The Not-So-Gay 90's - Act Four: . . . Or Not

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 23

Ah, those Gay 90's.  As we have seen, the decade didn't start off too well for Erasmus and his family.  There were a few positive developments as prior crises were resolved - both Conrad and Sam had returned home by early 1893 - and Erasmus had gotten a smoking deal on his sale of land to his son-in-law.  Would life continue on the path upward toward the carefree prosperity that nostalgia claims was enjoyed by Americans?  Unfortunately . . . not.

Before we look into those years, though, I have a confession to make: I do not want to write this post.  I used to want to write it.  But then life got busy and I had to take a break, and then I was so tired from all the busy-ness that I didn't want to put in the mental work to finish the research and write the post, so I just spent the next month doing random research about other points in Erasmus' life (like the 1860's - that I am excited about).  Now, with my momentum broken and all of the details I'd discovered from the 1890's more than a bit hazy, I am honestly just over it.  Unfortunately, we've got to get through this decade, and the last few years of the 1890's are actually a bit more interesting, so we are going to slog through this and if it is not an enjoyable trip, come back for the next one - it should be better!

Prologue: In which there Is a Tornado

On the night of Friday, April 28th, some time after most of the residents had gone to bed, a tornado struck the town of Cisco, about twenty miles due north of Erasmus' home in Wolf Valley.

Forth Worth Daily Gazette
30 April 1893

The tornado, the worst in Texas history up until that point, has been categorized as an F4.  Wikipedia reports that there were 23+ deaths and 150 injuries.  In addition,

Every building in Cisco was severely damage or destroyed, leaving 1,500 people with no shelter of any kind. Only two buildings were left standing in downtown. An entire fully-loaded freight train was thrown 80–120 feet (25–35 m). As many as 26 people may have died.

Here are some newspaper headlines from the following days:

The Philadelphia Times
1 May 1893

The Evening Messenger
1 May 1893

The Fort Worth Gazette

1 May 1893

The Galveston Daily News
2 May 1893

I have linked clippings of the full articles on Newspapers.com.  (The really long one from the Fort Worth Gazette is two pages, so I put one link in the title and one in the date.  I'm pretty sure anyone can read the clippings even if they don't have an account.  If not, let me know and I'll put them on my Google drive and use that link instead.)  The articles are really, really interesting and give a great description of both what happened, what the devastation was like, and what the surrounding cities did to help.

According to the articles, the town and surrounding countryside were completely destroyed, leaving some 1500 people without food, shelter, or clothing (other than what they were wearing when the storm hit).  The telegraph lines were torn down, so the newspaper reporter hired a horse and rode ten miles through the storm to the town of Eastland to get word out that they needed help, and by the next morning passengers on the eastbound train that ran through the area reported the devastation when they stopped at the town of Weatherford outside of Fort Worth.  

The death of fifteen people was confirmed by the second day, but they were still in the process of searching the wreckage.  By Tuesday, one paper reported a total of 97 injured people, more than 60 of which were injured either severely, seriously, or dangerously, with many of those not expected to survive.  By Wednesday the death toll stood at 25.

The call went out first for doctors and medical aid, then for food and clothing, and then for shelter and help rebuilding - virtually every business was lost and out of the entire residential section of the city, only 17 houses remained that were habitable.  Cities as far away as St. Louis sent monetary aid, and towns all over west central Texas sent volunteers to help with search and rescue, tending the wounded, and rebuilding the town.

For those of you who would like to know more but don't want the hassle of reading old newspaper articles, I just found a post about it on another blog called YesterYear Once More.  It gives a nice summary of the newspaper accounts.

I can imagine the shock Erasmus must have felt when he heard the news.  I can imagine that he gave whatever aid his family could afford, maybe even more than they could afford.  And I can imagine that, looking back at the end of the year, the disaster might have been viewed as a harbinger of the bad times to come.

