the Texans’ credit. Even so, across the street from the Hanging Tree is the Hanging Tree restaurant. How very Texas.

Treue der Union

Posted on February 25, 2015 by admin

The Texas State Historical Association says that “the Civil War skirmish known as the battle of the Nueces took place on the morning of August 10, 1862, when a force of Hill Country Unionists, encamped en route to Mexico on the west bank of the Nueces River about twenty miles from Fort Clark in present-day Kinney County, were attacked by mounted Confederate soldiers… Contentions over the event remained on both sides, with Confederates regarding it as a military action against insurrectionists while many German Hill Country residents viewed the event as a massacre.

“After the war the remains of the Unionists killed at the battle site were gathered and interred at Comfort, where a monument commemorates the Germans and one Hispanic killed in the battle and subsequent actions. The dedication of the Treue der Union monument occurred on August 10, 1866. To commemorate the 130th anniversary of the memorial, the monument was rededicated on August 10, 1996. It is the only German-language monument to the Union in the South where the remains of those killed in battle are buried, and where an 1866 thirty-six star American flag flies at half-staff.”

The memorial stands on High Street in Comfort, Texas, between 3rd and 4th Sts., next to a piece of undeveloped land and across the street from a church and a school.
With the names of the dead on the sides. These fell in a later event in October 1862, on the Rio Grande.

And a 36-star flag does indeed fly there.

Not something you see too often. That flag was only current for two years, between 1865 and 1867, or rather between the admission of Nevada and Nebraska.

Two Stops on the Hill Country Bat Trail

Posted on February 24, 2015 by admin

Somewhere or other Jay heard about a bat roost near Comfort, Texas, and if that isn’t an incentive to visit that place when you’re already close by, I don’t know what is. So on the afternoon of the 14th, we went looking for it.

Comfort is a small town, pop. 2,300 or so, in Kendall County and, according to the Census Bureau, part of the San Antonio MSA. I’d put it in the Hill Country, though that’s not an official designation. Comfort’s main street (named High Street) is characterized by handsome 19th-century buildings, many made of local stone, put to 21st-century purposes, such as antique stores and restaurants that point out — or should point out — that they offer Comfort food.

To get to Comfort from San Antonio, head northwest on I-10. On Ranch to Market Road 473, a few miles east of town, you’ll find this curious structure.

According to the Texas Historical Commission plaque at the site: “This shingle style structure was built in 1918 to attract and house bats in an effort to eradicate mosquitoes and thereby reduce the spread of malaria. It was designed for Albert Steves, Sr., a former mayor of San Antonio, by Dr. Charles A. R. Campbell, an authority on bats who had served as the health officer in the same city. Named ‘Hygeiostatic’ by Steves, the bat roost is one of 16 constructed in the United States and Italy between 1907 and 1929. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark – 1981.” It’s also on the National Register of Historic Places.

No bats were at home, it being February. I understand that they do live there in the warmer months. Different sources put the number of such towers in this country at two or three. Apparently one of the others is on Lower Sugarloaf Key in the Florida Keys.

North and east of Comfort, not far from Fredericksburg, is Old Tunnel State Park. Formerly a railroad tunnel, it’s now a home for bats. During the warm months, you can sit outside the entrance and watch bats emerge around dusk — a smaller version of the bat flight out of Carlsbad Caverns, memorable enough that I remember it after 40+ years. Again, no bats were around in February. But on hand were a couple of bat enthusiast-volunteers to tell casual visitors about the bat cave, and we talked to them a few minutes.

That’s two stops on the hypothetical Hill Country Bat Trail. Another could be the Congress Street Bridge in Austin, also known for as a bat habitat, or Bracken Cave in Comal County.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Small Town USA