Monthly Archives: January 2025

Thoughts and Ramblings

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I hope everyone survived the “Snow Cone of Uncertainty” this week. I saw that Doomsayer, Jim Cantore from The Weather Channel, was in Houston. I guess he’s slipping because nothing says #Armageddon ice and tragedy like Interstate 10, especially East Bound through Louisiana, but gumbo fixes all bad weather. I think all of I-10 was closed from Lake Charles to the Mississippi border. Of course, Houston gave him a show, and Beaumont was no better Tuesday evening.

We fared well Under the Oakes on Ye Olde Block Farm. I believe the count is around three inches of snow near the street but around eight inches around my trailer, my work truck, and between the garages and fences. Apparently, snow drift loves my trailer and the back of my trucks.

While I was at Magnolia Cemetery this week, the name C. C. Caswell, along with a few other ex-mayors of Beaumont, came up in conversation. Christopher Columbus “C. C.” Caswell was mayor of Beaumont from April 1882 to August 1883. I found a separate story connected to him in 2012 while working for Oiltanking on Amoco Road. Someone had pointed out a grave in a field about 100 yards from Highway 347. Of course, this got my attention! It turns out the grave belonged to Elisha Brewer.

Elisha Brewer was the grandson of Christian Hillebrandt, a cattle baron, after whom Hillebrandt Bayou was named. His wife Mary was the granddaughter of John Sparks, the first settler and founder of the Sparks settlement (Aurora), which was the precursor to the city of Port Arthur.

It is unclear why Elisha O. Brewer had been buried in what would have been his backyard. I’ve heard several theories, but most likely, the decision was made out of convenience for the family. Whatever the reason, we can assume from the words on his gravestone that he was deeply missed:

Since thou canst no longer stay

To cheer me thy love

I hope to meet with thee again

In yon bright world above.

Elisha O. Brewer

February 2, 1852 – August 5, 1883

I found a W. T. Block article, to which I will leave a link at the bottom of this blog, telling the story of Elisha O. Brewer. After visiting the deathly ill mayor of Beaumont, C. C. Caswell, Elisha had been unharnessing his wagon when his horse had kicked him in the groin. Elisha died a short time later. He was 31.

C.C. is buried on the hill at Magnolia Cemetery near Robert Kidd. The life of Mr. Kidd is another interesting story Judy Linsley shares during our Annual Cemetery Tour in October. Robert lived to be 116 years old, and family tradition states that he had farmed his land by himself until he was nearly 100.

I guess the “convenience” of Mary Brewer burying her husband on their land isn’t the only recorded history of that area. Sebron Berry was also buried on what was his land, at Smith Bluff near the Neches River, which is now Sunoco. However, his grave may have been part of a bigger cemetery, compared to the lone grave of Mr. Brewer. Yet another cemetery in this area, the Sparks Cemetery, was located on Dupont land. The 30 graves were moved in the 1950s to Forest Lawn Cemetery in Beaumont before Dupont built its refinery. I know this because I researched this cemetery back in 2013.

2013 was the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Sabine Pass, and a big event commemorated the battle. Knowing the story of Kate Dorman and the two Sarahs, I of course wanted to find the two Sarahs. I know where Kate is. She’s in Sabine Pass, and I did find Sarah Ann King Court, who was buried in Sparks Cemetery but is now in Forest Lawn. I never found out where Sarah Vosburg is because I think she had left the area. If you’ve never heard of Kate Dorman and the two Sarahs, I’ll leave a few links to the works of W. T. Block. The three women had turned Kate’s hotel into a makeshift hospital to treat those with yellow fever during the Civil War.

Well, that’s it for this week, but be sure to stay tuned to the Facebook page. On the 28th, I’ll be sharing a special post on Susie Spindletop.

Until next time.

http://www.wtblock.com/lone_grave.htm

http://www.wtblock.com/catherin.htm

Thoughts and Ramblings

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I won’t research a family just for fun, especially if I’m not interested. Throughout my studies, I have mostly investigated individuals, not whole families. Wait a moment—that’s a lie! I have looked into the Kishi, Kondo, Rowley, and Norvell families because of what I found in terms of history. I’d say that the Rowley family research is second to the Stratton family research, which I will present to you below, as a result of many triggers. Gene was the initial spark. I went down many rabbit holes to trace her short life history. Then, it was her father’s untimely demise. Thanks to a family member, I found out about the story of Vera (Dido) and her brother Jerry, who were local musicians. They made George Jones, the “Possum,” write about them in his autobiography.