Scene 1: In which the Economy Takes a Dramatic Downturn

When we reviewed the Brown County tax rolls last time, we discovered that Erasmus reported a 20% depreciation of his assets in the first quarter of 1892 compared to the same time the previous year.  But did the trend continue into 1893?  Let's see:

Assets	1892	1893	1894	1895
Land (Nichols)	160 acres ($400)	-
Land (Delk)	80 acres ($400)	80 acres ($400)
Land (Dickenson)	-	150 acres ($750)
carriages/wagons	2 ($50)	2 ($75)
horses/mules	9 ($180)	8 ($180)
cattle	20 ($80)	6 ($30)
sheep	19 ($20)	15 ($20)
hogs	0	6 ($10)
Misc. property	$45	$35
Money on hand	$0	$0
Total value of Assets	$1175	$1500

Huh.  Things don't seem to have been much worse, do they?   

His wagons and livestock were actually shown as being worth more, and he had acquired six hogs.  Of course, his total number of livestock (other than the hogs) had been reduced from 48 to 29 head, which is 40 percent less, but maybe he sold the animals and turned a profit.

If we look at the boxes at the bottom of the chart, it appears that things were actually looking up overall in the beginning of 1893, but this is really just because Erasmus had traded a tract of land valued at $400 for one valued at $750.  Aside from that, his fortunes seemed to have been pretty much the same.  

Well, I guess we can see the problem with trying to keep up with blog posts while in the midst of conducting research.  Before I started this series about the 1890's I had a bare-bones outline from my preliminary research.  Supposedly, 1893 was a really bad year in Texas, because there was not only a national financial panic, but also a drought.  Things getting worse instead of better, see?  And then I looked at the tax rolls and deed records and made this handy chart and, if you go back and read the previous post, it appears that the economic downturn for Erasmus and his neighbors actually began in 1891 and continued into 1892.  That's when he devalued his property and everyone started buying land with promissory notes.  

So, I had titled the last post as "Better Days . . . " and this one is titled "Or Not."  Today I was supposed to talk about how things were bad, and then they were looking up, and then they got bad again.  But maybe they were pretty much always bad and the fact that Erasmus' two sons returned home were just bright spots amidst the gloom.  So actually, now that I think about it, the title of my post still makes perfect sense!   Yeah.  Let's take that approach, because focusing on 1891 and 1892 a bit more actually solves another problem with something I wanted to share from those years but had forgotten about until just now.  

But first, we have to talk about the economy a bit more.

At some point during my research I came across the fact that there was a national financial panic in 1893.  It turns out that it was more than just a panic and actually started around 1890.

If you want to get the whole picture, you have to piece together the information from a lot of different sources.  The FamilySearch Blog has an article titled "Did Your Ancestors Live During the Panic of 1893?"  It tells us that

Beginning in 1890 there was a global recession which increased prices in the United States.

Due to the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, signed into law in July 1890 and designed to increase the money supply, one thing led to another and the U.S. gold reserves were seriously depleted.

There was a railroad boom during the 1880's, but due to overbuilding, railroad expansion slowed down in the 1890s and caused a decline in construction-related jobs and investment opportunities. 

Agriculture products also took a hit between 1892 and 1893; prices tumbled due to storms, drought, and overproduction. The decline in prices caused grave financial problems for farmers dealing with mortgage debt and trade deficits. Purchasing power for goods and services decreased.

Bank runs caused an estimated 500 banks to close. Along with bank failures, the demand for goods declined, causing approximately 15,000 businesses to fail, including several railroads.

Nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population was unemployed.  Many farmers lost their farms when banks foreclosed on their mortgages.

The depression began to lift in 1897, but industry and commerce took time to recover.

The article "Grover Cleveland Returns: The Great Depression of 1893–1897" on the Oxford Academic website calls The Panic of 1893 "one of the greatest economic disasters in US history" which "began with an 1893 financial crisis that shook markets for months" and "then came an economic downturn so deep and prolonged that, prior to the 1930s, Americans referred to it as the 'Great Depression.'”

And, an article on the Texas State Archives website explains that the speculation and debt related to railroad expansion was one factor leading to the financial panic and then collapse, resulting in a three-year depression.  In addition to high unemployment, wages fell approximately ten percent.  The depression hit Texas hard:

Farm prices were lower than what it cost farmers to grow their crops. Deflation, in which prices fell while interest rates remained high, worked great hardship. Farmers were caught in a spiral of debt. Many of them lost their land and were forced to become sharecroppers on the land they once owned. 

The Federal Reserve History website has a nice article that explains the ins-and-outs of the economic factors I've mentioned; for those of you who are into that type of stuff, you can find it here.

