Brazos River walk...Almost like a walk on the beach...

Fall is just arriving down on the sandy Brazos riverfront. There were all kinds of river relics strewn about; Petrified wood chunks, old river-worn bits of bottle glass, even some driftwood. The killdeers did their best to simulate gulls as the tiny freshwater clams crunched under my feet. It sounded and smelled like the beach! And there were original murals overlooking the shore... just like at Galveston.
 

Oh well, it's a cheap thrill... but one available every day.
 

 

 

Have you ever been down to stroll under the Brazos River bridge? 

Navasota Doctors: The very early days: Part Three

The early Texas doctor, this is one of a collection of life-sized portraits I painted for the Star of the Republic Museum at Washington on the Brazos.


Wow, I was writing about our wonderful medical history here in Navasota when several music events kind of blew all that out like a blue Norther in a chicken coup. I think it is too late to gather all the chicks and put them back in… but I do want to pursue this subject, for posterity.

Like I said before, nobody has ever put down the story. Or asked the questions. For a pretty small town Navasota had a bunch of physicians. Why or how come so many? I am fortunate enough to have several great sources to tell you about our pioneer doctors, who they were and some wonderful anecdotes about them… So we will approach them like a doctor would, chronologically. In past segments we have learned about the very first doctors in Texas, about Cabeza de Vaca and La Salle’s murderous surgeon Liotot… Thank goodness some real physicians finally showed up! These three men were our doctors and leaders during the Republic of Texas days.

Benjamin Briggs Goodrich. B. B. Goodrich was perhaps one of the most prominent men in Grimes County for many years. But not because he was a doctor. Goodrich was one of the earliest pioneers to settle here, and became a political leader from the very beginning.

Born in 1799, B. B. Goodrich graduated from medical school in Baltimore and then migrated south, with short stays in Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida and Alabama where he was soon elected to the State Legislature. He and his younger brother John, known as the “bee hunter,” finally found Texas in 1833, settling in Eureka, later to be combined with Fanthorp and renamed Anderson. John Goodrich was one of the men who made Texas forever famous when he died at the Alamo.

B. B. Goodrich served early Texas as a delegate to the Consultation in 1835, and the Convention at Washington on the Brazos in 1836. He was a signor of the Declaration of Independence. He also helped to write the Republic of Texas Constitution. Later he was instrumental in helping to select the town site of Anderson as the County seat for the new County of Grimes in 1846 when it was separated from Montgomery County.


Dr. Robert Caldwell Neblett. Born in Virginia in 1795, his early training was in carpentry. Robert abandoned this vocation and took up going to school and playing the violin. His father burned the violin and sent him to work. Robert joined the Virginia Militia instead. At age seventeen he volunteered and ended up in the War of 1812, where he rose to the rank of Sergeant Major. After the war he taught school, then in 1818 decided to attend medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. After he graduated, he started practicing in Clarksville, Tennessee. From there he moved to Wayne County, Mississippi where he married Marie Poe in 1825.

He kept moving west. He and his family settled in Louisiana, and there he farmed and practiced medicine and went into merchandising at Neblett’s Bluff, and this town was named after him.

But by 1840, Dr. Neblett arrived in Texas, very near the present town of Navasota. Here he “planted his ebenezer” and continued to use all the talents he had developed to that date. At that time, the other doctors were engrossed in political affairs, and Dr. Neblett served the region between the San Jacinto and Brazos rivers! He helped to organize one of the first schools, the Masonic Collegiate Institute, in Anderson in 1843. He was a charter member of the Orphan’s Friend Lodge.

Medical supplies were scarce and costly, and Neblett carried the only medicine known to exist within hundreds of miles in his saddle bags; calomel and quinine. He had no anesthesia, not even chloroform. Patients often could not be carried, and he made many house calls, travelling the country on horseback. His most frequent foes besides ignorance and superstition were infection and Malaria. One of the more interesting superstitions he ran into was the use of a native root called the Mandenke, or May Apple root. Its root grew into a shape not unlike a man, and it had a fork which looked like legs. Users believed that they should take a part of the root from the corresponding part of their own body which was ailing, and make a tea from it and consume it.