Last week, while searching for more information about Louise Stratton, I came across a census from 1880 that contained all the Stratton family members: Asa (the father), Louisa (the mother), Emily (the oldest sibling), Berta (the middle sibling), and Louise, who was three years younger than Berta. I may have seen this mentioned once in my more than twelve years of research on Florence Stratton, but I’ve never found the smoking gun to make my historical work accurate. To digress a bit, I never met the historian Bill Quick, but he is definitely in my head when I’m studying something, and everything I find is analyzed based on his rule. You must have at least three sources to paint an accurate picture of what is happening. I believe it wasn’t a coincidence that I attended my first Jefferson County Historical Commission meeting in 2012, a year from the day he passed. Mr. Quick had a plan to be accurate in his research, and if I’m bringing up the rear in his absence, then that’s what I will do!

My research on Florence Stratton has shifted from her to her mother and father. In her father’s newspaper archives, I still haven’t found substantial information on Louisa, but I did discover more on Berta, including census pages and city directories concerning where she lived. Unfortunately, Berta was invalid (like Louise), and she died in 1902. As far as I know, Florence did not speak about her or Louise in Susie Spindletop’s Weekly Letter, which was published in The Beaumont Enterprise from February 28, 1926, to January 23, 1938. This is an epic find, but further research on the family is required.

Regarding Florence’s story, a master researcher—we’ll call her Kate H.—found a map of railroad stops in Texas from 1908. This haunts me a bit, but I was glad to learn that Florence’s niece, Eunice Stephens, was right when she said that a town had been named after her aunt in an interview in the 1980s. It wasn’t really a town, though; it was a railroad stop. Still, Florence Switch did exist. It had nothing to do with Florence in Texas, north of Austin. I’ll give Eunice kudos for this.

I wasn’t going to get into this, but since my whole feed has been yelling about the upcoming snow/ice/freeze/rainmageddon, I want to put my tinfoil hat on and rile you up even more. Forget that the government is releasing something via the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program and that there are drones in Orange County peeking into people’s rear windows. I want to talk about the fact that recently, every time it has snowed, we’ve had a hurricane. Actually, we’ve had one before and after the snow, so I have no idea what the future holds.

Growing up, there were a few times when it snowed, but they only closed the school because the heater wasn’t working. I’m not going to give a shout-out to the nuns or any other Peace Corps teacher at St. James because I hated that school. The only time I enjoyed being there was when I was in first grade and we had to sit in the hallway with the seventh graders. Bad weather ensued, and the seventh graders were crying that their homes had been destroyed by a tornado. Nothing major happened that day, and I made fun of those seventh graders. Yes, I was probably an a-hole, but I was in first grade!

I remember when it snowed on Christmas Eve, 2004. The cat was elated, but he wasn’t that happy when we evacuated on September 22, 2005. He lived through Rita, and when I came back, he had a girlfriend and kittens. I couldn’t catch him when we evacuated, but he found an alternative home for his family.

I also remember when it snowed in December of 2008. I remember this because I laid sod at an undisclosed government facility (we’ll call it MARAD). Of course, no one watered it, but we did get a considerable amount of snow around that time, which did the job. Thank you, mother nature, and not the government! On a side note, this week, during the US National Weather Service briefing for Lake Charles, Louisiana, I saw someone post that we are in the “snow cone of uncertainty!” Sometimes, I watch the briefings just for the comments.

I found out more about the spring cemetery tour this week, and there will be alcohol. So, stay tuned!

Stay safe this week. I hope that the snow cone of uncertainty doesn’t do too much damage.

Until next week, I yearn for Mr. Heat Miser to bless us again because his brother, Mr. Snow Miser, sucks!

Thoughts and Ramblings: Cemetery Edition

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I hope everyone is thawing out from last week’s arctic blast. Thankfully, it was a non-event here, but it was pretty nasty from the Texas panhandle to North Carolina. As I said before, I’d take a hurricane over any storm with ice or snow in it. To me, jacket weather is anything under 67 degrees, so take that as you will.

One positive side to the cold weather (besides the white beans and tamales smelling up the house) was my ability to finish digitizing a year’s worth of research, and boy, was it a mixture of both Southeast-Texas and World-War-II history. I also had a lot of entries from Find a Grave and Ancestry.com of people that I had to struggle to find why I was looking them up in the first place. This happens when someone contacts the Jefferson County Historical Commission (JCHC) because they saw a headstone on their new property or they drove by a property they’ve driven by for years and thought they were passing a cemetery, and then someone moved all the stones into a pile. These inquiries are taken seriously, and we get a couple of them yearly.

