The Not-So-Gay-90's - Interlude Two: Persistence Pays Off

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 21 

Several weeks ago, while I was looking at all of the maps, it came into my head that maybe I should check back on the FamilySearch website to see if they had fixed the problem with the deed records from Brown County, Texas.  I figured I'd better double check to see if there was any chance that Erasmus Miller Owen had bought and sold a piece of land within the same year, causing it to not show up on the tax records.  

The direct index to deeds for 1880-1894 was unlocked, so I took a look at that.  It showed five possible instances where Erasmus and his wife sold land in those years.  Unfortunately, one of the volumes I needed wasn't available on the website (maybe it has been lost), one of the records in the index was actually for a different, possibly completely unrelated Owen, and one of them was not on the page it said it was supposed to be on.  I finally found it, and do you know why?  Because persistence pays off.  I went through each page, reading the names on the deeds, until I finally found it on page 253, instead of page 203 like the index said.  

Now, you might have noticed that I said there were actually four different deeds of sale for Erasmus' land between 1880 and 1894.  The first one was entirely expected.  The other three . . . not so much.

In March of 1892, Erasmus and his wife sold just three acres of one of their tracts of land.  I'd better put up a map again:

Brown County, Texas
1910 Survey Map Detail

According to the tax rolls, Erasmus purchased the dark blue/indigo tract some time in 1890.  I couldn't check the deed records for the exact date because all of the reverse indexes, which means the ones alphabetized by the name of the purchaser, were locked.  And because it was a technical problem, I couldn't even view them at the main Family History Library.  I could have gone through all of the deed books for the relevant years page by page, but I decided to wait out the FamilySearch tech support a little longer before I spent all that time.  So, at that point I had to be satisfied to know that he didn't have the land during the beginning of 1890, but he did own it by the beginning of 1891.  Then, less than two years later, he sold a little three-acre piece of it.  Here is the deed:

Brown County, Texas
Deed Book 37, Page 109
E. M. and R. S. Owen to H. P. Taylor
March 1892

This says that he sold a piece of the NW 1/4 of section 18 of the survey done for the B. B. B. & C. Railroad Co.  You can see on the map above that this is describing the Nichols tract marked in dark blue.  What is really strange about this is that, if I am reading it correctly, he sold just a thin three acre strip running the entire length of the eastern edge of his property.  Maybe there was a boundary dispute or something.  I don't know.  Mr. Taylor paid him $15 for the land.  What is even stranger, though, is that the clerk wrote that the property sat on Hog Creek.  Now, Hog Creek split into three major branches in the area around May, but none of those were up in the blue section.  I looked back at all of the historical maps I had downloaded, and there is a creek that ran up through the property, but that was the Bledsoe Branch of Lost Creek, and it wasn't over on the eastern boundary, so I don't know what that was all about.

On the very same day, Erasmus and Rhoda sold a second parcel of land:

Brown County, Texas
Deed Book 38, Page 244
E. M. and R. S. Owen to
Trustees of Wolf Valley School District
March 1892

Interesting.  This piece of land was sold to the trustees of the Wolf Valley School District for the sum of two dollars (which was probably the amount of the filing fee), "the receipt of which is hereby acknowledged and the further consideration that the ground is not to be used for any other purpose whatever than for school purposes: and it is further stipulated and understood that should said hereinafter descended land be used for other purposes than for school purposes the land shall revert to the grantors of the said property, or should it cease to be used as school [as school] property then it becomes the property of the above grantors."

According to the deed, this was a two acre tract of land that ran right along the western side of the strip they had just sold to H. P. Taylor.  If I read the document right and did the math correctly, the parcel was approximately 67 x 100 meters, which is a little over the area of a football field.

Now, we've heard about Wolf Valley before - that is what the area around the blue and purple tracts of land was called back in the day.  And remember, there was a Wolf Valley Cemetery and church between Erasmus' two sections of property.  

I wondered if that little piece of land he sold was still being used for school purposes to this very day, and if not, just how long it had been used and then what happened to it.  I also wondered what would have happened if it wasn't being used for school purposes but the original grantors were no longer living.  I might have found the answer to the second question in a document from Stanford Law School, but I didn't really understand it.  (If anyone out there is a lawyer, or maybe a mortgage person(?) they can read it and tell us all in the comments how it works!)

As to the first question, you wouldn't believe how hard it was to find an answer, but this is where my persistence really paid off.

I did a Google search for Wolf Valley school Brown County Texas and came up with that bit about the cemetery I quoted for you before.  Here it is again: 

This valley was settled in the 1860's. Most of the residents left their home states (southern), and traveled together until they found this small hill, overlooking a green valley. Mr. Robert Porter, a long time resident, is of the opinion that when they were scouting the area, they found a great many wolves in the immediate vicinity. Consequently the name Wolf Valley.

The church building was constructed here in 1887 for the use of the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian congregations, as well as the local school. Ten acres was sold to the school trustees "for school, church, and graveyard, and when said lands are abandoned as school and church purposes, the whole is to be used for graveyard purposes." The Cemetery was formally set aside in 1902, when trustees A. E. Bailey, A. W. Hardy, and J. W. Spence bought the original tract from the D. M. Davidson family. Recorded in Vol. 64, page 154, Brown County Courthouse. Filed March 15 1902.