Dr. Neblett was elected into the Texas Legislature in 1855. Neblett helped to bring St. Paul’s Episcopal College to Anderson in 1861. Dr. Neblett was active serving his community until 1970, and died in 1871. The U. S. Government placed a marker on his grave at the Orphan’s Lodge Cemetery recognizing his bravery in the War of 1812.

David Catchings Dickson. D. C. Dickson was another early doctor from Anderson that fell into a leadership role in Texas very quickly. After his first wife died in Mississippi, he married her younger sister and came to Texas in 1841. Dickson was the first doctor to open a practice in Alta Mira, a village west of present day Anderson. He was soon elected as the Justice of the Peace. He helped to found the Orphan’s Friend Masonic Lodge in Anderson. He was elected as a Representative to the State Legislature in 1846, where he served four terms. In 1851, he was elected the Speaker of the House. In 1853 he was elected as Lieutenant Governor. In 1855 he became snared in a political strategy that backfired when he announced his candidacy for the office of Governor, challenging then Governor Pease. Pease replaced him on his ticket and he then was defeated.

D. C. Dickson represented Grimes County in the Texas State Senate during the Civil War. Perhaps his most heroic challenge was while working for the Texas Prison system. After the war, he was appointed as the financial agent of the Huntsville Penitentiary. When the Yellow Fever epidemic broke out in 1867, he stayed at his post and provided essential care to the guards and inmates during this deadly time. His own son died during epidemic, but he was credited with continuing his fight against the disease, which raged in the unhealthy environment inside the walls. He served out his remaining years assisting his brother Lawrence here in Grimes County as Deputy Clerk. He died in 1880.

Most of this was taken from Blair’s History of Grimes County, pub 1930, and The Medicine Man in Texas, 1930.

Hidalgo Falls

Not too long ago, an old friend, George Boutwell called me and asked how to get to Hidalgo Falls. One of the most famous artists in Texas, he is doing a print series on Texas waterfalls. There are not as many natural waterfalls in our state as say Colorado, but more than those in Louisiana. And there are some nice ones. Hidalgo Falls, right here on the Brazos River, can be very scenic if the water has not covered over it, as it will do in the rainy season. The sandstone outcroppings that mark the area used to be a huge navigation problem for the early day steamboats, preventing steam trade up the Brazos for half of the year.

For many years the area was rented as a fishing camp, and is now owned by a club out of Houston. It's a shame that most residents of Navasota have never, and may never see it. Long ago there was an area that featured Hidalgo Bluffs, Hidalgo Prairie and the falls, all in the same area. I'm not sure who the name, obviously of Castillian or Spanish derivation, honors, but hidalgo meant nobleman. Surely this scenic area of the Brazos Valley was fit for a nobleman. But natural beauty and parkland was not something on our cotton-headed forefather's minds. Maybe someday a purchase can be arranged to make the park accessable to the people who live downstream from it.

Curses, Mutiny, and the Legacy of La Salle

In 1685 Rene Robert Cavalier Sieur de La Salle stumbled into a deadly mutiny while leading a party of marooned Frenchmen to the northern Mississippi Valley. Famished and demoralized, his men had been traversing the Texas Gulf Coast while engaged in a brewing class confrontation. It was a fight to the finish, over buffalo meat, and several men had already been killed. The world famous explorer had endured many annoying mutinies all over North America, but this would be his last. One of his men waited and ambushed him as he tracked the party that had been sent to hunt buffalo to feed the famished caravan. The frenchman known as Duhaut knew that La Salle was no one to mess with, and would surely punish the killers, no matter what the reason.

