At Camp Colorado ninety years ago my grandfather, Col. William H. Day, enlisted in Company B, 1st Texas Mounted Riflemen, Confederate Army. Eleven years ago I followed in his footsteps by marching away to war with an infantry company made up one hundred per cent of Coleman County volunteers. Seventy-five years ago some of you present witnessed the establishment of the county seat in Coleman - the event we are celebrating today. Mrs. Mary Woods, George McNamara, Mrs. Emily Minnix, A. T. Scroggins, John Jones and possibly one or two others present could tell you first hand what Coleman City looked like in 1876. It must have been a sad looking sight from the open flaps of their tents pitched along Hords Creek from where they could see a few rawhide lumber buildings being thrown up to outline the beginning of Main Street.
The father of Coleman was Col. R. J. Clow, who gave the county 160 acres of his headright as a location for the county seat. This grant of land had been given him in recognition for his services as a soldier in the Texas Revolution and as a prisoner of war in the black dungeons of Perote Prison where he and several hundred other Texas soldiers were incarcerated during the war near Mexico City.
Coleman was at first an embryo town, but it was soon to assume a place of importance, because it was on the Western Trail - the greatest cattle trail of all times that ran from Matamoros, Mexico to Dodge City, Kansas. There wasn't a strand of barbed wire in the State of Texas and nothing but wide open range between Coleman and the North Pole. There was, of course, a store at Trickham, a settlement around the abandoned fort at Camp Colorado, possibly a cabin or two at Santa Anna Mountain and a few scattered cow camps and nesters. But Coleman quickly mushroomed as a trail town. Up and down both sides of its hundred-foot-wide street were its business houses, including a raw-hide lumber courthouse, all sandwiched between a dozen saloons and gambling halls. Upstairs over a saloon at the present J. C. Penney (now Perry's) location was a sort of dance hall, from which could be heard fiddle music and coarse laughter of men and women at any hour of the day or night when trail outfits were passing through. And I have been told that at times in the spring of the year the dust of twelve trail herds advancing on Coleman could be counted at one time from a point of vantage on the hill west of town.
From April until the late fall hundreds of steer and mixed herds slowly drifted north through Coleman to find a market at Dodge City. Although Coleman had no organized Chamber of Commerce or Board of Community Development, during the height of the season, Coleman Merchants, with eyes cut for business, kept full time riders hired to go out and welcome incoming trail outfits. They were ambassadors of good will with saddle bags well stocked with sample refreshments and a come-on that made every trail hand feel the urge to go to town.
Two years after the establishment of Coleman City the state of Texas placed the public school lands on the market for sale. Prior to this time large and small fortunes were made on the free grass of the open range, cattle being the only industry on the Texas frontier. With the public lands being introduced for sale, a new economic period was soon to sweep Coleman County. Col. Day was the first local ranchman to buy and fence his land, because in 1878 he purchased a large tract in the southwest part of the county and the following year began fencing thousands of acres of his newly acquired lands. Others were soon to follow his example and a map of Coleman County published in 1883 shows at least twelve large ranches to have been bought and fenced in Coleman County. They were owned by S. O. Cotton and Brothers; J. D. Davidson; C. A. Childs; Bowen, McCord and Lindsey; R. H. Bowen; R. H. Overall; Cusenberry Bros.; G. W. Mahoney; Adam T. Brown; Starkweather Bros.; Wilson, Smith and Hearn; and W. H. Day.