If you remember, Erasmus purchased a piece of land in 1892 and in the deed it says that he was assuming the promissory notes owed by the seller.  So I think that when we look at the Brown County deeds and tax rolls we can catch a glimpse of what might have been a combination of land speculation and rising debt leading to foreclosures.  

And before I forget (again!), here are the pages of the 1893 tax rolls that show Erasmus:

Brown County, Texas
Tax Rolls - 1893

Brown County, Texas
Tax Rolls - 1893

We've already talked about what these show, but this year the assessor/collector wrote the date paid in the final column; I don't remember ever seeing this information on one of the tax rolls before.  So, the taxee (I don't think that is an actual word but whatever!) was supposed to "render" (report) their property along with its valuation sometime during the first quarter of the year.  Then, the assessor compiled it all into the tax roll and submitted it (to whomever he submitted it to) in August or thereabouts.  Then, the sheriff and/or his deputies, who were the actual tax collectors, would collect what was owed sometime after that.  If I'm remembering correctly from delinquent taxpayer lists published in newspapers elsewhere, the property owner was supposed to pay up by the end of the year.  I don't remember what the grace period was before they sold off a person's property at auction to pay delinquent taxes, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't more than a year.  Anyway, Erasmus paid his taxes in December, so he squeaked by without being called out for delinquency.  (That wouldn't have been a good look on a preacher, would it?)

And since I didn't talk about this in my post about Uncle Ras, you can see that he is listed right there below his father, owning five horses and nothing else.  The fact that he shows up on the tax rolls for the first time in Brown County when he was already 28 years old tells us that either he had still been living in San Saba County up until this point (FamilySearch only has San Saba County tax rolls up through 1884), or that he was finally recovered enough from his head injury to begin being responsible for paying taxes again.  Either way, we do know for sure now that he was living in his father's household at the beginning of 1893. 

So, despite the bright spot of  Uncle Ras' recovery, 1893 must have been a concerning time for Erasmus and his neighbors.  And if the increasing financial instability wasn't stressful enough, they also had to face a devastating lack of rain.

Scene 2: In which there Is a Drought

First, a word about Texas droughts: I found a really interesting article on the JSTOR research website called "West Texas Drouths" by W. C. Holden.  (I think the link opens a pdf; if not, anyone can make a free account on the website and access 100 articles per month - some are free and don't count in that number.)  The article was published in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly way back in 1928, and had this to say:

Prior to 1900, a drouth was a serious matter. Most of the people depended upon creeks, rivers, or natural lakes for stock water. A few months of dry weather would cause these to dry up and the matter of water for the stock to become serious.

The article mostly focuses on the drought of 1886 (too bad I didn't have that article back when I wrote about the drought affecting W. C. Cheatham and the town of Buffalo Gap!), but it does say that there was a severe drought in West Texas in 1891, and that "in 1893, the part of West Texas lying north of the Texas and Pacific Railroad was in the extreme southern end of a drouth area which embraced Kansas, Missouri, part of Arkansas and the Indian Territory."  That railroad ran just 25 miles north of where Erasmus lived, so it is possible that his area saw some of its effects as well.

I took a bit of a look on Newspapers.com to see what was being reported concerning a drought in 1893 and it appears that southwestern Texas was still being affected by the 1891 drought in January of 1893.  Closer to Erasmus, however, it appears that rain was to be had, but it was more sporadic than usual:

San Saba County News
7 April 1893

On the same day, there was a very long article in the Austin American-Statesman called "Weather and Crops" that reported that there had been a general deficiency in rain over most of the state for the entire past year and that no rain had fallen anywhere in all of Texas during the previous two weeks.  It said the planting of cotton had been delayed in western portions of the state because of the dry weather and the fact that farmers only had enough seed for one planting.  The progress of crops in various towns throughout Texas were reported:

Eastland (in the county just north of Brown): "Needing rain for all crops...if rain does not come in a few days wheat and oats will be cut short."  

Fredericksburg (three counties due south): "Fall wheat has been damaged by drought in some sections till it will not make more than half a crop. Cotton planting has commenced but it is probably too dry to bring it up regularly; rain needed badly."   