Over fifty years ago historians suggested that according to the accounts of his survivors, La Salle must have been killed somewhere in the southern end of the Navasota Valley. The Daughters of the American Revolution commissioned and erected a bronze statue of La Salle in Navasota during the Texas Centennial in 1930. Since then, Navasota has been traditionally associated with the ill-fated Frenchman.

The French mutineers scattered, and some even made it back to French-held lands on the Mississippi. News of the great La Salle’s demise took years to reach the French court. And the Spanish authorities in Mexico launched an epic manhunt to find the French colonists in Tejas. One Don Alonzo de Leon, the governor of Coahuila, took it upon himself to find and root out the French intrusion. In 1689 he traveled along the La Bahia Trail, and passed through present day Navasota on his search for the elusive La Salle. He brought a hundred men to help him face the legendary adventurer. La Salle was known to be an intrepid conqueror. He had established the first American Trust on furs, successfully trading with the Indians of the Great Lakes region. He had found the mouth of the strategic Mississippi River, and claimed all of its reaches for France. Now he was under the direct employ of King Louis the XIV, and had reportedly built the first European settlement in Texas. De Leon had good reason to be concerned, and was wise to take every precaution.

Little could de Leon have known that La Salle and his accursed colony were already destroyed and gone without a trace. Nature had already reclaimed their shallow footprint on Texas soil. One of the greatest explorers of all time was left to rot and feed the scavengers in the Navasota Valley, his dream of a French colony on the Gulf Coast left in ruins at Matagorda Bay. The curse that confused La Salle and caused him to overshoot the Mississippi, searching in vain until his ships were hopelessly wrecked on the Texas coast, now led de Leon on a wild goose chase after a ghost. There is some evidence that the Spanish war party did not fare well either. While blasting out a hill east of Navasota in the early 1900's, railroad construction men found a cave near Piedmont Road full of strangely clad skeletons, thought to be either members of La Salle's party or Spaniards. Perhaps more men who fell under the curse that had brought La Salle to his early grave.

Sadly, other than our statues of La Salle, there is no monument to these other courageous seekers, no marker for lives given in the wilderness to the earliest vanguard of Manifest Destiny.

The Roads of Navasota

The pathways to Navasota embody much of our local history, and provide a great way to tell our wonderful story. Whether you are new to Navasota or have grown up here, you might find that understanding these paths will make travel through the area much more meaningful. There are at least six different important paths that have woven this rich fabric of our heritage.

1) Native American Pathways For eons the Native Americans hunted buffalo along their hunting routes that crisscrossed through Grimes County. The early settlers called the two most obvious trails the Upper and Lower Coushatti Traces. They more or less made the path for highways 105 and 90 through Grimes County. Some of the settlers must have observed Coushatta Indians as they passed through on their annual hunts. The Upper Coushatti trace seemed to temporarily join the larger and longer La Bahia Road here in Grimes County. As the bluffs over the Navasota and Brazos Rivers made natural traps for buffalo harvesting, there is no doubt that other tribes found their way here as well. Tonkawa, Comanche, Caddo, Deadoses, (Bedias, and Anadarko), Kickapoo, Karankawa, Delaware, Tawakoni, Waco, Paouites and others were some tribes that were known to camp or travel nearby, and would have used the trail as well.

2) Spanish and French Explorers Rene Robert Cavalier Sieur de La Salle brought his desperate party through this area right before a tragic meltdown of class warfare that left him and five of other Frenchmen dead. Soon the Spanish were seeking to nip the French intrusion at the bud, and a small army carved a path through the wilderness, shaking down the natives and looking for the French invaders, and passed through Navasota in the search. The road they used from the abandoned French fort on Matagorda Bay became known as the Bay Road, La Camina Bahia, which is marked as such near downtown Navasota. It later became a popular path, as it connected Nacogdoches in East Texas with San Antonio, the largest town in Tejas at the time. Numerous missions were established in east Texas, and the road was a major artery in Texas from 1687 on.