In order to inject a flavor of the times I would like to read you a letter written by a young Coleman County bride in September 1879: "My husband, Col. Day is building a fence around his pasture, which when done will contain forty thousand acres of land. It is a beautiful country, rolling prairie, covered with good grass, interspersed with timber, through which are beautiful little streams of running water and cool springs. We have a good stone house with four rooms and a front porch, a smoke house full of hams, breakfast bacon, flour, meal, dried apples, beans, golden and maple syrup by the barrel, splendid pickles, canned corn, tomatoes, grapes, blackberries, strawberries, sugar, coffee and catsup. I believe that is all we have to eat except cheese and maple sugar, which I keep in my room for my own use. Col. Day shipped his provisions from Austin, one of the nearest railroad points. We get a nice mutton or goat every once in a while or a hind quarter of beef. Then the boys bring in a deer occasionally and every evening some quail or a turkey - have plenty of wild game. I have but one neighbor, Mrs. Gatlin, who lives seven miles from me. She spent the day with me day before yesterday. She is a splendid woman; has lived here but two years. I wish you could see her house. It is made of poles stuck straight up and down and covered with boards. That is a paradise compared to the other houses of this country, most of which are dug outs. All these people who live here are good hearted, but wholly uneducated. Col. Day got me a guitar to bring with me instead of a piano and they call it a music box and think it very large. What would they think, could they see a piano? There are deer, antelope, a few panthers, plenty of snakes, centipedes, tarantulas, wolves, prairie dogs, and polecats out here, so, you see if I get up a music class out here they will have to be my pupils.
"Col. Day and I are going to Coleman City tomorrow, which is thirty miles north of the ranch, so I stayed home today to write my letters. Here comes a wagon. Who can it be? Well, what do you think! Old Mr. Creswell, the only man for forty miles who has a garden and has a good one, has brought over twenty-five watermelons, a sack of string beans, and some nice fresh tomatoes, with his compliments to the "old boss" and his boys. Ha, Ha, he forgot me, but that is O.K. I'll just quit my letter a moment and try one of those melons all the same. I'll have to send those melons to the boys. They camp where they are at work, as it is so far to come home. It is eleven miles from the house to the far side of the pasture.
"Do you wonder I weigh one hundred forty five pounds? I wish you were here with me. I'll venture you'll never complain again. What do you say, Myrt? Come out and ranch it a while. I'd dance on my head to see you coming. Come to Fort Worth on the cars, then stage to Brownwood, and I'll meet you there with our "traveling she-bang." Col. Day got it in St. Louis. It is nice, cost $373.00, has three seats in it. They can be let down and a bed fixed in it like a sleeping car. We can cook and eat in it, if the weather is raining. Can't you come? Let me hear from you, if you will allow me to still be your friend, and I'll promise to do better in the future. Address me at Trap Post Office, Rich Coffee, Texas. It is a little town at the Trap Crossing on the ranch."
In 1883 the T & P railroad had built as far west as Baird, Texas, which then became the shipping point for Coleman County. Prior to that time all freight was hauled overland in wagons from such points as Fort Worth, Round Rock or Austin. And by 1883 the introduction of barbed wire and its growing acceptance marked the beginning of an economic change that the Texas frontiersman found hard to digest. There was a resentment against fencing the open range from the beginning. And numerous attempts were made to have the state legislature declare the erection of the barbed wire fence illegal. But it was the drouth in the summer of 1883 that jolted him into reality. During that extensive period of no rainfall, in which the nomadic cow and sheep man saw his overstocked range wither and die and found his stock slowly starving around soupy bog holes, the free grass man slowly awoke to the realization he was being crowded out by the far-sighted stockman who had bought and was fencing his land. With the absence of any laws governing building or cutting fences, the leathery frontiersman, long accustomed to taking the law into his own hands, struck and ripped the barbed wire fence out by the roots. When it started, fence cutting spread like an epidemic. It grew quickly into such proportions that fences were being destroyed for countless reasons, quite often influenced by personal animosity. Fences were suffering all along the Texas frontier, but the three principal centers of destruction were in Jack, Clay and Wise Counties in the north, Coleman County in the center and Frio County in the south. On September 13th, three days before heavy rains broke the extreme drought, the Austin Weekly Statesman reported, "Wire fence cutting has at last commenced in Coleman County. Several pasture fences were cut last night, one among them was the pasture fence of R. S. Bowen, which was utterly ruined."
During the excitement over the fences, the saloons in Coleman became wire-cutting headquarters and did a good business. During the day the town was full. Around the saloons everyone whiled away his time drinking and gambling. But along toward sundown the town would gradually become empty and stay that way until just before sunup when small parties of men would ride in on lathered horses to fall in their rolls at the wagon yard for a few hours sleep. Mahoney was visited every night, because those opposed to fences just naturally liked cutting the Yankee's fence. Besides, Mahoney was a man with a personality no one seemed to appreciate. And, unfortunately, his fence was close to town. When they got tired of working on Mahoney, the night riders would pay Lee Shield a visit or drop down to whack on R. H. Overall's wire. Then they would be out several days at a time when down on the river to see after the Vaughn, Starkweather and Day pastures.