Albany (two counties to the north-northwest): "Unless we get rain soon wheat, oats and barley will be cut short."

At some point the rain did come, but it appears that it was intermittent enough to be a problem: 

San Saba County News
2 June 1893

The Taylor County News
16 June 1893

Taylor County - where my Cheatham ancestors lived at the time - was two counties to the west-northwest of Brown County.  (Do any of you other Baptists out there find this article as amusing as I do?)

Austin American-Statesman
1 August 1893

Austin American-Statesman
2 August 1893

The article continues:

Austin American-Statesman
2 August 1893

It then went on the say, "A few days ago THE STATESMAN published the alarming news that the water in the water company's reservoir in the river had fallen to within two inches of the top of the suction pipes."  This was referring to the water supply for the town of Austin (four counties to the southwest of Brown County).  Fortunately, the river in question had been dammed and they were able to draw water from the lake.  

Just four days later, a central Texas newspaper reported that the drought was over:

The Waco Daily Day-Globe
6 August 1893

San Saba County, just south of Brown County, apparently had abundant rain as well:

San Saba County News
11 August 1893

And then:

The Waco Daily Day-Globe
16 August 1893

Of course, Texas is a pretty big place; this article and the next one give the sense that from one town to the next, even within the same county, the amount of rainfall differed: 

Austin American-Statesman
24 August 1893

So by the end of August, the drought had ended in some localities but not in others.  These newspapers (the closest ones to Brown County available on Newspapers.com) either didn't have anything much to say about the drought during the next two months, or the articles didn't use the word "drought" when talking about rain.  (And unfortunately, there are no copies of the Brown County newspapers preserved for the entire year of 1893 and the first half of 1894.)  So we'll jump to November:

San Saba County News
3 November 1893

It looks like things were still bad in that area.  And it sounds like the financial panic was in full swing by then as well.  But look:

Austin American-Statesman
13 November 1893

I only did a newspaper search for 1893 (that sort of thing is actually very time-consuming!), but Austin had done a pretty good job of reporting drought conditions all over Texas so maybe everyone was having the same respite.  I did a check of the 1894 editions of The Brownwood Bulletin just now, and found an article from August 16th that said, "The drought of last year left Brown County in a far worse condition than it ever left this county..."  The article indicated that it hit the wool industry especially hard.  So that makes it sound like the drought did not continue into 1894 where Erasmus lived.  

In the October 18th edition of the same newspaper, an article about Brownwood hosting a Synod indicated that there had been worry over whether the town could do so because of "the drought of the past few years", indicating that times had been hard since before 1893.  However, the article I put up a few posts ago about Erasmus being the parson at Wolf Valley was also from October of 1894 and it made it sound like crops were abundant (it actually called Wolf Valley luxuriant!), so maybe the county had recovered quickly.

After I did all of this newspaper searching, I came across a 1959 report prepared for the Texas Board of Water Engineers called "A Study of Droughts in Texas." It had this handy graph showing rainfall across Texas in all the years since it had been measured:

This shows what they were calling the Mid-West and Mid-East sections of Texas; Brown County falls exactly on the line between the two.  The fifth bar in from the left shows the rainfall for 1893.  And although the rainfall in 1894 (and about twelve out of the next 24 years) was still below average, there wouldn't be another year as bad until 1917 (the year of Erasmus' death).  The article had a comment in it that, "This drought followed several years in which the rainfall had been above average. It is probable that the ground water had not been seriously depleted."  

Read that quote again.  Based on the newspaper articles, I doubt if this was the case for Brown County.  But if it were, it might have been particularly relevant to Erasmus' life.  Why?  Well, remember how he sold a piece of land in August of 1892 and then turned around and bought a different tract?  Take a look at these maps:

Brown County, Texas
Wolf Valley Area
Erasmus Miller Owen Land Tracts

Brown County, Texas
Wolf Valley Area
Erasmus Miller Owen Land Tracts

These two maps do a good job of showing the water sources on Erasmus' land.  The dark blue tract (which I like to call the Nichols tract based on the original owner) at the bottom left was the plot of land that Erasmus purchased in 1891, sold two small strips on the eastern edge early in 1892, and then sold the remaining acreage to B. F. Mallory in August of that year.  The purple section (Delk tract) was actually purchased by Erasmus in 1888, and remained in his possession throughout the 1890's.  (As I've mentioned before, Erasmus must have been living on this tract, because he purchased it on the same day that he sold the land he had occupied during the 1880's.)  The yellow section (Dickerson/Dickenson tract) was purchased just after the sale of the Nichols tract in 1892.  

You can see on the maps that all of the tracts have a water source running right down through them.  Now, I put up both maps because they show things a bit differently.  The first one is a USGS topo map, and according to the key, the dashed blue line shows water.  (The dashed line is not even on the key in the section for rivers and streams, but the key says blue means water so . . . .)  It also shows at least one small lake/large pond in each highlighted section.  The second map does not show the ponds, but it does show the streams with a type of line that is actually on the map key.  That type of line stands for an intermittent stream.  What is that exactly?  Well, according to the Oxford Reference website, it is 

a stream which ceases to flow in very dry periods. The flow may occur when the water-table is seasonally high, but there will not be flow when the water-table is significantly below the river-channel bed level.

However, the EPA website says that 

Seasonal streams (intermittent) flow during certain times of the year when smaller upstream waters are flowing and when groundwater provides enough water for stream flow. Runoff from rainfall or other precipitation supplements the flow of seasonal stream. During dry periods, seasonal streams may not have flowing surface water. Larger seasonal streams are more common in dry areas.

With the streams in the Delk and Dickenson sections coming down from the hills, I would imagine that they received a significant amount of runoff from rain, so maybe that helped a lot with the amount of groundwater on his land.

As for the ponds, the key says that all of the ponds were perennial.  According to numerous online sources, that means that they were fresh-water sources that maintained relatively consistent levels throughout the year for most years.  However, Wikipedia tells us that 

The definition is not precise, because most water bodies vary in fullness according to the season, and according to the heaviness of precipitation and other factors during any given year. Also, the water level in many such water bodies as do not actually dry out, may nonetheless drop so drastically that their surface area is greatly reduced. They even may be split into several separate water bodies with dry land between, either arid or covered with vegetation.

This drying out typically occurs only during years of unusual or extreme drought.  So.  Obviously Erasmus needed a piece of land with a water source for his livestock.  At the beginning of 1892 he had nine horses, 20 head of cattle, and 19 sheep.  Would a couple of intermittent springs and perennial ponds have provided enough water for his animals and family?  Or did all of those dry up during the summer of 1893?  A modern satellite map of the area might give us an answer:

We can see that within the two parcels that Erasmus owned during the drought there are still today four decent-sized ponds, even though there doesn't appear to be any streams anymore.  Or maybe there is one . . .

I zoomed way in on that weirdly shaped feature and there appears to be a stream running between it and the pond.  That horizontal stream section is on the USGS map above, but the strange feature is sitting where the main stream should be.  Is that an area cleared of trees that has field rows in the midst of being irrigated?  Is the water in that area coming from a vertically running stream obscured by the trees, or from the horizontal stream and pond?  

Anyway, if you look at the first satellite image you will see a red circle in the bottom left-hand corner of the Delk survey.  If you click on the image to enlarge it and look closely, you will see that there are two buildings inside of it - I think the one is a single-wide trailer.  So that should give you all some perspective on the size of the ponds.  (I actually went and looked at this map on the Dave Rumsey map website which lets you zoom waaaay in and did some measurements, and this could probably actually be called a small lake, because it covered almost half an acre.)

It appears that maybe, just maybe, Erasmus might have been okay during the drought as far as having water for his livestock . . . . or not.

Way back when I started this post I had bookmarked a page on the landsearch website that shows acreage for sale in Brown County, Texas today.  Their satellite map, which you can also zoom waaay in on, shows this:

Ooh.  All of the lakes but one (oops! I actually cut off most of one when I snipped this image!) look dried up . . . yep.  Even the large one on the property where Erasmus actually lived:

(So maybe that isn't water that we're seeing in the cleared section? And there appear to bee a whole bunch of trees growing in the middle of it.  I wonder which image is newer?  You would think the one showing land for sale, right?) 

Anyway, as we can see, most of those lakes, at least today, do dry up in the summer.  But maybe that is because there are more people living in the area who have wells and have been pumping the groundwater for years and years.  Maybe Erasmus was lucky enough that that didn't happen in his day.  At least it appears that he still had one good source of water even in dry times - the lake that was a brighter color down in the corner of the Dickenson tract.  Maybe he knew that it survived when others didn't, and he purchased the land not just because it adjoined his own, but because it gave him a more secure water source.   

I'd like to share a few photos from the landsearch website of some properties that are within a few miles from the land that Erasmus owned:

We can't click on each picture individually, but I think they are big enough to get a bit of a sense what the area is like.  According to the website, most of the properties in the area are today either agricultural land (farming or grazing) or basically just tree-covered wilderness, and they are being sold in parcels of tens to hundreds of acres.  So it sounds like not much has changed since Erasmus' day.  They call the ponds "stock tanks," and in this first bank of photos the realtor explained that they were all currently dry due to drought (so maybe the satellite image reflects drought conditions), but that they had had a rain recently and the tank retained water for an entire week afterward.  (Another property advertised that they had one tank that was still full of water.)  You can see even in the photos that when they were taken the water level was lower than at some points in time.  You can also see in the second picture that the area along the bank is all churned up from animals coming to drink.  The dry creek bed in the fourth picture was referred to as a seasonal creek.

This bank of photos came from three other properties in the area.  I included them so you could see that intermittent streams could be quite wide and full during certain times of year before dwindling down to barely a flow, and that when rain is abundant the area is beautiful lush grassland full of wildflowers.  The third picture shows the hilly terrain of the land close to the border with Comanche County; that is what Erasmus' land would have looked like, although for the most part it would have been just the hills!  The picture might be too small to see, but there are small cacti dotted across the land.  The property is about about six miles south of the tract Erasmus owned, so I don't know if he had cacti or not.

Most of the trees in the area are one type of oak or another, and wildlife - bobcats, deer, wild turkeys and pigs abound in the wooded areas.  Erasmus' land is still heavily wooded today, so he probably had to contend with the occasional predator stalking his sheep.  

Most of the properties today do have wells, so my earlier comment about groundwater levels should hold true, but the bigger problem may have been grazing.  From what I've read, rains generally came regularly enough that irrigation wasn't really a thing in most of Texas at that time.  If crops were suffering, there's a good chance that grasses for grazing were a problem as well.  And if grass was usually abundant, most likely nobody would have been growing feed, much less have a year's supply sitting around in storage.

The only way to gauge what the effect of the drought might have been on Erasmus' fortunes is to look at the property he reported on his tax rolls.

As we have seen, the number of his livestock declined from 1892 to 1893, but the value of each animal increased.  Could it be, as the newspaper indicated, that Brown County was already experiencing a shortage of rain in 1892?  Could that be why Erasmus sold the Delk tract and bought the Dickenson land?  If it had larger and deeper ponds, the water would be more likely to last.  He had gone through at least two major droughts during his time in Texas already; It appears that even if drought conditions weren't the cause of his move, they certainly influenced his choice of land, since all of his properties in Brown County had their own water source.

As for the livestock, it is also possible that Erasmus lost some to disease or predatory animals, or maybe he sold cattle and sheep to his neighbors for one reason or another.  Maybe other people in the area had lost their animals to one of these causes, and that is why the values had risen across the board.  Either way, Erasmus started out a year of severe drought with his number of livestock already significantly reduced; would he lose even more during that devastating summer?

Scene 3: In which Times Are Still Hard

Let's see what the tax rolls look like for 1894:

Brown County, Texas
Tax Rolls - 1894

Brown County, Texas
Tax Rolls - 1894

Let's add those values to the chart for easy comparison:

Assets	1892	1893	1894	1895
Land (Nichols)	160 acres ($400)	-	-
Land (Delk)	80 acres ($400)	80 acres ($400)	80 acres ($400)
Land (Dickenson)	-	150 acres ($750)	150 acres ($750)
carriages/wagons	2 ($50)	2 ($75)	2 ($40)
horses/mules	9 ($180)	8 ($180)	5 ($125)
cattle	20 ($80)	6 ($30)	11 ($42)
sheep	19 ($20)	15 ($20)	7 ($3)
hogs	0	6 ($10)	4 ($5)
Misc. property	$45	$35	$25
Money on hand	$0	$0	$0
Total value of Assets	$1175	$1500	$1390

So, in 1894, we see another slight decline in his fortunes, with a 7.3% reduction in the value of his assets.  This was primarily due to the considerable depreciation in the value of his wagons and livestock.  I don't know what caused the wagons to be worth that much less - maybe one was broken and the other just old.  In addition to the loss in value, his number of livestock decreased by about 40% overall (except for the cattle, which almost doubled . . . calves maybe?).  It's likely that the problem with the livestock was at least partly due to the drought conditions. 

