history

East Texas Research Trip

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Halloween tree at Kurth Memorial Library, Lufkin, Texas.

I spent the past weekend in and around Lufkin, conducting research and visiting family. I added an extra day to my usual weekend visits to fit everything in, and I still didn’t fit everything in!

Due to the size and complexity of the Pine Curtain Project, I have divided it up into a multi-year roadmap and what I hope are small, manageable chunks. The last time I visited for this work, I focused on some cemetery tours and family oral history. For this trip, I chose two local history centers and narrowed down my research to Old Homer History and the beginnings of a Huntington, Texas history that I am pursuing.

Researching takes a long time, longer than expected and longer than people realize. When I look through archives or do field interviews, I usually have one or two main points I want to explore, but I also have to leave time and “brainspace” for other ideas and topics that I encounter along the way, to either fit them into the narrative or file them away for later. Especially when I am interviewing or consulting someone. This is why you may notice that sometimes my art production goes dark for a few weeks – it is just hard to do everything at once. The past few weeks have been devoted to launching the podcast and preparing for this trip.

Because the Ora McMullen Genealogy Room hours aren’t compatible with my non-resident schedule, the Kurth Memorial Library team was kind enough to pull stacks of requested materials and set me up in a study room on Friday. I stayed for nearly three hours and only made it halfway through. I spent my time going through three large file folders: One on the historic role of the Masonic Lodge in Homer; one on general Homer history; and one on Huntington, Texas around the 1930s-40s. I have 347 photos from my trip, and most of them are of documents found in these folders, if that tells you anything.

Workspace view and archival documents, Kurth Memorial Library, Lufkin.

Saturday morning, I woke up early and drove out to Huntington, to spend some time talking to Darrell Bryan of the Huntington Genealogical & Historical Society. Darrell is a longtime Homer, Huntington and East Texas historian whose work focuses on armed conflicts, cattle rustling, racism and land disputes. He is also a friend of my father’s, and very nice.

Darrell gave me a tour of the historical society building in Huntington’s Centennial Park, and then spent most of the morning sharing his research finds and opinions; and helping me understand the bigger picture around the incidents I am learning about. I came away with a better idea of the “whys” around the “what happened,” and also new, bigger mysteries to contemplate.

View of Heritage Park from the Huntington Genealogical & Historical Society and Centennial Park, Huntington, TX.
Suite at the Courtyard Marriott in Lufkin.

Since most of my work was in Lufkin proper, I stayed at the Courtyard Marriott. I’m a frequent guest there, and this time they upgraded me to a suite! Score! So, I spent the evenings with lots of space to spread out, organize my notes and snack from the giant bag of gummy candy I bought at Target.

When I wasn’t working or in the hotel, I was at my parents’ house catching up with their animals, and that was pretty cool, too. Less cool is the blighted field across the street from them, that used to have horses, goats, tall grass and trees. Soon, the field will be an all-night gas station and truck stop. An infuriating but important lesson that nothing lasts forever.

Poncho!
Sweet NaNa.
Soon, the construction site here to the left will be an Exxon gas station in Homer. To the right is my grandfather’s front yard. Harder to see – a great big hole at the end of the street to catch groundwater and God knows what else that drains from the site.

Research Notes: Brownsville Snake Hunters, 1900s

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“Lady Snake Hunters, Captured in One Day,” William Deming Hornaday Collection, Texas State Library and Archives.

This photo is so visually arresting! And, the more I researched and learned about it, the more compelling its story was. The image was found in the William Deming Hornaday collection on the Texas State Library and Archives Flickr page (a great resource that I use a lot!). This photo stood out to me, and I immediately knew that I wanted to learn more and create my own work inspired by it. But, without much to go on from the Flickr caption, where to start? This is where the process gets fun for me.

As I learned more about William Deming Hornaday, I discovered that he was a photojournalist and eventually the public relations director for UT Austin, and that most of his Texas work was in Central and South Texas. Moving beyond the TSLAC Flickr Page, I went into the Texas Digital Archive and started searching through his work, focusing in on geographic areas and using the “Search Within” function until I found a set that had a lot of snakes in it. I enlarged those files until I found this image, and the one below, which identifies the ladies as Mrs. W.A. King and her sister.

“Mrs. W.A. King and Sister. Expert snake hunters.,” William Deming Hornaday. Texas Digital Archive.

