The Not-So-Gay 90's - Act Three: Better Days . . .

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 22

When we last looked at our Owen ancestors, it was the early 1890s, and the family should have been well on their way to achieving a carefree, decadent lifestyle.  Funny how ridiculous the myth of the Gay 90's sounds when put that way, isn't it?  For Erasmus Miller Owen, 1890 and 1891 had been not so great at all.  By 1892, however, things were beginning to look up.  

Scene 1: In which Land Changes Hands

As we saw previously, in March of 1892 Erasmus and Rhoda sold two strips of land along the eastern edge of their newest piece of property.  One was sold to a man named H. P. Taylor.  I did a couple of quick look-ups, and it turns out that Mr. Taylor did already own the land just to the east of Erasmus, so he was definitely looking to legally add the three acre strip to his own property.  He also happened to be the father of a man who would later become the longest-serving and most famous president of Howard Payne College.  Interesting.

The other piece of land was sold to the trustees of the Wolf Valley School District for the purpose of building a school, which in case you've forgotten had been using the church building for the previous ten years.  And this brings us back to the whole Wolf Valley Church question . . . .

(Sigh.  It is so hard to write a chronologically organized research blog!)  In my last post, I showed a newspaper article from 1894 that said Erasmus was the parson in Wolf Valley.  The question of whether he was pastoring the church there or in May bothered me quite a bit, so I really spent a lot of time digging to find the answer.

I began by doing a general internet search for the May Baptist Church and the Wolf Valley Baptist Church.  I didn't come up with much, but I did discover that a Methodist preacher who served in May during the 1980s actually wrote a book for the town's centennial celebration.  Unfortunately, the book has not been digitized, is held in only a few Texas libraries, and is considered a reference book so cannot be borrowed through interlibrary loan.  One of the libraries happens to be the one in Brownwood, Texas, the capital of Brown County, which has a special department at the library that is staffed by the Pecan Valley Genealogical Society.  I called them.  They weren't familiar with the book.  I told them they had it at their library, and would it be possible for somebody to do a look-up for me.  The nice gentleman said he would see what he could do, and would I like him to also inquire whether anyone had a copy they would be willing to sell?  I said yes, absolutely.  He took my name and number, and I never heard back from him.  After waiting for three weeks, I decided I'd better give the internet another go.

This time I searched the newspapers.  Unfortunately, it was pretty impossible to get productive results when searching for a town called "May," so I had to focus on the Wolf Valley church instead.  I got literally hundreds of results, which had to be checked for relevancy.  Most of them were obituaries, saying that so-and-so was to be buried in Wolf Valley Cemetery and that services would be in the Wolf Valley Church.  Or . . . in the Wolf Valley Baptist Church.  It was really random date-wise which name was used.  

I got the impression that the original church, which had been for the use of three different denominations, was at some time converted to just a Baptist Church.  A 1910 article stated that the Wolf Valley Church joined the Brown County Baptist Association, but a 1916 article referred to a women's meeting at the old Union church.  The association's 5th Sunday meeting was held in the Wolf Valley Church in 1912, but that doesn't really mean that it was only a Baptist church by that time, just that it was being used by the Baptist congregation.  A 1962 article mentioned a visiting preacher at the Wolf Valley Baptist Church, but a 1956 article said that the Wolf Valley Church was hardly ever used anymore.  By 1969, when vandals burned the church building down, it was known as the Wolf Valley Community Church and no longer housed a congregation; it was only used for funerals and the annual cemetery decoration day.

It was all very confusing.  Then I found this:

The Daily Bulletin
Brownwood, Texas
8 April 1911

Okay.  This makes it sound like the Wolf Valley Baptist congregation dedicated a church building for their own use in 1911.  Perhaps this replaced the old log structure that was erected in 1887?  But was the Wolf Valley Church actually a distinct congregation from the one in May?  Did each church have its own pastor?  I couldn't find any earlier mention of the church.  I did find this, though:

Brownwood Bulletin
19 September 1930

I had seen this preacher's name in the annual Baptist publications. He was listed as a pastor in May during the years 1903-1908 and again during 1910-1914. Another Baptist pastor, C. C. Smith, was also listed in May during the earlier time period. He actually began showing up in the records in 1898, and was listed alongside Erasmus in the 1900 annual of the Southern Baptist Convention. After Rev. Smith dropped out of the records for May, other pastors turned up alongside Rev. Steele instead.