Obviously, this is not talking about Erasmus' sale of two acres to the school, because his was supposed to revert back to himself if it wasn't used for that purpose.  Plus, it was only two acres, not ten.  But now I had another question: were both locations actually used for a school?  Was the church building used first, and then a proper school built on the land Erasmus sold?

My Google search also turned up numerous other websites that talked about the community and the cemetery, all of which I had already come across when I was writing the post with the maps.  I did find a few more references to the school in particular.  The first came from the same website as the blurb above:

There followed a list of 189 schools, along with the district they were consolidated with, and sometimes the year of consolidation.  The list said that Wolf Valley was consolidated with Zephyr at some unknown date.  This couldn't possibly be true, because Zephyr was way down in the southeastern portion of the county.  So that was a complete bust.  

But I did find something helpful from a search result about the Wolf Valley Methodist congregation:

Texas Escapes - May, Texas

So that clears up the confusion about Hog Creek, I guess.  Modern maps show both the branch of Hog Creek that stretches near to the townsite of May, and Lost Creek, which stretches farther north, as branching off of Hog Creek.  They must have called all of it the same name way back in the day.  

The other search results contained a bunch of obituaries, some soil/resource data, a historical conservation report, a bibliography from somebody's dissertation, and a lot of garbage.  When I got to the forty-fifth result, I found this in the Texas School Journal Vol 7 1889:

Okay.  Not what I was looking for, but now we know that the school ran for six months, and that the teacher was a professor Allen.  I thought this was actually a really cool thing to find, because I am assuming that Erasmus' children would have attended school there.  Not only does this give us new insight into their lives, but it also tells us that Erasmus' son Edgar, who (according to one of his descendants) was a school teacher in Brown County in 1888, was either never the teacher at that school, or was no longer the teacher by 1889.  

And then, all of the results exhausted and still no answer to my question, I decided to change my search term to "wolf valley" school Brown County Texas history.  (See?  I just added some quotation marks and the word history.)  That gave me a lot of the results I had already looked at, plus two newspaper articles.  The first one was from 1977.   I didn't really think that was going to be at all helpful, but I was getting desperate by that point so I opened it up.  Luckily, it turns out that 1977 is the last year contained in the Brownwood Bulletin archives on Newspapers.com, so I was able to look at it without the upgraded membership:

Brownwood Bulletin
21 Oct 1977

Okay.  This article is about the history of schools that were in the location served by the May School District in 1977.  The article mentions Wolf Valley School, but doesn't tell us much else, other than the fact that it was one of the ones that had closed.  But underneath this article was an old school district map of Brown County showing the location of all the old schools:

Brownwood Bulletin
21 Oct 1977

Isn't this great?!  I put the color coding on so you can see where the schools were in relation to the Wolf Valley area.  (Except I accidentally carried the yellow box too far east!)  You'll notice that the "Old" Wolf Valley School is number 37 on the list, but that there are two connected circles with dots on the map in that location.  One is in the spot where the cemetery sits today, and has the number 37 right next to it, so I'm guessing that the school started meeting there in 1881 (the date listed on the key), before the church building was built in 1887.  The other one is in the corner of the dark blue section, which is exactly where those two acres that Erasmus sold to the trustees would have been located.  Amazing.  If you look very carefully, you can see a number 7 written below the circle.  Number seven on the key says "Wolf Valley" with an unknown date for the opening.  So, this map indicates that both locations were used for a school, and it suggests that the "old" Wolf Valley school location was abandoned (well, not really abandoned, just abandoned as a school, since it would have still been used as a church) when the new one was opened.  From what we know so far, that would have been sometime after 1892.  The historical marker for the cemetery includes the history blurb I put up above (in maroon), but it also says,

A church building was constructed here in 1887 for use by Baptist, Methodist and Cumberland Presbyterian congregations as well as the local schools. Brush arbors were used for summer revivals. The building and grounds were the spiritual and educational hub of the community. The structure burned, but was rebuilt through donated funds and labor.

I wondered whether the fact that Erasmus sold the trustees a separate piece of land had something to do with the fire.  I did a bit of searching and found a 2012 article from the Deseret News.  In it, an elderly resident of the area recalls, 

All that Wolf Valley is now is the cemetery, and the cinder block church that was built in the 1970s after the original log church burned. The church doors open for an occasional funeral, and always on the first Sunday in May, when descendants of those buried there come to decorate their ancestors' graves, meet for a brief business meeting, hold a church service and share a meal "on the grounds." Then in the afternoon, gather again in the little chapel and sing the old hymns.

"Our cemetery is about full," Muhle said. "The places that aren't filled are most likely reserved. We've worked hard, and I think, finally, all but one or maybe two of the graves have been identified."

He points to the small ravine southwest of the little church and says the story is that in the late 1800s the Davidson family hired a man to move the old log church building up the hill. Nobody thought it could be done, not by 100 men and certainly not by one.  But it only took one man, and his one mule. He laid out "pipes and beams and got it across."

Well, I guess the two events were completely unrelated, but isn't it fantastic that we now know that the church was a log structure?  Trust me, it is, because my search turned up that other article - one that didn't show me the date in the search results - and that one was the icing on the cake of this little quest for information:

Brownwood Bulletin
4 October 1894
page 1

Brownwood Bulletin
4 October 1894
page 2

Yes, this is verrrrrrrry long, and the print is verrrrrrry small.  This article details the journey from the town of Clio (which, incidentally, is where the American Baptist Yearbooks show Erasmus living/preaching for the first four years he was in Brown County) up through May and Wolf Valley on the way to Cisco in Eastland County north of Brown.  If you want a better picture of what life was like for Erasmus Miller Owen or his children, you should definitely click on the link and read the whole article.  If, however, you skipped it and are now reading this, I am going to put up the part that is relevant to today's discussion now:

Brownwood Bulletin

4 October 1894

page 2

Wow, right?  I love this article . . . "His virtues will live after him!"  This, folks, is why I enjoy this research so much.  Not only does this article tell us that Erasmus Miller Owen was very well respected, and hospitable too, mind you, but that he was a well-known "pioneer preacher", one of the early settlers of the region, and, most importantly for today's line of research, the parson of the Baptist church at Wolf Valley.

So why do the Baptist records all say that he was from May, and never mention Wolf Valley?  Well, the only publication to report the pastors and/or ordained Baptist ministers in Texas prior to 1898 was the American Baptist Yearbook.  It reported that Erasmus was in May, Texas at the end of 1886 (published in 1887), but there are no digitized copies online for the years 1888-1891.  The tax records report that he had land about a mile south of the center of the town of May by 1883, and that he kept it until sometime in 1888.  I found the deed (I didn't show it to you in this post because we'll talk about that one when we discuss the 1880s!), and it says that he sold the land on Dec 12, 1888.  That implies that he lived in May proper until that time. 

Wolf Valley did not have its own post office; it was a part of the May postal district.  So either the American Baptist Yearbook never received updated information for him and just kept printing that he was in May, or they were going by his postal address, which was and continued to be May.  I'm guessing, based on this article, that the book was using his postal address, and that he began residing in the Wolf Valley community when he purchased his land there some time in 1888.  (As I mentioned in my last post, the FamilySearch records have been unlocked and we now know that he sold and purchased both tracts of land on the same day.) 

But why then do the Baptist records still show him in May all the way later in 1898 and 1899?  I thought the Texas Baptist annuals were listing the specific church names, but maybe they, too, were just going by postal address.  I guess we'll have to check on that when we get further into the 1890s.  I also forgot to show you the third (unexpected) deed, but I feel like that would be a bit anticlimactic so we'll save that for a later time as well.   

On a last note, and to illustrate a point, when I found that article in the Brownwood Bulletin I clipped it and gave it a title.  So now, this shows up as the fourth entry in the Google search results:

If anyone had been searching for just this thing and gave it another try, a new result would have miraculously appeared (this has happened to me and I never understood why!).  So you see, persistence really does pay off.

                                                                                                                                                 - Therese

The Not-So-Gay-90's - Act Two: The Struggles of 1891

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 20

As the new decade dawned, Erasmus Miller Owen was living in the northern outskirts of the town of May in Brown County, Texas.  Here is what we know about his life in 1890:

E. M. Owen (as he liked to be called) was the pastor of the Baptist church in May.

He was on the board of directors of the newly founded Howard Payne College.

He had recently sold his land south of the May townsite and purchased land four to five miles north.

Living with him at the time would have been his wife, Rhoda, his daughters Minnie (aged twenty), Clara (aged 17), Leona (aged twelve), and Orlena (aged nine), his two teenage sons, Mark (aged fifteen) and Conrad (aged thirteen), possibly his son Edgar (aged twenty-one), and probably his son Erasmus (aged twenty-five).  

Not only did Erasmus seem to be quite busy, but he had a lot of mouths to feed on a preacher's salary.  Would his farm have provided the support his family needed?  Since the 1890 census is no more, we can't look at the agricultural schedule and will instead have to rely on the tax records to paint some kind of picture for us.  Here are the pages from the year 1890 that show Erasmus Miller Owen:

Brown County, Texas
Tax Rolls - 1890

Brown County, Texas
Tax Rolls - 1890

I downloaded these from the FamilySearch website (there is a link in each image title for those of you who have created a free account), but I used the nifty colorization tool on Ancestry to give them a more accurate (and less boring gray) appearance.  Line 8 shows that in 1890 Erasmus had

80 acres of land

1 wagon/carriage

12 horses/mules

15 cattle

21 sheep

9 hogs

I'm sure they had some chickens as well, even though the form doesn't ask that question.  Unfortunately, this doesn't tell us how many acres were in cultivation, but way back in 1880, Erasmus was only farming four acres of land - probably just enough to feed his family - so we could guess that he was doing the same in 1890.  He also had

$50 in tools/implements/machinery

$40 in miscellaneous property

$200 money on hand

That's a lot of money to keep under your mattress!  Actually, there was a bank in Brownwood, about twenty miles to the southwest, and Erasmus most likely traveled there occasionally for Howard Payne business anyway, so maybe he kept his money there.  Anyway, to put $200 in perspective, you could buy a man's suit for between $7 and $10, a boy's suit for between $1.50 and $3.50, a yard of basic fabric was 5¢, a pair of ladies' kid gloves 35¢, a pair of ladies' boots between $1 and $2.50, a bedspread was about $1, and a ladies' chemise normally cost about $1, but could be had for half that price on sale.  $200 was more than what Erasmus' wagon/carriage, his miscellaneous property and all of his livestock except his horses were worth all put together.  

So why did he have so much cash?  Well, it turns out that when he sold his land in 1888, he was paid $2,000 for it.  The new piece of property that he bought in that same year (same day, actually, and from the same person to whom he sold the other parcel - we'll talk about that later) only cost him $800.  So, out of the $1,200 net cash after the two transactions, he supposedly only had $200 left two years later.  That sounds a bit weird, doesn't it?  But not as weird as if he had lied about the amount, since he was a Baptist preacher and all.  

So what happened to the rest of his money?  Well, there is the chance that he paid some medical bills for Uncle Ras.  He probably bought some clothes and other needed supplies for the family.  The 1891 tax rolls show that he did purchase an additional carriage/wagon some time during 1890:

Brown County, Texas
Tax Rolls - 1891

Brown County, Texas
Tax Rolls - 1891

The original carriage/wagon was probably just that - a buckboard spring wagon, with removeable seats so that it could carry passengers or cargo:

We only ever see these with the one seat, but apparently they were made large enough to hold up to four.  Not only would this be the logical choice for a large rural family living in 1890, but according to a guide I found on the University of Missouri Library website, you could have one for the price Erasmus estimated his was worth ($65) when he reported his property for the taxes.  (The website has links to all kinds of economic reports.)  The total for the two wagons was only $100, which means the new one was probably a smaller spring/road wagon, maybe one suitable for a single person who needed to travel to meetings in a neighboring town.  Or maybe he drastically dropped his estimate of what the old wagon was worth and bought a more expensive one.  

Now, maybe some of you took a closer look at the 1891 tax document.  Maybe you noticed that, in addition to the 26% reduction in his number of livestock, he had no money on hand.  Could he have really spent that whole $200 in the course of one year?  Yes, he could have, partly because he purchased an additional 160 acres of land:

Brown County, Texas
Deed Book 33, Page 177
J. R. and Emma Lyon to E. M. Owen
February 1891

 

This is what I am calling the Nichols tract, and it was marked in dark blue on my maps.  Erasmus paid $800 for the parcel, which means that the $200 "money on hand" must have literally meant money on hand (or under your mattress!), and not money in the bank, which actually kind of makes sense, because banks were few and far between and you would have to take a special trip to the closest town that had one in order to make a deposit or withdrawal.

I did some looking - no wonder it takes me three plus weeks to finish a post - and the average family earned between $500 and $1000 a year in 1890.  I'm guessing that a preacher, even one in rural areas brought in some kind of income.  The cost of living in Texas was about $640 dollars a year.  Of course, that was for an average family of five, not nine or ten like in Erasmus' household.  If his son Edgar was still living at home, and still teaching school, he was probably bringing in about $240 a year . . . and if they were growing their own food, cost of living would be less . . . . Where am I going with this???  Let's see.  Two years . . . about $1500 in living expenses . . . $1200 net proceeds from land dealings . . . about $1400 in actual income . . . $2600 minus $1500 leaves $1100.  So yeah, he would have had $800 to purchase more land at the beginning of 1891.

In 1891 Erasmus had

240 acres of land

2 wagons/carriages

7 horses/mules

12 cattle

21 sheep

3 hogs

$50 in miscellaneous property

$0 money on hand

So, he was down five horses, three head of cattle, and six hogs.  We don't know if those animals were sold, traded, slaughtered, or just died - their loss could have been a financial loss or added income.  And, even though he should have still had some cash, Erasmus must have had it in the bank, not at home.  (Oh, and here is an interesting fact:  The financial report that gave me the average living expenses also said that the average family only saved 5% of its income, so having an extra two to three hundred dollars would have been rare.  I suppose this is why we usually see men selling land shortly before purchasing a new tract.)

I did just notice, though, that Erasmus devalued his first parcel of land between 1890 and 1891, reporting its worth first as $800 and then as only $400.  And, even though he bought the Nichols tract for $800, he reported shortly thereafter that it was only worth $600!  Hmmmmm.  I wonder what that was all about.  (The railroad finally reached Brown County in 1892.  Perhaps by 1891 they had the route planned out and land prices rose and fell in accordance.)

Anyway, this post has sort of run away from me, because Erasmus' own spending habits weren't a problem in 1891.

The money issues of the board of Howard Payne College was.

Scene 1: In which Money is Handled Irresponsibly

As mentioned in a previous post, Erasmus Miller Owen began serving on the board of directors in either September 1889 or shortly thereafter.  The following excerpts from Something About Brown: A History of Brown County, Texas by T. R. Havins (pages 88-91) give us an idea of how that went:

"A story in the Texas Baptist and Herald leads us to believe that the trustees met in October [1889]."  They decided to name the college after the brother-in-law of board president J. D. Robnett after he pledged a "sizeable sum" to the school.

"The trustees formulated and matured plans for a building to cost $25,000 and began a systematic campaign of soliciting funds."

"By the winter of 1890 [January or February] they had succeeded in securing some cash and notes amounting to more than $15,000, along with gifts of lands in Brown, Coleman, Runnels, and Eastland counties."

"The trustees employed certain members of the faculty on May 19, 1890, and began preparations looking to the opening of the first academic year in September. At the same meeting the board let the contract for the masonry work on the college building."

"During April, May, and June the trustees held weekly meetings."

I'm guessing this might have been what led Erasmus to buy a second wagon.  Not only would that leave the original wagon at home for the use of his wife/children, but perhaps he needed something lighter weight yet newer and more stylish - maybe one of those nice black lacquered kinds - that was more fitting for a man of his distinction. 

"At a meeting on May 10, tuition charges had been set at $17.50 for the preparatory department and at $22.50 for college instruction [probably per semester]. . . . The institution was in dire financial difficulties from its inception to 1898, and the unusually small charges for tuition were a major factor in perpetuating the financial problem."

On top of the small tuition fee, the board decided that ministers (and I swear I read somewhere that this also applied to ministers' children - I can't find the source now) would receive their education for free.

"From our modern point of vantage it appears that little practical planning guided the board in its actions. In May, 1890, the trustees authorized the purchase of six pianos without funds with which to pay the invoices. Two weeks later the board instructed one of its committees to purchase school furniture when the board already owed a local bank more than $2,000. Neither of the obligations could be met, and seven years later the Chicago firm that had sold the furniture brought suit against the college. Contracts for the stone work, the carpenter work, the painting, the plastering, the excavation of the foundations were executed without visible funds."

"As bills came due J. J. Ramey, Treasurer of the Board of Trustees, paid them from his private funds or endorsed the college paper at local banks."

"When the college opened its doors to registration on September 16, 1890, more than one hundred students registered the first day. Students continued to enroll for the next twenty days, and the number of college and preparatory students numbered "between a hundred and sixty and seventy-five." The scholastic year of 1891-1892 brought an enrollment of three hundred eighteen. The third year of the college was disastrous. Although the student body increased, the financial picture darkened."

"Funds were unavailable in May, 1892, with which to pay the salaries of the faculty. It appears that the president, Dr. Emerson, insisted that other faculty members than himself should be paid out of the first receipts. It was at this juncture that J. J. Ramey came forth with his private funds to meet the salary payments. When conditions worsened in 1893, the president evidently felt that further effort would be futile and resigned. The date of Emerson's resignation is uncertain. If the trustees held any meetings between June 8, 1892, and May 30, 1893, no record of the meetings were kept."

"The trustees had secured a loan of $15,000 from Frank Ely of Dallas in 1892, giving a deed of trust on the buildings and grounds and with the endorsement of the note by thirty prominent citizens of Brownwood."

So.  Apparently the board of directors had this dream to start a Baptist college, and they weren't going to let a lack of money stand in the way.  The board president moved into the role of college president, and one of the existing board members moved up to lead the board of directors.

"From the accession of Yantis as head of the board of trustees there appears more orderliness in the minutes and a more business like approach to the problems."  

This didn't really help matters, though, because the school remained heavily in debt; when the $15,000 mortgage came due several years later, they were unable to pay the balance.  Eventually, the college had to be taken over by the Texas General Convention.  

While researching the financial problems of the college, I came across another book, A History of Texas Baptists, by J. M. Carroll, which shed some light on some of the details that were left unclear by the sources we looked at before.  The book explains that

"The following board of trustees was elected to serve till the regular session of the Association: J. D. Robnett, J. J. Ramey, A. D. Moss, John W. Goodwin, Ben Wilson, J. W. Staton, Moss Martin, J. C. Averitt and W. S. Maddox. . . . At the next regular meeting of the Association with the church at Santa Anna, Sept. 5, 1889, J. F. Jackson, E. M. Owen and A. R. Watson were elected as members of the board in place of J. W. Staton, W. S. Maddox and J. C. Averitt, who expressed their purpose to go into a new association."

So that confirms that the first board was never meant to last longer than the initial three months, and that Erasmus was elected in the regular election, and not later as a replacement for men who resigned.  The book also quoted a report given by the college president at the end of the first year:

"The last year has been one of great labor and anxiety on the part of your board. Selection of location, securing a proper site, and plans and specifications for a suitable building, raising of funds, letting of contract, employment of faculty, arranging a suitable curriculum, getting out catalogues, employment of agencies for advertising the College and securing students, have necessitated many meetings and an expenditure of much time in deliberation, and yet the board feels amply repaid for all the labor and anxiety of the work by their great success."

This gives us an even greater idea of the responsibilities the board was tasked with, and reminds us that there were numerous expenses, like newspaper advertising and the printing of catalogues, that were incurred in addition to the large sums spent on buildings and furniture.  And, as for the fact that the board was spending money it didn't even have, the report continues:

"Our agents have been friendly received and encouraged in the work wherever they have gone. Over $25,000 has been subscribed to the College. Much of this is as good as cash. Some of it has already been paid. Some of it is in notes and part in real estate. The contract for the center building has been let and the foundation is nearing completion. The building, when completed, will in every way be adapted to the running of a first-class college and is intended as a heritage for our children forever. Your committee commend the institution to the prayerful and hearty co-operation of the entire brotherhood."

They were confident in the large sum of money that had been promised to the college, but remember, just the building contract alone was supposed to cost $25,000.  So from the very start, they knew that they were spending money with no idea how the debts would be covered.

Erasmus Miller Owen only remained on the board of directors through the first academic year of the college.  By the start of the second year (1892-93), he is no longer listed in the catalogue.  So what happened?  Did he have a problem with the way the financial matters were being handled?  Did he feel like nobody agreed with his ideas of how things should be run?  Or was he part of the problem and began to feel, like the college president, that they were failing at their task?

Maybe Erasmus Miller Owen did some soul searching and decided that God had other plans for him.  Maybe his decision to resign from the board actually had little or nothing to do with the financial problems at Howard Payne.  Maybe, just maybe, certain family problems had brought him to the conclusion that, however worthy the cause, the time required of him as a member of the board just wasn't worth it.

Scene 2: In which the Eldest Son is Convicted of Manslaughter

Way back in my first post about Erasmus Miller Owen I shared a page from the Owen Family Association newsletter.  The author of that article also wrote a piece about Erasmus' son Sam, from whom she is descended:

Owen Family Association Newsletter
Volume 26 Issue 3

I went ahead and put up the whole page (you can find and download the pdf here) because we will need to look at several different parts before we are finished today.  For now, the important thing to know is that Sam was Erasmus' first son, from his marriage to Mary Ann Carr.  He was a cowboy/rancher, married with several kids, and spent his early adult life living in San Saba County, Texas where he had been born and raised.  

Now, look at the seventh paragraph:

I tried and tried (and tried!) to find mention of this in a newspaper article, but it appears that none of the editions of the San Saba News from September 1890 through April of 1891 have survived.  And I don't just mean have not been digitized.  I haven't been able to find reference to a library, public institution, or private entity that holds those missing editions in either original or microfilm format either.  In addition, I couldn't find editions of any digitized newspapers for the right time period from any of the surrounding counties.  Either this branch of the family snipped the article when it happened and saved it long enough for the date to be remembered, or the court records have been preserved and this is how the author of the newsletter article knew the details.  Unfortunately for us, San Saba County hasn't had any of their court records other than probate microfilmed or digitized, and I haven't been able to find any other reference to the event other than this newsletter.  So what does that leave us with?

If you do a search on the Texas Digital Archive or on Ancestry's "Texas, U.S., Convict and Conduct Registers, 1875-1954" database, you will find several records for the name Sam Owen (Owen, Sam).  There is only one Sam (or Samuel) Owen out of those records, however, who could possibly be Erasmus' son:

Huntsville Penitentiary
Convict Record Ledger B

On the fifth line down we see convict number 6926: Sam Owen, age 35, six foot tall, blue eyes, red hair.  So far, so good.  The physical description matches the photos we have of him, and many of the men in Erasmus' line of descent were tall.  It also says that he was born in Texas, lived in San Saba, was married, didn't smoke or drink, and had a limited education.  Finally, it says that he pled not guilty, but was convicted of manslaughter on May 4, 1891 and was sentenced to two years in the penitentiary.  All of that sounds right.  Even if we didn't know the family "secret" that he had served time, everything else matches what we know about him (well, the story doesn't mention the not smoking or drinking bit, but hey - his father was a Southern Baptist preacher so...).

The next paragraph comments on his time in prison:

The book mentioned is a compilation of information from Brown's own research and the published memoirs of former Texas prison inmates.  You can purchase it on Amazon, a limited number of chapters can be previewed on Google Books, or it can be checked out from the Hoopla digital library (all you need is a library card from a participating public library).  I spent a lot of time researching the Texas prison system before I remembered that Hoopla was a thing, so I've read a wide range of primary source documents, websites, and scholarly journals, in addition to the 1910 report on the prison system that is repeatedly referenced in the book.  What I gleaned from my research is this:

The Texas prison system had the primary goal of punishing its convicts.  This fact, in conjunction with the fact that Texas did not want to allocate any money to the prison system, caused it to lease the entire system to private companies up until some time in the 1880s.  The wardens were so corrupt and the abuses so profound, that once the abuses came to light, the state ordered an immediate halt to the prison leasing system.  It still did not want to add a tax to support the prisons, so it instead leased out the individual convicts to private companies, where they worked on farms, railroads, sawmills, and coal mines.  In addition, the inmates at Huntsville prison worked in shops making clothing and shoes for the inmates, building furniture, and manufacturing wagons.  

As it turned out, living conditions were pretty much just as brutal and the treatment just as inhumane as it had been before.  The abuses continued even though annual inspections were eventually conducted by members of the state legislature. (In the earlier years, the prison superintendent simply submitted a report to the legislature.  Later, a committee of legislators themselves made visits.  You can read two such reports that were printed in the newspaper here and here.)  They mostly returned with glowing reports, but rarely visited the outside work camps, where conditions were reputed to be much, much worse.  (The first chapter of Texas Gulag mentions the contrasting conditions.)  By 1909, somehow word had gotten out just how bad things really were, and a complete overhaul of the system was undertaken.  (Things improved somewhat, but not much until after the 1930s.)

About half of the prison population was African American, and they were mostly sent to the farms (this began near the end of Reconstruction and might have been established as a way to perpetuate slave labor, or might have been done under the assumption that, being former slaves, African American convicts were familiar with working fields), while the white and Mexican inmates worked the remaining industries.  However, in a 1903 journal article calling for the reform of the Texas prison system, Charles S. Potts revealed that only half of the convict population could be held within the two prisons; the remainder were sent to outside farms and labor camps, where their treatment was "hardly less brutal than the former exile system of Russia . . . . As a rule the life of a convict is not as valuable in the eyes of the sergeants and guards and contractors, with a few exceptions, as that of a dog; in evidence thereof we find that the average life of a convict is seven years. Convicts are shot down upon the least provocation, and when there is absolutely no excuse for it. Convicts are worked when they are sick and disabled, and some have been compelled to work until they drop dead in their tracks, yet nothing so far as we know has ever been done to remedy this evil." 

Among the most common complaints in the convict memoirs were the brutal punishments, spoiled food, and months that they had to go without bathing.  Whether those were the norm or specific punishments for inmates that misbehaved, I can't say.  What I can say, however, is that the death rate in the prisons was high.  Like, really high.  According to the 1890 census vital statistics report, the probable average death rate in 1890 was 18 per 1000 people.  That's 1.8%.  For males, it was slightly higher, at 2.58%.  According to the 1890 prison report published in the newspaper, during 1889 and 1890 the prison population averaged 3250 convicts.  183 of them died during that time, which is 5.6% - more than double the rate in the general population. (And the report said that was a reduction in deaths!)  

Sam would have spent his time in prison during the convict leasing period, but according to another journal article, most of the railroad work was done either before or after the years in which he served and was also mostly in the eastern portion of Texas and so pulled prisoners sentenced to the Rusk penitentiary, not Huntsville.  However, I did find these two mentions in newspaper articles around the time he was incarcerated:

Austin American-Statesman
18 Jan 1889

Austin American-Statesman
26 November 1890

Both of these articles indicate that railroad gangs were indeed being used up until the year before Sam was convicted, and the first one mentions the Huntsville prison in relation to the convicts.  The second one says that the railroad gangs might be "turned back to prison any day," although it also says there is demand for more convicts to work the railroads, so I don't know what that was all about.  I think it was late 1893 when the prison system began building its own railroad line, so this implies that there was no break at all in the use of railroad chain gangs.

I don't know if Sam's descendants had passed down the idea that he worked on two railroad chain gangs, or if some reference to that was found in the penitentiary records in the Texas state archives.  If he was assigned to any work outside of the prison grounds, though, he would probably have had to wear either the ball and chain or something called a spur, which was also meant to make it impossible for an inmate to run. 

Well, I just figured out where the information came from!  There is a separate "Conduct Register" for the Texas inmates:

Texas Prison Conduct Register
Volume 1998-038-184

The box at the right of this image is from the column labeled "location."  I had seen this before but didn't see the heading and had no idea what those initials stood for.  Now that I have read numerous sources about the railroad chain gangs, I know that those stand for two different railroads.  So Sam was indeed assigned to a railroad gang on his very first day in prison.  

When the family found out that Sam had been convicted (and probably denied an appeal - he was transferred to prison very shortly after his initial sentencing), they were probably quite fearful about what would happen to him.  The newsletter article tells us about the action Sam's wife took:

Supposedly, the Texas archives has boxes of files containing the petitions along with their accompanying letters and documents, but I couldn't find any of these on their website of digitized materials.  It would be interesting to see if Erasmus wrote a letter to the governor commending his son's character and requesting clemency.  

Could Sam's situation be one of the reasons Erasmus resigned from his duties as a trustee of Howard Payne?  Did he want to devote time to securing a pardon for his son?  Was he ashamed of what happened and didn't want to be in the publish eye if the news spread?  Sam was convicted on May 4, 1891.  As far as we know, Erasmus was still on the board at that time, but had resigned by the printing of the catalog for the following school year, which began on September 7th, 1892.  

Perhaps he thought he had better pay more attention to his younger sons, aged fifteen and thirteen.  Perhaps his youngest son, Conrad, wasn't too keen on the attention.  Perhaps it was what happened in October of 1891, just five months after Sam's conviction, that prompted Erasmus to leave his post.

Scene 3: In which the Youngest Son Runs Away

The newsletter article up above mentions that Erasmus Miller Owen was a very strict and "severe" father.  Whether this refers to the fact that, as a Southern Baptist, he forbade most activities that young persons might consider fun, or to more specific rules and punishments related to daily life is unknown.  The article tells us that Sam ran away from home at a young age, and that five of his half-brothers would run away to live with Sam when they were twelve to thirteen years old.  He supposedly set each of these brothers up in business by the time they were eighteen or nineteen, implying that they remained with him during their teenage years.  

I would like to respectfully apologize to the author of the newsletter article and any other descendants of Sam Owen who have been given this family story, because I am going to have to pick it apart.

(I've learned from experience, both from my family's stories and from those of my husband's, that stories can change a lot after four generations and 100 years have passed.  Not only can vague statements be misinterpreted, but details can be misremembered, especially when heard as a child and passed on when a person is older.  It's just like what happened with Uncle Ras where, by the 1980s, nobody seemed to remember that he actually was a preacher for years and years.)  

Brother #1: Jacob Richard (Dick) - born 1861

Jacob would have been thirteen in 1874.  Sam would have been eighteen at that time, and according to the article was out on the range doing the cowboy and buffalo hide stuff, so he probably wasn't available to run to.  

Brother #2: Uncle Ras - born 1864

Erasmus and his family lived in San Saba County until 1882.  Erasmus would have been thirteen in 1877.  Sam started breaking horses for a living at age nineteen, which would have been 1875.  He didn't own any of his own land until 1882, so my guess is that he was either a) still pretty transient himself, b) living in someone else's household, or c) living on his own father's land in 1877.  Uncle Ras might have run to him, but Sam probably lived within a few miles so it wouldn't have been a big deal.

Brother #3: Edgar - born 1869

Edgar would have been thirteen in 1882, which was the year that the family moved to Brown County.  I suppose maybe Edgar wasn't happy about the move and ran back home to San Saba County.  I don't think it's likely that Sam set him up in business when he was in his later teens, however.  After finishing high school in Rising Star, Texas (a town several miles north of May), Edgar became a teacher at age nineteen, and was ordained as a minister the following year.

Brother #4: Mark - born 1875

I haven't done much research into the life of Mark yet.  He would have been thirteen in 1888.  Sam and his family were living in San Saba County at the time, which was about 83 miles from where Erasmus and his younger children lived.  By 1900, both brothers were "farming" in Kent County, but they were in opposite sides of the county and Mark was 25 by then, so I don't know that it has any bearing on the story, other than to make us wonder what kind of "business" Sam would have been setting his brothers up in anyhow.

Brother #5: Conrad - born 1877

Conrad would have turned thirteen at the end of 1890.  That means he would have been thirteen during 1891, which is the year we have been talking about.  Conrad actually did run away, but not to his brother Sam, because Sam was in prison at the time.  Instead, he ran all the way to New Mexico, almost 350 miles away:

 

The Pecos Valley Argus
3 October 1891

Deputy Sheriff Mallory was the husband of Conrad's older sister Letitia.  Letitia's family lived in Eddy, New Mexico at the time, which is what the town of Carlsbad was originally called.  So how did Conrad manage to make the trip all on his own?  Well, it would have taken more than a week by horse, so I'm guessing he got a ride somehow.  Although the train went all the way through to Eddy at that time, he could not have caught one from his hometown, and he would have had to take a rather circuitous route with considerable backtracking for the first portion of the trip.  I don't know how much that would have cost, or whether he would have been able to save his own money or possibly pilfer some from under his father's mattress.  Maybe he did the 19th century version of hitch hiking.  

Did Conrad run away because his father was too busy and the boys had to put in extra work on the farm?  Did he run away because his father was so strict?  Did he leave home because he was suddenly getting too much attention?  Or did he leave because he wasn't getting enough?  We will most likely never know, but in his letter to his sister Clara (which I shared in the post about Uncle Ras), Conrad confessed that his brother had "made the most profound impression in my life of any man I have ever known including even our father. The best in the characters of both father and mother were imparted to him."  This makes me think that, even if Conrad bristled at his father's discipline when he was young, Erasmus wasn't so very severe, at least not by that point in his life anyway.

How long did Conrad stay in New Mexico?  His uncle set him up in school, either because he was a deputy sheriff and needed to be on the up and up, because he valued education, because he didn't want his nephew to think running away was all fun and games, or maybe because he knew he had better let things blow over back home before sending Conrad back.  He might have eventually put his nephew on a train home, or he might have just waited until he was heading that way and took him himself:

The Eddy County Citizen
20 August 1892

The Eddy County Citizen
3 September 1892

This doesn't mention anything about returning his nephew to his home in Texas, but that doesn't mean that Conrad didn't stay in New Mexico for almost a year.  However long he stayed, I'm sure his initial disappearance and the subsequent discovery that he had run away couldn't have been a happy time for his parents; it would have been a bad end to an even worse year.

Would things begin to look up in 1892?  We'll soon find out.

                                                                                                                                                 - Therese