With shootings, stealing and cattle rustling, Ben Pittman, Sheriff of Coleman County, had his hands full. For once he was glad that the hunting down of "legitimate outlaws," such as horse thieves, took up his entire time. Public opinion was so widely divided on the fence issue that he felt it was a matter the sheriff's department would do well to give a wide berth, but he said that he would be more than willing to discharge the duties of his office by serving papers on anyone wantonly destroying private property if anyone would swear out a complaint against a specifically known fence cutter. But every law abiding citizen was like John Jones, who is present today. When Col. J. E. McCord, head of the local law and order league, asked him to go and find the exact parties cutting wire and report back, Jones, replied, "I love to live too well to do that."
But the following January the legislature in special session passed a common sense law which assessed a penalty of from one to five years imprisonment for cutting fence. And when the lawless fence cutter realized he had something more than a few individual ranchmen to contend with, the Fence Cutting War of 1883 came to an end quickly, leaving Coleman County's fences cut between every post.
With the coming of the barbed wire fence, the offering for sale of the public school lands, a cattle boom in the early eighties, and the inflow of capital following the heels of an aggressive railroad building program which reached Coleman County in 1886, there was a touch off of a tremendous speculation in Texas lands. Hundreds of people moved into Coleman County and towns sprang up along the railroad such as Talpa and Valera. Santa Anna, which had been established before the coming of the railroad, quickly grew to be a town of wide county importance in its own right. For the next ten or fifteen years, however, Coleman County remained strictly a ranching country cut up into relatively large pastures. During this period the county was passing into private ownership and being fenced up.
It was not until after 1900 that we witness another economic change. At that time the county went into a colonization period in which the large ranches were gradually broken up and sold out in small farm homesteads. During this period train loads of emigrants came into Coleman County to purchase farm homes and grow cotton.
It was not until the depression of 1932 that the county witnessed another violent change, with hundreds of farm families quitting the farm and moving to town. The county then became converted into one vast stock farming area in which by diversification rural Coleman County has become established on the soundest economic footing it has experienced in its entire history.
The father of Coleman was Col. R. J. Clow, who gave the county 160 acres of his headright as a location for the county seat. This grant of land had been given him in recognition for his services as a soldier in the Texas Revolution and as a prisoner of war in the black dungeons of Perote Prison where he and several hundred other Texas soldiers were incarcerated during the war near Mexico City.
Coleman was at first an embryo town, but it was soon to assume a place of importance, because it was on the Western Trail - the greatest cattle trail of all times that ran from Matamoros, Mexico to Dodge City, Kansas. There wasn't a strand of barbed wire in the State of Texas and nothing but wide open range between Coleman and the North Pole. There was, of course, a store at Trickham, a settlement around the abandoned fort at Camp Colorado, possibly a cabin or two at Santa Anna Mountain and a few scattered cow camps and nesters. But Coleman quickly mushroomed as a trail town. Up and down both sides of its hundred-foot-wide street were its business houses, including a raw-hide lumber courthouse, all sandwiched between a dozen saloons and gambling halls. Upstairs over a saloon at the present J. C. Penney (now Perry's) location was a sort of dance hall, from which could be heard fiddle music and coarse laughter of men and women at any hour of the day or night when trail outfits were passing through. And I have been told that at times in the spring of the year the dust of twelve trail herds advancing on Coleman could be counted at one time from a point of vantage on the hill west of town.
From April until the late fall hundreds of steer and mixed herds slowly drifted north through Coleman to find a market at Dodge City. Although Coleman had no organized Chamber of Commerce or Board of Community Development, during the height of the season, Coleman Merchants, with eyes cut for business, kept full time riders hired to go out and welcome incoming trail outfits. They were ambassadors of good will with saddle bags well stocked with sample refreshments and a come-on that made every trail hand feel the urge to go to town.