Of course, it wouldn't make sense that a single small country church would have two pastors. And, if you add up all of the years the article claims Rev. Steele was pastoring churches, it comes out to 102 years. So obviously he was pastoring more than one church at a time. All of these references to May, then, must be indicating the postal area, not the actual church. The question now becomes, was one man the pastor of the church in May and the other in Wolf Valley, or was there some sharing going on? I found an article saying that a Baptist pastor from Brownwood preached his regular appointment at May, indicating that indeed the churches had to share pastors.

After all of the searching and guessing, it somehow popped into my head that I should go back to the Baylor University digital archives and see what the Baptist Standard newspaper had to say. (You know, because I am trying to figure out the mess with Baptist churches.)

I really should have thought of that first, because it would have saved me a whole lot of time.

The Baptist Standard
20 April 1911

This article gives a little more information about the dedication of the Wolf Valley Baptist Church in 1911. It implies that the church became a distinct congregation in 1910 when it joined the association, and that the new church house was built for it in 1911.

But take a look at this:

The Baptist Standard
6 June 1918

Not only was this article stretched across like five pages, but it was alphabetical, so I had to just clip out and paste together each church I wanted us to look at.  Here we see every single church served by a pastor living in the May postal code during 1918. All of the churches with a number 11 were in the Brown County Baptist Association, and the ones labeled 30 were in the neighboring Comanche County. This shows us that in 1918 there were two different pastors serving churches in the area; the list was updated the following year and there had been a change in pastors. For example, the church in May was still holding services twice a month, but it was being served by a preacher who lived in Brownwood, about twenty miles away. As we can see, Rev. Hamilton was preaching a total of 4 services a week. Rev. Steele is only shown preaching two, but if you add in Hog Valley and Wolf Valley it brings him up to four as well.

The strange thing is that Wolf Valley does not have an asterisk indicating that it had a church building. In the 1919 list it does, though, so it was probably just an oversight in this one. The numbers of services match in the 1919 list, but it gives additional information: All of the churches except Hopewell had a Sunday school, and May also had a Baptist Young People's Union and a WMU.

All of this makes me think that, because of the rural nature of the county, all of the Baptists in the May postal district were scattered enough that travelling to a central location every week might be less than desirable, so churches were erected in various locations to serve each small, local congregation.  I also think it is clear that there weren't enough pastors to go around, and even if there were, one couldn't really make a living pastoring one of the tiny church congregations. So, it appears that they kept up the frontier tradition of sharing churches.

 
This leads me to conclude that, back in the 1880s and earlier 1890s, Erasmus Miller Owen was the pastor of multiple congregations, or that it was all considered one congregation and they met in different locations each Sunday. I think we should say, then, that Erasmus was the Baptist pastor in May, and include Wolf Valley (at least) within that designation. (I could try looking up those other churches, but really, I don't think I have the time!)

Well, we seem to have gotten a bit off track from "Scene 1" so let's try this again, shall we?

Scene 1: In which Land Changes Hands

As we saw previously, in March of 1892 Erasmus and Rhoda sold two strips of land along the eastern edge of their newest piece of property.  One was sold to a man named H. P. Taylor.  The other was sold to the trustees of the Wolf Valley School District for the purpose of building a school.  The third tract of land was sold in August of 1892, and it was sold to none other than Erasmus' son-in-law, B. F. Mallory.

