Walls around the Square
You know, sometimes, things are under your nose but you just don’t remember. And, I respond in my solo mutterings back to myself “but I’m not so old as to be forgetful yet.” In the study of history, you have to be careful. The details are there. But finding those details is a different matter. I knew that somewhere along the way I was told that the railings around the town square in Mt. Vernon were horse railings and that they were installed to allow the reins for horses, mules, and teams of those animals to be tied up while people went about their business in the town. But while I was on the city council a few years back there was a great plan to renovate all of the plaza and to take out that ugly embankment. I didn’t feel quite right about it and somewhere I thought I had heard my grandparents speak of the railing as being quite useful. Then Carolyn Teague, the town’s Main Street manager, quoted a 1913 Optic-Herald news report regarding the installation of the retaining wall and rails around the square. She was researching the town’s history regarding the move into the courthouse on the north side of the square (formerly in the center) and she ran across the actual news account. And now I watch the modern installation of a sprinkler system out in that square and think about the force of the water against the century-old retaining walls and I just hope the walls hold into another century. But, in any event, they are now truly historic and deserve more than a dismissal as a retainer wall of the World War II era. I keep hoping the city will just install some weep holes to accommodate the modern water use (it regularly runs out in all directions, every night, most months of the year). But I’m just a vocational historian and historians are generally dismissed.
In 2013, the City of Mt. Pleasant sat back and allowed the demolition of their railroad depot. There was no ordinance to protect a historic structure from demolition. We have the ordinance in Mt. Vernon but the general feeling in official circles seems to be that there is no need for the ordinance. Time will tell. In the meantime, after the Mt. Pleasant Depot came down, a friend asked me if the town fathers there realized that they had a 1923 airmail beacon tower within a block of the depot (former location). The first airmail towers were very singular and distinct structures; very few remain. I tried to raise an alarm. John Bradberry pulled up great history. We sent over information. Perhaps the town will protect that resource. It’s a great history lesson to show children and addresses a long-passed era in communication and transportation; I wish we had it in Mt. Vernon. Our town has generally pulled together to save our heritage although the wealth of Victorian homes from my childhood was destroyed almost overnight in a decade of prosperity while I was still a kid; you do what you can.
Today I had the good fortune to meet three times with Bettye Burns Delaney. A descendant of some German peddlers has come upon three letters written by three Germans who traveled through here in the early 1850’s. Mt. Vernon keeps coming up in correspondence of the time; and that’s the authentic proof; a contemporary record. They are out on the Choctaw Trail east of Mt. Vernon. A farmer Graham befriends them (think the old marble tomb behind Ed Joyce’s house just east of town – out in the pasture – where the cattle knocked down the fence and have toppled the tombstone); dating from a burial in 1854; and a farmer named Carr pulls out their wagon; and he’s good natured and he lives just past the Grahams; and they encounter a Methodist congregation (think the Methodists at Tranquil who organized in 1841 before Mt. Vernon came together in 1855) and they will stay at the Burns stagecoach inn on the Trace (right out past Tranquil Cemetery … and who is a descendant of that Thomas L. Burns – Bettye who called on me today and her brother attended Easter Services at New Hope with me this year at the 174th Easter there (Tranquil moves over to New Hope in 1884 but we still bury at Tranquil). It can all come around if you can just manage to keep it straight. And I do like land titles and so I study the map of the area just north of the John Humphries Survey (he arrives in July 1818 while we are still part of Spain) and I find that a Bruton widow fails in her effort to claim over 4,000 acres in that area in 1839 (rejected by the Land Commissioners of Red River County just as well, my people might have had to stop elsewhere as they traveled down the trail and I couldn’t claim a share of the Daphne Prairie today)…. Oh, well. The land remains as Scarlett O’Hara (I think that’s Margaret Mitchell) would say.
Aren’t we lucky to have the terrain we do (and to be having this rain when the rest of Texas is in terrible drought). Thank the Lord for home.