Two years after the establishment of Coleman City the state of Texas placed the public school lands on the market for sale. Prior to this time large and small fortunes were made on the free grass of the open range, cattle being the only industry on the Texas frontier. With the public lands being introduced for sale, a new economic period was soon to sweep Coleman County. Col. Day was the first local ranchman to buy and fence his land, because in 1878 he purchased a large tract in the southwest part of the county and the following year began fencing thousands of acres of his newly acquired lands. Others were soon to follow his example and a map of Coleman County published in 1883 shows at least twelve large ranches to have been bought and fenced in Coleman County. They were owned by S. O. Cotton and Brothers; J. D. Davidson; C. A. Childs; Bowen, McCord and Lindsey; R. H. Bowen; R. H. Overall; Cusenberry Bros.; G. W. Mahoney; Adam T. Brown; Starkweather Bros.; Wilson, Smith and Hearn; and W. H. Day.
In order to inject a flavor of the times I would like to read you a letter written by a young Coleman County bride in September 1879: "My husband, Col. Day is building a fence around his pasture, which when done will contain forty thousand acres of land. It is a beautiful country, rolling prairie, covered with good grass, interspersed with timber, through which are beautiful little streams of running water and cool springs. We have a good stone house with four rooms and a front porch, a smoke house full of hams, breakfast bacon, flour, meal, dried apples, beans, golden and maple syrup by the barrel, splendid pickles, canned corn, tomatoes, grapes, blackberries, strawberries, sugar, coffee and catsup. I believe that is all we have to eat except cheese and maple sugar, which I keep in my room for my own use. Col. Day shipped his provisions from Austin, one of the nearest railroad points. We get a nice mutton or goat every once in a while or a hind quarter of beef. Then the boys bring in a deer occasionally and every evening some quail or a turkey - have plenty of wild game. I have but one neighbor, Mrs. Gatlin, who lives seven miles from me. She spent the day with me day before yesterday. She is a splendid woman; has lived here but two years. I wish you could see her house. It is made of poles stuck straight up and down and covered with boards. That is a paradise compared to the other houses of this country, most of which are dug outs. All these people who live here are good hearted, but wholly uneducated. Col. Day got me a guitar to bring with me instead of a piano and they call it a music box and think it very large. What would they think, could they see a piano? There are deer, antelope, a few panthers, plenty of snakes, centipedes, tarantulas, wolves, prairie dogs, and polecats out here, so, you see if I get up a music class out here they will have to be my pupils.
"Col. Day and I are going to Coleman City tomorrow, which is thirty miles north of the ranch, so I stayed home today to write my letters. Here comes a wagon. Who can it be? Well, what do you think! Old Mr. Creswell, the only man for forty miles who has a garden and has a good one, has brought over twenty-five watermelons, a sack of string beans, and some nice fresh tomatoes, with his compliments to the "old boss" and his boys. Ha, Ha, he forgot me, but that is O.K. I'll just quit my letter a moment and try one of those melons all the same. I'll have to send those melons to the boys. They camp where they are at work, as it is so far to come home. It is eleven miles from the house to the far side of the pasture.
"Do you wonder I weigh one hundred forty five pounds? I wish you were here with me. I'll venture you'll never complain again. What do you say, Myrt? Come out and ranch it a while. I'd dance on my head to see you coming. Come to Fort Worth on the cars, then stage to Brownwood, and I'll meet you there with our "traveling she-bang." Col. Day got it in St. Louis. It is nice, cost $373.00, has three seats in it. They can be let down and a bed fixed in it like a sleeping car. We can cook and eat in it, if the weather is raining. Can't you come? Let me hear from you, if you will allow me to still be your friend, and I'll promise to do better in the future. Address me at Trap Post Office, Rich Coffee, Texas. It is a little town at the Trap Crossing on the ranch."