Here’s where it gets REALLY interesting! I took to Google with a simple keyword search, and pulled up this family’s story. These Lady Snake Hunters were part of a huge snake business in Brownsville, Texas, providing the reptiles for circuses and other traveling animal acts.

According to his biographer and other documents, William Abraham Leiberman was a Russian/Polish Jewish-American businessman in New York who saw unusual business opportunities along the Rio Grande and moved to the then rural border town of Brownsville, Texas to open “Snakeville”, a “roadside facility to breed, sell, and show off snakes for tourists and interested clientele around the world.” Leiberman eventually changed his legal name to William Abraham Snake King.

Texas-born Manuela Cortez King was the snake king’s wife, and evidently quite the talented snake handler, herself. I can’t find exact confirmation on the sister who is pictured here, but Mrs. King’s obituary names two sisters: Matiana Walker and Luisa Samaron. Perhaps it is one of them.

Please explore these links for citations and further reading:

This video shows W.A. and Manuela Cortez King in a “snake catching contest” in 1914, a contest which they won in 3 minutes and 45 seconds.

“Rattlingly Yours…Snake King,” by W.A. King, Jr.

“The Snake King of Brownsville,” Valley Morning Star, Harlingen, Texas. (Gated content)

*As an animal lover, I acknowledge that this story contains some dated attitudes around animal welfare and exhibition that are not acceptable today. I found “Snakeville” to not be not just a fascinating tale of entrepreneurship that brought to life a unique time, place, and personalities in Texas history, but an exciting opportunity to find a name and deeper identities for this photo.

Researching on a Snow Day

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It’s a snow day week here, and my studio feels a bit daunting and too cold to relax in and get into the zone. So, I’m spending the day organizing some research I’ve found lately. I have been going through old Diboll Free Press newspapers. There are a bunch of them with a lot of good information – some historical but most of it in terms of “slices of life” as it published mostly unedited citizen reporter news from the surrounding counties. I’ll say more on that later on, but in the meantime, here are some fun vintage newspaper ads I’ve come across.

Art on a Rainy Tuesday

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Today is the first day of fall, and here in Texas it is finally cooler and a bit rainy. “Hygge Weather,” I call it, and for this year at least, at my house late September to late February is “Hygge Season.” No one knows what Halloween and the holidays will look like, but we can be pretty sure that being cozy at home is still the best way to go, at least for those of us city-dwellers. So, I decided to try and take a bit of control over these things we can’t control, and embrace the positive.

Yesterday, in my Instagram archive, an interesting post popped up from seven years ago. I was in East Texas at The History Center in Diboll, TX, researching for the novel I was working on at the time. (And technically still am, as I put it away with about a third of it left to finish.) My research was centered on the more salacious bits of East Texas history, not something I’d really make into a print. At the same time, that research is still very valid, as I still go back to the materials I copied to check my facts around locations, names and milestones as I create art around and write Pine Curtain Stories. I put my novel away when my professional career started to ramp up, and I didn’t have any time to devote to it. I had often regretted not finishing that story. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I have many fewer regrets because I see that time wasn’t wasted. The work I put in then is helping me now, and who knows, maybe I’ll eventually drag my book back out and finish it, too. So, if you’re struggling or feel like you’ve wasted creative time on a project that fizzled out, don’t worry so much. Put it aside and revisit it from time to time, and life may surprise you.

As I keep returning to Homer as a creative focus, the concept of Ghost Towns rattles around in my head. Ghosts of the past, ghosts of what might have been. Literal ghosts? Some say yes. And yet, to me, it never really felt sad or like it has dwelled in missed opportunities. Homer’s population is small, for sure. It has hovered between 350 and 500 for most of my life. But it has always been so busy and vibrant. At the same time, it was definitely insular, “the bubble” as I call it, and I did have a hard time acclimating as my life got bigger. So, in a way, those woods and fields are also full of ghosts I loved and then left behind.

So, how does this circle back to art? As I have mentioned before, for me, art helps me make sense of things that are hard to process and harder to articulate. When I am making a print or painting, especially for this project, it opens up new parts of my mind to communicate with, and to communicate without overthinking. At the same time, art begets art, and when I am working on a piece, thinking about the story behind it, my mind is more open to ideas about future pieces, or stories, or research I want to go back to.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke