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