If you recall, Conrad had run away from home in October of 1891.  He ran all the way to New Mexico to his older sister Letitia.  Her husband set Conrad up in school, and at some point obviously returned him home.  The Eddy County, New Mexico newspaper reported that Mallory made a trip to Brown County in August of 1892:

The Eddy County Citizen
20 August 1892

The Eddy County Citizen
3 September 1892

Whether or not B. F. Mallory went to May because he was accompanying his nephew home, or whether he was there to conduct business or just visit family we don't know.  But we do know that he bought land from his father-in-law while he was there:

Brown County, Texas
Deed Book 36, page 253
E. M. and R. S. Owen to B. F. Mallory
August 1892

This deed says that the sale was for the entire NW 1/4 of section 18.  That's it.  It doesn't say how many varas in each direction, nor how many acres it included.  Of course, Erasmus had already sold approximately five acres of the tract a few months back, so he couldn't have been selling the whole thing unless the land had reverted back to him, and I found no evidence of that.  This was a quit claim deed, however, which means that it did not guarantee that Erasmus was the legal owner of the land, so maybe that was the way of doing things quickly and easily and there was just an understanding with his son-in-law that the five acres along the east side were not actually included.

Erasmus was paid $1000 cash for the land, which was $200 more than he had bought it for nearly eighteen months before.  I wonder what value he placed on the property on his taxes that year.  Let's see . . . .

But first, if you read the deed up above, you might have noticed that the transaction actually took place in Eastland County.  That is because Erasmus lived pretty close to the county line, and only about six miles to the town of Rising Star, which was a much closer place to find a notary than in Brownwood, twenty miles to the southwest.  According to the Texas State Historical Association, 

In 1889 Rising Star had five businesses and three doctors and by 1904 had added a bank, a hotel, a school, five churches, two newspapers, and dry goods and drug stores.

According to THE MINISTERIAL DIRECTORY OF THE BAPTIST CHURCHES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, TOGETHER WITH A STATEMENT OF THE WORK OF THE NATIONAL MISSIONARY PUBLICATION AND YOUNG PEOPLE'S SOCIETIES, WITH THE NAMES AND LOCATION OF EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND CHURCH PAPERS,  edited by George W. Lasher, Erasmus' son Edgar attended high school in Rising Star for three years.  Since he was born in 1869, that would have been well before 1904 and even before 1889, so there is a good chance that all of Edgar's younger siblings (Minnie, Clara, Mark, Conrad, Leona, and Orlena) attended high school in Rising Star as well.  

And look what I just found on the Portal to Texas History website:

Rising Star School
c. 1886

This is the Rising Star schoolhouse taken c. 1886, which is right about the time Edgar, Minnie, and Clara would have attended.  Heck, they might even be in this photo, but we can't tell because the resolution is too low to zoom in enough to see if we could recognize them.

(I just discovered two things:  First, that the Texas State Historical Association got their information from a 1904 book called A History of Eastland County, Texas by Mrs. George Langston, but they did a really bad job of summarizing things, because the book actually says,

There are several large dry goods and grocery firms, drug stores, hardware, a bank, hotel, and the usual number of smaller shops and eating houses. There are two newspapers, five church buildings with as many organizations, and a handsome school building with seven teachers and three hundred and fifty pupils.

Well that gives a bit of a different picture, doesn't it?  The town was founded in 1880 and by 1904 had seven hundred residents.  

The second thing I just discovered was that the 1894 article I put up a few weeks ago about E. M. Owen being the parson of Wolf Valley included a piece about Rising Star.  Check this out:

The article also said that the high school, which was supposedly a "leading institution of learning" had a complete course of instruction that awarded a "first grade certificate."  Plus, I read somewhere that in 1898, Wolf Valley School only had ten grades, so I guess none of the Owen children could have completed high school there.)

This wasn't the only one of Erasmus' deeds that was notarized in Eastland County, and I think it is safe to say that when he and his family needed to go into town, they were probably just as likely to visit Rising Star as May.

Okay.  Now for the taxes:

Brown County, Texas
Tax Rolls - 1892

We can see E. M. Owen down on line 32.  At the beginning of 1892 he owned two tracts of land:  80 acres in the Delk survey and the whole 160 acres of the Nichols survey.  He had bought the Delk land in 1888 for $800; in 1890 he reported an $800 value for it, but in 1891 he dropped that down to only $400.  He was still valuing it at $400 in 1892.  He purchased the Nichols tract in February of 1891 for $800, but by the time he reported his taxes he had reduced his valuation to only $600.  In 1892 he reduced it once again, to $400, which was only half the price he had paid for it one year before.

It's kind of strange, then, that Ben Mallory paid him $1000 for it, isn't it?  Maybe not.  Mallory was a real estate investor, buying up bits of land, building things like livery stables and hotels on them and then selling them immediately afterward, so maybe that was his plan here.  I checked the deed records and he sold this tract in October of 1896 for $700 cash and four annual promissory notes totaling $1100 plus 10% interest.  So he almost doubled his money.  Not bad.  Oh, and he sold 155 acres, which confirms that when Erasmus sold him the land it did not contain the five acres that he had already sold in 1892.  There might be another reason he was willing to pay such a high price, but we'll get to that in a little bit.

For now, let's look at the tax rolls some more.  The first page also tells us that Erasmus owned 

2 wagons/carriages - $50 (In 1891 they were valued at $100 - how's that for depreciation?)
9 horses/mules - $180 (average of $20 each; in 1891 they were valued at twice that)
20 cattle - $80 (valued at $4 each as opposed to $5 each the previous year)

So the value of everything, not just the land, appears to have been reduced by twenty to fifty percent.  On the next page we see:

Brown County, Texas
Tax Rolls - 1892

Erasmus also had

19 sheep - $20 ( This equals $1.05 each; the year before they had been valued at $1.43 apiece)
0 hogs (In the year prior he had three, worth $1 each)
$45 miscellaneous property (down by $5)
$0 money on hand

Compared to 1891, Erasmus had the same amount of land, 2 more horses, almost double the number of cattle, two less sheep, three less hogs, and $5 less in random possessions, yet he valued his holdings at $293 less, a total reduction of 20%.  So, maybe the additional horses and cattle were babies, or some of Erasmus' animals were getting old or sick or both).  Maybe land prices were tanking.  On the bright side, he only owed a total of $9.69 for state and county taxes, compared to $12.36 the previous year (a 22% reduction).

Remember how I said that there might have been another reason that Ben Mallory was willing to buy Erasmus' land and pay top dollar for it to boot?  Well, that land transaction took place on August 3rd.  Exactly one week later, Erasmus bought a new tract of land:

Brown County, Texas
Deed Book 37, page 157
W. K. & S. A. Wilson to E. M. Owen
August 1892

This one is kind of interesting.  First, though, in case anyone is wondering why the land is always purchased by just Erasmus but sold by both him and Rhoda, it is because nearly the entire United States at the time operated under the doctrine of "coverture" which merged a married woman's legal existence with that of her husband, so that she had no independent legal existence and thus could not enter into contracts in her own right.  However, many states, like Texas, also gave dower rights to widows, which means that a woman was entitled to a portion of her husband's estate if he were to die without a will.  In these states you will always see the woman having to agree to the sale of a piece of property, because it is her inheritance that is being sold.

Anyway, Erasmus purchased this tract of land (150 and 7/10 acres) for $750 dollars.  So maybe Ben Mallory bought his other tract so that Erasmus would have the cash to buy the new property.  The interesting part is that Erasmus only paid the Wilsons $300 up front, and for the remainder of the purchase price he assumed three promissory notes that Wilson owed to a man named Lipscomb Norvell for his purchase of the tract almost exactly one year before.  The promissory notes were each for $150 plus 10% interest and came due on the first day of October 1892, 1893, and 1894.  