In 1883 the T & P railroad had built as far west as Baird, Texas, which then became the shipping point for Coleman County. Prior to that time all freight was hauled overland in wagons from such points as Fort Worth, Round Rock or Austin. And by 1883 the introduction of barbed wire and its growing acceptance marked the beginning of an economic change that the Texas frontiersman found hard to digest. There was a resentment against fencing the open range from the beginning. And numerous attempts were made to have the state legislature declare the erection of the barbed wire fence illegal. But it was the drouth in the summer of 1883 that jolted him into reality. During that extensive period of no rainfall, in which the nomadic cow and sheep man saw his overstocked range wither and die and found his stock slowly starving around soupy bog holes, the free grass man slowly awoke to the realization he was being crowded out by the far-sighted stockman who had bought and was fencing his land. With the absence of any laws governing building or cutting fences, the leathery frontiersman, long accustomed to taking the law into his own hands, struck and ripped the barbed wire fence out by the roots. When it started, fence cutting spread like an epidemic. It grew quickly into such proportions that fences were being destroyed for countless reasons, quite often influenced by personal animosity. Fences were suffering all along the Texas frontier, but the three principal centers of destruction were in Jack, Clay and Wise Counties in the north, Coleman County in the center and Frio County in the south. On September 13th, three days before heavy rains broke the extreme drought, the Austin Weekly Statesman reported, "Wire fence cutting has at last commenced in Coleman County. Several pasture fences were cut last night, one among them was the pasture fence of R. S. Bowen, which was utterly ruined."
During the excitement over the fences, the saloons in Coleman became wire-cutting headquarters and did a good business. During the day the town was full. Around the saloons everyone whiled away his time drinking and gambling. But along toward sundown the town would gradually become empty and stay that way until just before sunup when small parties of men would ride in on lathered horses to fall in their rolls at the wagon yard for a few hours sleep. Mahoney was visited every night, because those opposed to fences just naturally liked cutting the Yankee's fence. Besides, Mahoney was a man with a personality no one seemed to appreciate. And, unfortunately, his fence was close to town. When they got tired of working on Mahoney, the night riders would pay Lee Shield a visit or drop down to whack on R. H. Overall's wire. Then they would be out several days at a time when down on the river to see after the Vaughn, Starkweather and Day pastures.
With shootings, stealing and cattle rustling, Ben Pittman, Sheriff of Coleman County, had his hands full. For once he was glad that the hunting down of "legitimate outlaws," such as horse thieves, took up his entire time. Public opinion was so widely divided on the fence issue that he felt it was a matter the sheriff's department would do well to give a wide berth, but he said that he would be more than willing to discharge the duties of his office by serving papers on anyone wantonly destroying private property if anyone would swear out a complaint against a specifically known fence cutter. But every law abiding citizen was like John Jones, who is present today. When Col. J. E. McCord, head of the local law and order league, asked him to go and find the exact parties cutting wire and report back, Jones, replied, "I love to live too well to do that."
But the following January the legislature in special session passed a common sense law which assessed a penalty of from one to five years imprisonment for cutting fence. And when the lawless fence cutter realized he had something more than a few individual ranchmen to contend with, the Fence Cutting War of 1883 came to an end quickly, leaving Coleman County's fences cut between every post.
With the coming of the barbed wire fence, the offering for sale of the public school lands, a cattle boom in the early eighties, and the inflow of capital following the heels of an aggressive railroad building program which reached Coleman County in 1886, there was a touch off of a tremendous speculation in Texas lands. Hundreds of people moved into Coleman County and towns sprang up along the railroad such as Talpa and Valera. Santa Anna, which had been established before the coming of the railroad, quickly grew to be a town of wide county importance in its own right. For the next ten or fifteen years, however, Coleman County remained strictly a ranching country cut up into relatively large pastures. During this period the county was passing into private ownership and being fenced up.
It was not until after 1900 that we witness another economic change. At that time the county went into a colonization period in which the large ranches were gradually broken up and sold out in small farm homesteads. During this period train loads of emigrants came into Coleman County to purchase farm homes and grow cotton.
It was not until the depression of 1932 that the county witnessed another violent change, with hundreds of farm families quitting the farm and moving to town. The county then became converted into one vast stock farming area in which by diversification rural Coleman County has become established on the soundest economic footing it has experienced in its entire history.
A talk given by James T. Padgitt in 1951 at the replica building, Coleman City Park, as a part of Coleman's Diamond Jubilee.
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