Most of the time, some headstones are discarded because the family has purchased another for their plots. This, at least, has usually been the case while I have been Cemetery Chair at the JCHC. I don’t know the etiquette of how to discard an old headstone, but a few years back, Magnolia Cemetery had an erosion problem around Babyland (a section for buried infants), so they used some of the discarded stones to help stop the erosion. This is a great idea to me, but if you are not in the know, and have no idea what is happening and are concerned you usually contact 12NewsNow instead of inquiring if there is a problem at the cemetery. “Of course, the graves are falling in Brakes Bayou. Film at 10.” Shout out to Gene Tuck! A blast from the past. I wonder if he still rides dirt bikes, but I digress.

We had someone contact the JCHC early last year about a possible incident of cemetery desecration on Moore Road near Sour Lake Road. Apparently, someone put a considerable number of old discarded headstones on a property in rows, and they were there for at least a few years because some people I talked to thought it was a cemetery. One day, someone drove by and saw they were all in a pile. Thinking that the owner was desecrating a cemetery, they contacted us. We thanked the person for the call because it is not beyond someone in our history to do this. Luckily, these were discarded stones. We traced them to Magnolia Cemetery. Most were from Section Seven, but all were accounted for. I have no idea who owned the property and decided years ago to place a fake cemetery on their property, but I do know that with all the land for sale on that road, no one wants the burden of dealing with a cemetery, fake or real. Ask a realtor!

A few cemeteries here in Jefferson County are abandoned, and some are even under concrete. W.T. Block wrote about a cemetery in Port Neches on Dearing and Rachford, the owner of which bulldozed the headstones in the 1940s. I believe Block because he was really pissed off when he wrote the article. He had just returned from the “European campaign” (World War II) and found the headstones removed and the graves under a slab.

Another cemetery that has been lost to time is the La Blue cemetery, which may have been a part of Spell Cemetery on Caswell Road. It is located between Spell Cemetery and the Dupont Credit Union (yes, under the highway). When you drive north over the LNVA Canal, you are driving over a cemetery under Highway 69-96-287. There is no record of burial removals. I will leave a link to an article I did on the Lewis Cemetery located somewhere between 19th and 23rd streets in the Calder addition. It also has been forgotten, and its were-a-bouts unknown.

During my research, which I digitized last week, I also came upon two articles from 1903 and 1910. The 1903 article stated that there were two coffins uncovered on Washington Street and Jefferson Street while a sewer line was being put in. (Washington Street is no longer a street. It was replaced with a railroad track.) The journalist wrote that this may have been the location of Robinson Cemetery, “which went out of commission in 1869 or 1870.” The 1910 article was more extravagant. The old cemetery was thought to be someone from the pirate Jean Lafitte’s gang. (Note: the pirate Jean Lafitte and his men are thought to be buried in this county and Orange County. I call B.S. If you disagree, then show me the money! Whether he died in France, Honduras, or an apartment in Los Angeles, I don’t care.) Argh!

A week later, I found another article stating that the land was a burial site used during the Civil War. Since then, there have been discussions of just how many people were buried there because of wounds inflicted during the Battle of Sabine Pass or from the yellow fever (“yellow Jack”). Some say 100, others say 500. I doubt we will ever know. I’ll leave a link to an article written by Judith Linsley about this cemetery and how historian Bill Quick found out the real story of Union Navy Lieutenant Robert Rhodes’s fate at the Battle of Sabine Pass. Also, I want to give a shout-out to Bitsy for reminding me of this history a couple of weeks back. You are missing out if you are not a Facebook follower of BeaumontTexasHistoryBits.

“Susie Spindletop’s Weekly Letter” was a permanent fixture each Sunday morning in the Beaumont Enterprise. There were a few occasions when Florence Stratton missed a week or two while traveling, but for the most part, Beaumonteers looked forward to reading about the gossip of their neighbors, or even themselves. In January of 1929, though, it was not good month for Florence. On January 9, she lost her sister Louise after being ill for several months. Then, on January 14, she lost who I consider to be her best friend, Willie Cooper Hobby, wife of W.P. Hobby. Needless to say, there was no new “Weekly Letter” from January 6 to February 3.

I’ve never found much information on Louise other than that she had been sickly all her life. She lived with her mother, Louisa, and father, Asa Stratton, until her mother’s death in 1895. After that, it seems she lived at different times with her older sister Emily and her husband, Walter Stevens, her sister Florence, and her father and new stepmother, Ina Smith Stratton.

I’ve stepped away from this research for a year now and believe it is time to jump back in. My goal this year, for what it’s worth, is to look into the Stratton family, particularly Louise and her mother, Louisa Waldman Stratton. To be continued.

As for Willie Copper Hobby, I’ll have something to say about her on the 14th.

Until then, ciao for now!

Mysteries of the Battle of Sabine Pass:

https://www.sfasu.edu/heritagecenter/3935.asp

Lewis Cemetery:

The Search for Lewis Cemetery

Thoughts and Ramblings: Mildred Wright; Headstone Cleaning Etiquette; Remembering Those Who Served

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Well, it’s a new year, and it’s a new me! Are they still saying that? I’m not new, and I probably smell like Reed Timmer’s chase car. If you watched the video from last week, Reed complained about mold in his Subaru Forester. He blamed it on the Hurricane Milton chase in Florida, but what do you expect when you drive your Subaru on the coast of Florida just in time to meet the eye of a hurricane? In January, many people set out to do new things but give up two weeks later. I’ve done it, and so have you. Be honest! But I think that eating black-eyed peas, corn bread, and cabbage somehow makes it right—or maybe not. You be the judge.

Last week, I mentioned that I was digitizing and organizing my historical research files. Some of these files contain considerable material about people I’ve never met as a researcher and member of the Jefferson County Historical Commission (JCHC). Still, I honor and cherish this information because some of these people have passed. One of them is Mildred Wright. Some of you may remember her as the Cemetery Lady. Her research went beyond my meager input for the cemetery chair position at the JCHC. She wrote three books on the cemeteries of Jefferson County, which you can download for free from the JCHC website. I’ll leave a link at the end of this post.

During the last week of 2024, I spent a few good hours in Section 19 of Magnolia Cemetery. Back in May, I was contacted by a person who lives out of town who wanted someone to clean their family’s headstones. There are three of these, and since I’m usually haunting Magnolia, I agreed. There is an etiquette to cleaning headstones, especially in the world of the Texas Historical Commission (THC). I will get into this in a moment, but first I want to explain how I clean headstones: I spray D/2 Biological Solution on them and go away. I do not scrub, nor use any other cleaner. Yes, it takes months longer than using a pressure washer, but this way, the headstone remains intact as there is no abrasion. Sure, you can use a soft brush if need be, but the main goal is to clean the stone without doing any harm to it.

If you are interested in cleaning headstones, you should know that you will not become a hero to those who care about cemetery preservation by pressure washing and cloroxing everything you see. Doing this is wrong, and you must have permission from the families. As far as the gray area in this scenario is concerned, if you see a headstone with lichen on it and accidentally spray it with D/2, the result will be that people may be able to read it a hundred years from now. Actually, the gray area is that in most cases, the older headstones have no one left to take care of them, or the families no longer care. So, what are we to do when lichen grows on a headstone and makes the name and dates illegible? You spray it with D/2 and say oops (this is not recommended by the THC). I understand what the THC is worried about: We have yahoos entering cemeteries with heavy equipment and their views of what preservation is because they read a blog post or watched a few YouTube videos—I digress. In this case, I will always go rogue because 1) I have common sense and 2) I want to preserve the old stones to remember who they are for.

In other news, we may have a cemetery workshop in February with the THC. Stay tuned!

My end-of-year visit to Magnolia Cemetery wasn’t just to clean headstones. A friend of mine has been very busy with a project there that some of us began a few years ago. The project wanted to recognize all the veterans in Magnolia. Initially, we only had a few names; then, my friend (we’ll call him Don S.) took it upon himself to walk the rows of the cemetery to find those who served. He is on a mission to find every veteran in Magnolia. However, the birth and death dates on a headstone simply coincide with war or peace times; the stone doesn’t tell you if someone served.

I want to ask you a favor. If you have a loved one buried at Magnolia who was a veteran and whose headstone has no mention of their service, please email me at rediscoveringsetx@gmail.com. It will also be helpful if you tell me which section they are in. We want them remembered!

Until next week.

Today’s weather report mentions tornado watches. Don’t go fishing in Stanolind Reservoir or any other fishing spot while an EF3 tornado travels from Brazoria County to Lake Sabine. I don’t care how good the fishing is. Your best friend and your dog will thank you.

Cemetery Books for Jefferson County:

https://co.jefferson.tx.us/Historical_Commission/Jeffco_History_Cemeteries.html

Texas Historical Commission Cemetery Preservation Program:

https://thc.texas.gov/preserve/preservation-programs/cemetery-preservation

Fisherman Explains What Happened:

https://www.facebook.com/TheWeatherChannel/videos/10008850882475666