Lipscomb Norvell was an attorney (and at some point judge), and he was selling land left and right during this time period.  Every single deed I looked at was transacted using promissory notes.  Perhaps Mr. Wilson was going to be unable to make the note due in October 1892, and so he put the word out that he wanted to sell in order to avoid being sued and having the land sold at auction and then lose the amount he had already paid.  Maybe, since the land adjoined one of Erasmus' own tracts, it sounded like a good idea to snatch it up, but he didn't have the money to purchase it.  Maybe, knowing that his son-in-law was constantly investing in land, he reached out and told him the situation and convinced him to buy his own tract and pay him just enough for the down payment plus the note that was due two months later, plus an extra $250 or so (I hope I did the mental math correctly!) which would once again give him some cash to spend on necessities.

Sounds pretty plausible, doesn't it?

That was the last purchase of land that Erasmus would make in Brown County, and there were no more transactions until he sold it all at the end of the decade.  But now that I have gotten access to all of the deeds, I've read them and made a brand-new map showing exactly where each parcel of land was located: 

Brown County, Texas
Detail of NE section (Wolf Valley)
Showing Lands Owned by E. M. Owen

I said this is exactly where his land was located, but it's not really, because this map is not drawn quite right.  The Jesse Dickinson (also spelled Dickenson or Dickerson in the many records) League was surveyed way back in the early days of Texas and the northern edge apparently did not match up exactly with the surrounding survey blocks (early maps show this).  This map was actually drawn in 1910, so I don't know if they just didn't draw it right or what.  But it is close enough for what we are doing here, because it shows that Erasmus' final land purchase was connected to the parcel where he must have been actually living at the time (you know, since he purchased the purple section in 1888 at the same time he sold his land further south, but didn't acquire the indigo section until 1891).

So, by the end of 1892, Erasmus had his son Conrad back at home and he had consolidated his land holdings into one area.  And, although he had devalued most of his property, from what we can tell, things seemed to be going better than they had in the previous two years.

Scene 2: In which Good News Finally Arrives, Even if It Is Really, Really Late

If you recall, Erasmus' son Sam was convicted of manslaughter in May of 1891 and sentenced to the penitentiary for two years.  He was supposed to be released on May 4, 1893, but in February of that year, good news came down the line.  On December 30, 1892, the lieutenant governor issued a proclamation granting Sam a full pardon:  

Pardon of Sam Owen
State of Texas
Official Pardon Book #297

As you can see from the nifty watermark, I got this from the Texas State Archives digital collection.  (The digital image is taken from a microfilm so it is black and white, but I colorized the image.)  It says that Sam was issued a pardon because of his good behavior while in prison, and because it had been requested by 

the district judge (the district court is where cases such as manslaughter were tried)

the district attorney (who would have prosecuted his case)

eleven of the jury members (which is weird because there were only twelve jurors and I think they had to reach a unanimous decision, so I don't know why eleven of them changed their mind)

many other "reputable" citizens (that is what the conduct register says - I couldn't figure out the word in the actual pardon!)

I don't know when Sam was actually released; the Owen Family Association newsletter says March, but I didn't find that date in the convict register:

or the conduct register:

So I'm not sure if the March date was a misreading or a mistake or what.  I suspect, however, that Sam was not actually released on February 1st.  If he was out working on a railroad chain gang, news of the pardon would have had to have reached the penitentiary in Huntsville, and then they would have had to send word out to the chain gang.  Sam would have probably had to then return to the prison to get his change of clothes and the money they gave to prisoners when they were released (I forget where I read that, but the information is online somewhere if anyone cares to look it up) before being put onto a train for home.  It could have very well been a week or two later before he was actually released, but I doubt it would have been an entire month.  Erasmus may not have gotten the news until March, though, since Sam may have just shown up on his doorstep without sending any word ahead (I don't know if the governor's office would have sent notice to his family or not), and then would have had to either send a letter or visit his father with the news.

Although Sam didn't have very much time knocked off his sentence, the fact that he was coming home and no longer had to endure the harsh treatment and risk of early death, and that he had been issued a full pardon, meaning that all of his civil rights had been restored, was really, really good news.  

Would life continue on a positive course for the family over the next few years?  I don't know.  I haven't really looked at them yet.  But next time, we'll find out.

                                                                                                                                                - Therese