Remember how I shared that the newspaper article that said the wool industry had taken a big hit?  Erasmus not only lost a lot of sheep, but the value of the ones he had declined sharply - from about $1.33 apiece to barely 43 cents!  That's only 32% of their previous value!  I don't know anything about raising sheep, so I don't know why that would be, especially if sheep were being lost left and right (supply and demand, right?).  I think I've made a comment before about maybe the livestock was young and so not worth as much, but now that I think about it, that wouldn't really make sense unless he rendered his taxes later, in like April, instead of January.  (Don't most farm animals birth in the spring?)  Anyway . . . .

While we are looking at the 1894 tax rolls, I would like to point out that we find Uncle Ras on them again, this time owning 77 and 3/4 acres adjoining his father's land.  He purchased the tract in January of 1893.  I'm pretty sure after reading the deed that his land sat just south of Eramus' Dickerson tract.  If you look at the valuations, you'll see that his land was only worth about $3 per acre compared to $5 for Erasmus'.  Perhaps that is because it is also mostly hilly, has only one small pond, and no stream running through it.  (By the way, some of you may have noticed that there has been an "E. Owen" on the rolls all along - that is some other guy, and I haven't found a link between him and our Owens.)

And now for 1895:

Brown County, Texas
Tax rolls - 1895

Brown County, Texas
Tax Rolls - 1895

Once again, just like we would suspect, as of early 1895, Erasmus fortunes had declined even further:

Assets	1892	1893	1894	1895
Land (Nichols)	160 acres ($400)	-	-	-
Land (Delk)	80 acres ($400)	80 acres ($400)	80 acres ($400)	80 acres ($400)
Land (Dickenson)	-	150 acres ($750)	150 acres ($750)	150 acres ($600)
carriages/wagons	2 ($50)	2 ($75)	2 ($40)	2 ($20)
horses/mules	9 ($180)	8 ($180)	5 ($125)	6 ($150)
cattle	20 ($80)	6 ($30)	11 ($42)	8 ($40)
sheep	19 ($20)	15 ($20)	7 ($3)	-
hogs	0	6 ($10)	4 ($5)	11 ($22)
Misc. property	$45	$35	$25	$30
Money on hand	$0	$0	$0	$0
Total value of Assets	$1175	$1500	$1390	$1262

(I was so excited that I somehow figured out how to stick a chart in here and have the spacing turn out the way it is supposed to - don't ask me to do it again because I started this post way back in March and now I don't remember - but look over there in the orange column: for some reason the template decided to make the font in one box smaller!)

Here we see that the value of Erasmus' larger tract of land had taken a 20% hit in value; the value of his carriages dropped by another 50%!  The value of his horses remained the same, but the value of his cattle increased by 25%.  He no longer had any sheep, but his number of hogs was up from four to eleven, and had risen in value by about 38%.  (If you live in the right area, say, one covered in oak trees, you don't need grass or feed for your hogs - they will eat acorns and roots.  Perhaps that is another factor which influenced Erasmus' decision to purchase the Dickerson tract of land.)

Overall, the value of his assets were down another 10% by early 1895.  No, the 1890's were not going so well for the family.  1895 is the last year of the decade in which the tax rolls have survived, so we can't check to see if and when Erasmus' financial outlook started to improve.  The depression would last until sometime in 1896, though, so probably not until later than that.  

And that wraps up what I needed to cover in this post.  Writing it turned out to be not so bad after all - it wasn't nearly as time consuming or boring as I thought it would be; hopefully you all feel the same.  And now I'm going to get right on to writing the next one, because I have some interesting things to share for 1896 and 1897!

                                                                                                                                                 - Therese