3) The Austin Colony Trails and Waterways The early settlers knew little of the history of the road, and in fact had other names for it. “Labadie,” and “Contraband Road” and other corruptions of La Bahia muddied the history of this important road during the pre-Republic days, when Jim Bowie used the road to smuggle slaves into Louisiana. Stephen F. Austin was very familiar with his colony, and in fact had carved out a league with his name on it in Grimes County, just south of the La Bahia Road on the southern route of the Coushatti Trace, just a few miles east of Navasota. He is supposed to have hanged seven white men for stealing mules from some Mexicans, near the present townsite of Navasota, in an effort to prevent an all-out race war in his fledgling colony. He never married or settled down, and died fairly young in service to Texas, and the land here was never settled by him. Stephen F. Austin had presented a map of his proposed colony to the Spanish, and had named it “Austiana,” and in the past Grimes County has advertised itself as the “Gateway to Austiana,” and a Navasota subdivision is called Austiana Hills.

Just as important as the roads, the Brazos River was the true lifeline to this region for thirty years. Mail was delivered by steamboat all along the Brazos, and on a tributary of the Brazos, the Navasota River, during the Republic years. Steamboats brought everything necessary to outfit Washington on the Brazos, where the Texas Constitutional Convention was held, Independence from Mexico was declared and a frontier capital was established for the new Republic. Great Indian chiefs and foreign dignitaries came there to visit Sam Houston, then President of Texas. Planters were able to send the cotton and other produce grown in the Brazos Valley south to Galveston by steamboat, and later the steam vessels brought Texans up the river to do business with the Texas Rangers and the Texas Government that stayed there.

4) Civil War Roads and Railroad Eventually the railroads came, in 1854, and the only inland railroad in Texas during the Civil War went to Navasota, making it a major wartime purchasing, warehousing and shipping center. Guns, shoes, clothes and other military needs were manufactured locally and sent east via the La Bahia Road, known then as the Opelousas Road.

5) The Cattle Drives Although the Chisholm Trail has captured the imagination of Western history buffs, the Bahia Road actually served as a cattle trail to move Texas longhorns to market for a longer period of time, and to a much more important destination. There was always a buyer in Shreveport and New Orleans for Texas livestock, and Texas horses and cattle were driven to Louisiana, along the Bahia, then known as the “Opelousas Road,” to the largest population center in the South, and later to supply the Confederate States with essential beef and fresh mounts.

6) Blues Valley Any study of Music is pointless without a study of the Blues, and any study of the Blues will have to focus sooner or later on the Brazos and Navasota River valleys, the epicenter of the Texas cotton industry, and where 90% of Texas Blues musicians were born and bred. Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Texas Alexander, Albert Collins, Mance Lipscomb, Pee wee Creighton, L. C. Robinson, Big Mama Thornton, and many more traveled the paths and learned the songs along these rivers and their flood plains, and knew the roads to Navasota. The legendary Moore Brothers Prison Farm was nestled where the two rivers met, and the songs about them have been recorded by a half dozen recording artists.

Obviously it was the very heroes of Texas who used these pathways, and this ancient network of paths led many here and produced a strong culture of pioneers who made Texas what it is. Navasota has more than its share of real life stars in history and music. Here is a partial list of Texas “Who’s Who,” who followed the roads to Navasota. The * (asterisk) means this baker’s dozen of folks are truly legends, famous all over the world, and underlining means they were actually a resident of Grimes or an adjacent county. Some names are self explanatory…

*Rene Robert Cavalier Sieur de La Salle

Alonso de Leon- he led the largest manhunt in Texas history in search of La Salle.

Maria Agreda aka the “Blue Nun”- Sixteenth Century nun in Spain, who set off intense Spanish evangelical efforts to Texas Indians, after unusual visions and claims of teleportation to Texas where she preached to many Southwestern Indians in their own tongues, and converted large groups of Jumano Indians she found camped along a “large river with red sediments…” Later the Jumanos told of finding the bluebonnets for the first time where her blue robe had dragged the ground…!!! (Sounds like the Brazos and Navasota to me!) Even the Inquisitionists could not crack her story… and she became a 20 year confidant of King Philip.

