This image was taken from a family photo of Lizzie McBryde, my great-great grandmother who lived in Huntington, East Texas. She was alive between 1871 and 1946. I would place this photo somewhere in the late 30s or early 40s.
Lizzie McBryde
Pine Curtain Project
Research Notes: Ruby & John Avery Lomax
Ruby Terrill Lomax and John Avery Lomax produced folklife documentary work that comes up a lot when I am researching East Texas History. Along with her husband John Avery Lomax, Texas folklorist Ruby Terrill Lomax traveled the state and other Southern regions for the 1939 Southern States Recording Trip. The Lomax’s multi-genre journey documented Southern folk musicians and their communities through sound recordings, photographs and other ephemera, and spends valuable time in communities of Color and documenting the creative contributions of incarcerated people. The collection’s primary home is in The American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.
Here are a few items of interest from the collection:
Library of Congress
Ruby Lomax, Wikimedia Commons
The project’s recordings can be found here: Lomax Iconic Song List, Library of Congress
The Library of Congress also has the 300+ page Field Notes manuscript from this trip, which you can download for easier reading.
Queens for the Day
Pineywoods Royalty, 1962
This photo is from the digital archives of The History Center in Diboll. It shows a group of young women in formal dresses, representing their town on Diboll Day at 1962 Texas Forest Festival.
In the Pine Curtain, it makes sense that the annual civic event is a Forest Festival. Since 1938, East Texas forest region communities have gathered for a weekend of special exhibitions and demonstrations, carnival rides, youth team performances, and since 1985, the famous Hushpuppy Olympics Cookoffs!
“The event is no longer the ‘Olympics.’ Lufkin had its hands slapped several years ago when the real Olympics said it owned the trademark to the name. So now it’s the Hushpuppy Cookoffs.”
– Bob Bowman, Texas Escapes
The Texas Forest Festival is such a big deal for East Texas, that at one time, it even had its own commemorative publication! I love the ads in this one from 1948:
(Fun Fact: My mom’s church group won a prize in an early Hushpuppy Cookoff, dressed not in beautiful evening gowns, but homemade costumes as skunks, deer, squirrels and of course, big green net pine trees, complete with real embedded pine cones. They did a little rap and even made the local TV news! I was 12 and as you can imagine, very excited about this. *cue pre-teen eye roll*)
As of now, the 2021 Forest Festival is still scheduled for September! Our East Texas neighbor, Nacogdoches, hosts the also impressive annual Pineywoods Fair, planned for October. So, if you like to celebrate the mighty pine tree, Fall in East Texas is your time to shine.
As I am more of an artist and less of an academic historian, please explore these links for citations and further reading:
Lead Image Citation: The 1962 Diboll Day Queen and Court prepare to ride on a float in that year’s Forest Festival Parade through downtown Lufkin. TheHistoryCenterOnline.com.
Vintage Forest Festival Program collection, Angelina County Chamber of Commerce Publications collection, The History Center.
Bob Bowman, “Hushpuppies,” Texas Escapes.
Research Notes: Russell Lee
In researching East Texas history, one of my favorite and most valuable discoveries has been the work of photographer Russell Lee. He took iconic photos of Depression-era Lufkin, along with meaningful captures of elsewhere in the East Texas region and across Texas. I have used one of his photos, Railroad Gang in my artwork, and have more stacked up to use in the future. Many of his works are in the public domain, which is a gift for artists, writers and other creators who are inspired by it.
More information on the life and work of Russell Lee can be found in The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas – Austin, and the Library of Congress. Some of my favorite Russell Lee Texas photos are below. They were found in the Library of Congress, and are in the Public Domain.
East Texas Church, 1930s
East Texas Historic Church
This image caught my attention as I was surfing around the Library of Congress digital archives this week. I loved the trees and the juxtaposition of the old cars against the even older church. The cars are from the early 1930s, and the church was built in 1847.
When I researched some additional history on the church, I found an interesting story. Built in 1847, the structure predates the Civil War, has been a cornerstone of Catholicism in East Texas, and was relocated several times before becoming part of the Sacred Heart church campus in Nacogdoches.
The book “Historic Nacogdoches,” which can be accessed for free on Project Gutenberg, has this to say about it:
“Mission Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe was founded at the same time on the west side of North street in Nacogdoches, overlooking Banito creek, which was called “the creek of the mission.” This mission was never permanently abandoned until it was replaced by the church which stood on the little plaza in front of the present court house, built in 1802. The third Catholic church was formerly the home of Nathaniel Norris at the northwest corner of Hospital and North streets. The fourth church was the Sacred Heart church on Pecan street, built in 1847 under the influence of Bishop J. N. Odin; which was in turn replaced by the present Sacred Heart church, built in 1937 on a portion of the homestead of Judge Charles S. Taylor on North street, the house of the old Sacred Heart church being rebuilt about eight miles south of Nacogdoches as the Fern Lake church. The sites of the presidio and missions have been appropriately marked by the State of Texas.”
As I am more of an artist and less of an academic historian, please explore these links for citations and further reading:
“Spanish Missions in Texas,” Texas Almanac
“Nacogdoches, Texas,” Texas State Historical Association
Image Citation: Historic American Buildings Survey, C. (1933) Church of the Divine Infant, Cotton Ford Road, Nacogdoches, Nacogdoches County, TX. Nacogdoches County Texas, 1933. Documentation Compiled After. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
Baseball Season
Spring means outdoor fun, and in the East Texas country, many of us were lucky enough to have playing field-sized yards or adjacent lots to play in. We could enjoy badminton, t-ball, dodge ball and many other games with whoever was around, using whatever equipment we could scratch up and throw at each other, inevitably making our own rules. This is a photo of my cousin in the 1960s, giving it all she’s got in a baseball game in the pine trees.
This community sportsmanship came to a halt in my generation after a bloody Red Rover, Red Rover battle in the church parking lot. But it was fun while it lasted.
East Texas Mule Skidder
This week, I am returning to archive photos from the Diboll History Center. This is just one comprehensive source that I use, and it does a great job organizing its images into historical sets, so it is easy find images from the same era, activity or theme and put them together to document and build larger stories.
This image is “Two Mule Skidders and a Man,” from the Southern Pine Lumber Company, in 1903. The last time I worked from a vintage photo of East Texas loggers, it was a team from the 1930s, if that tells you how long this area has been working with timber.
These photographs at the History Center were part of a larger project by American Lumberman, a weekly trade journal established in 1899.
“The American Lumberman photographs of the Southern Pine Lumber Company consist of 255 gelatin silver prints made by American Lumberman photographers during visits to Diboll in 1903 and 1907. They document the lumber company’s management, logging operations, Texas South-Eastern Railroad, timber, lumber camps, sawmills, commissary, and social life. The photographs provide insight into the early twentieth-century community life of a Texas sawmill company town and connected logging camps.” – American Lumberman Photographs of Southern Pine Lumber Company in The Portal to Texas History. University of North Texas Libraries.
I didn’t know what a “mule skidder” was until today, and when I Googled it, images came up for heavy machinery, not animals. But back when the animal was the machinery, a driver would position the cart over felled logs, where dangling tongs would then raise the end of the log off the ground. The mule, oxen or horse team pulled the tong forward, allowing the log to “skid” along between the rolling wheels.
The photo caption notes that the actual skidder is not shown here, so it looks like the guys in this photo were suiting up for a hard day’s work. Or maybe resting between tasks. Either way, all three were in the middle of a very important job.
stephaniekhattak.com 