*Jim and Rezin Bowie

*Sam Houston

*Stephen F. Austin

Thomas Rusk- Republic of Texas Sec of State.

*Jesse Chisholm- Southwestern Indian guide, trader and interpreter, blazed trail known by his name.

Z. N. Morrell- Earliest Baptist preacher, held services at Washington on the Brazos in 1830’s. Early Texas author.

W. P. Zuber- Grimes resident, received first- hand account of the Alamo “Line in the Sand” story from Moses Rose, fresh from the siege, fought at San Jacinto, wrote important Texas histories. Shaped the Alamo Myth.

Jared Groce- Grimes resident, Considered the “Father of Texas Agriculture,” first planter to establish himself in Texas, very influential during the drafting of the Declaration of Independence from Mexico in 1836.

George Childress- The Thomas Jefferson of Texas. Young , well-schooled patriot, sent across the Brazos during the Convention to help ailing Jared Groce write the Declaration of Independence from Mexico at Groce’s home in Grimes County.

*Sara Dodson- Grimes Resident, The Betsy Ross of Texas, young wife of a Captain in the Texas Army, she fabricated the first red, white and blue, Lone Star flag, which hung at the “Independence Hall” during the Constitutional Convention, 1836.

Martin Ruter- Early Texas Methodist evangelist andpreacher. Ruterville was named after him.

Jeff Milton- Grimes County cowboy, Famous Western lawman, Texas Ranger, who faced down John Wesley Hardin several times while Police Chief of El Paso, Texas… Subject of “A Good Man With a Gun.”

*Adelaide Prince aka Lena Rubenstein, was born in Millican and grew up in and around Navasota, before becoming a popular stage actress and silent screen star.

*Frank Hamer- One of the most famous lawmen of all time, Texas Ranger, appointed by Texas Governor to serve as Marshal of Navasota as his first assignment, in 1908. Most famous for killing Bonnie and Clyde.

*Mance Lipscomb- Grimes resident, Blues guitar master, recorded half a dozen albums, lived to old age, became mentor to Leon Russell, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Taj Mahal.

*Blind Willie Johnson- Considered the progenitor of the slide guitar, he played for nickels on the streets of Navasota, right in front of Tex’s Music on Washington Ave.. Mance Lipscomb would tune his guitar for him.


*Texas Alexander- Grimes resident, one of the first major Blues vocalists, influential older cousin of Lightnin’ Hopkins, played with the Mississippi Sheiks, recorded numerous 78’s in New York and San Antonio, 1920’s.

*Lightnin’ Hopkins- A passive rival of Mance Lipscomb, he played in the Brazos bottom juke joints and learned and recorded the “Tom Moore blues.”

*Alvin Ailey- Grimes resident arguably one of the most influencial dancers in the country, who established the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre in New York City.

L. C. Williams- Brazos County resident (Millican), Blues drummer, played with Lightnin’ Hopkins, called “Lightnin’ Jr” made numerous recordings for Gold Star.

*Joe Tex- Grimes resident, 1970’s Soul recording artist, considered to be most important Texas Soul Singer, moved to Navasota at the apex of his career, became popular local resident, recorded a song where he mentions Navasota.

Jerry Jericho- Brazos County resident (Millican, just across the Brazos River ), 50’s and 60’s country singer, toured with Hank Williams, Johnny Bush.

Hollywood Actors: America’s Top Texas TV Hero, Chuck Norris, star of Walker, Texas Ranger, lives with his family at Lone Wolf Ranch, on the outskirts of Navasota. Child actress Jenny James Busse was raised in Navasota and graduated from Navasota High. She was in several movies, including Places in the Heart with Sally Field and Danny Glover. A segment of Matt Houston , starring Lee Horsley was shot in Navasota.