The celebration began Friday, July 22, at the noon meeting of the Rotary Club of Port Lavaca. State Representative Todd Hunter presented proclamations for the Texas Legislature to Port Lavacan Cherre Cain and recently relocated Port Lavacan Larry Nichols of Galveston. They were being recognized for their service as Chairs of the Calhoun County Historical Commission, Cain for five years and Nichols for two.

During Cain’s tenure she revitalized the Commission by adding over 30 new members. The Junior Historians were funded and formed in conjunction with the CCISD. The Cemetery Committee was formed, faithfully run by Mary Belle Meitzen, and eventually it received recognition for its fruitful work by the Texas Historical Commission. Many historical markers were added to our county and Cemeteries were restored. While Nichols was in the lead, short and long term goals were established: publicize our history, work towards the new museum, collaborate with local and state agencies to re-establish access to the Matagorda Island lighthouse, establish bus tours for Indianola, and such. The caboose was restored.

Later in the afternoon The CC Historical Commission and Friends of the CC Museum held a well-attended program and reception for the two at the Bauer Community Center. The festivities included the American Legion posting of the Colors, Dr. Marcus Caughron singing the Star-Spangled Banner, County Judge Mike Pfeifer’s speaking, and Alivia Jons, Cain’s 8-year-old granddaughter, playing America the Beautiful on the violin. Professor Emeritus of Victoria College, Charles Spurlin, spoke on the Confederate and Union Armies on Matagorda Island from 1861-1865. Museum Director George Anne Cormier talked about the many contributions Cain and Nichols have made to the preservation of the history of this area.

Russell Cain, local realtor, presented original letters from US Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Bill Clinton to the Museum in honor of his wife Cherre and Nichols. The letters were then read by children and grandchildren of the honorees.

Jan Regan, Chair of Friends of the Calhoun County Museum, unveiled the architectural concept for the new museum. Thanks to the Texas Settlement Region’s gift of funds to the Friends, the fundraising has begun. The structure will be built on the grounds of the Bauer Center. (see drawing)

The crowd was ultimately treated to the wonderful bagpipe sounds of military music and Amazing Grace performed by Dan Sheppard. What an event!

The reception followed to the accompaniment of music performed by Victoria resident Brent Van Sickle. Special recognition goes to Tina Crow, Executive Director of the Port Lavaca Chamber of Commerce, and her staff for the set up and presentation of food and drink for the guests. Ambassadors from the Chamber of Commerce were part of the support for this event.

For more information about the plans and fundraising for the new museum, please contact Jan Regan, 361-552-6313 or jan@russellcain.com.

August 12: James Overton; Sophie Perry; Martin Martinez; Mario Rodriguez
Aug. 13: Marty Lewis; Chaz O’Shields; Autumn Smith
Aug. 14: Sharon Preslar
Aug. 15: Johnathon Pitonyak; Audie Vasquez
Aug. 16: Sue Kubecka
Aug. 18: Mikaela Overton
Aug. 19: Amie Reed; Robbie Hawes
Aug. 20: Bobbye Martin; George Cady; Melanie Vossler; Natalie Harper; Derek Vasquez Jr.
Aug. 21: Jackie Luker; Brandie Baird; Brittney Collins
Aug. 22: Ted Brown; Ryan Hamerly
Aug. 23: Tim Sandoval
Aug. 24: Aireal Pressley; Lloyd Alford
Aug. 26: George Harper

Calhoun County has received the Gold Leadership Circle Award from the Texas Comptroller’s office. This award is given to local governments across Texas that are striving to meet a high standard for financial transparency online; opening their books to the public; providing clean, consistent pictures of spending; and sharing information in a user-friendly format that lets taxpayers easily drill down for more information.

The Leadership Circle has three award levels – Gold, Silver, and Bronze. The Gold designation highlights those entities that are setting the bar in their transparency efforts. Silver encourages those who are making progress, while Bronze inspires those who are just beginning their transparency efforts.

The County received a perfect rating in the major criteria of: Official Adopted Budget; Annual Financial Report or Comprehensive Financial Report; Check Register; and Financial Transparency Webpage. The minor criteria for the award included twelve categories: local government contact information; contact information for elected officials; public information request contact and instructions; easy access to financial documents in three clicks or less; budgets for three most recent fiscal years; annual financial reports for three most recent completed reports; check registers for three most recent fiscal years; searchable check registers; descriptive check registers; visual representation of financial data; current tax rates for local option taxes; and raw format budget. The County received 8 out of a possible 12 points for these minor criteria.

One thing I know for certain after two years of interviewing and learning about the people that make up Seadrift, Texas: the older generations were absolutely fascinated by the train! I wrote an article about the railroad in January of this year and since the recent move of the original train depot, my mind has been pondering… about all the unanswered questions I had.

First off, here’s a bit of history from the January 14, 2011 article:

On June 6, 1903, the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway (SLBM), also known as The Frisco; was chartered to run from Sinton to the Rio Grande at Brownsville with a branch extending westerly to the southeast corner of Starr County. The Port O’Connor (POC) Branch was one of the branches created which ran from Bloomington, Lela Pens and Seadrift to POC. March 1, 1910, the train depot was opened for business and used to freight large shipments of oysters and fish daily from Seadrift. By 1912, thousands of acres of cotton were grown and hauled to Seadrift to be ginned by the city’s new gin. The railway, over time merged with multiple lines and has numerous aliases, from the International – Great Northern Railroad (I&GN) to the SLBM to the Port O’Connor, Rio Grande and Northern Railway (PORG&N)—in the end it concluded as the Missouri Pacific Railroad (MoPac). The MoPac was one of the first railroads in the United States west of the Mississippi River which grew from a combination of a dozen mergers classifying it as a “Class I Railroad.” A Class I railroad is a large freight railroad company classified based on operating revenue. At the end of 1955, MoPac owned or leased 98 diesel units and 4,377 cars, with revenue of $461,554 and $15,759,273 of freight earnings.

So I set out to find out more. Several phone calls later, more pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. The last time I researched the railroad, it did not dawn on me where Lela-Pens, the stop between Seadrift and POC, was. As you are driving south, leaving Seadrift, about a mile outside of the city limits on the left-hand side looms a red building which looks like a barn; it’s appropriately marked “LELA-PENS” on the front. Joe Beaver Sr. told me they would bring cattle there and ship them North. They would also ship in gravel and stock pile it on the roads. Can you believe all of the times we drive by there (that I drove by there) and had no clue it was once a stop on the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway?!?

Joe said, “We would always play on the tracks; we’d collect rocks for our sling shots – they were just about marble size – and terrorize the birds.” As children they would play across the street from the depot in Seadrift on large cement pillars which were in the shape of pyramids. The pillars were located where the car wash is now. Joe also remembers placing pennies on the tracks, even though they were few and far between.

Dorothy Wilson also remembers playing on the tracks. The train was an old steam locomotive. She said, “We’d walk down the railroad tracks, and as the train neared, the conductor would see us and let out steam! We were afraid that steam would burn us so we’d run off the track !” She and her two younger brothers got to ride the train once; she even got to pull the whistle and see where they placed the coal which powered the train.

Much like Joe, Dorothy and her siblings would also place things on the tracks, only they put oyster shells on the track! “We laid them out on the track, hid, waited to see what happened. The train smashed those shells, but then it stopped, maybe looking for us. We were scared! We could have derailed it! Other kids put pennies, but we didn’t ever have pennies. I was born in 1928, the depression started a year afterward,” she said to me, “We weren’t used to anything better.”

Dorothy also remembers by the depot along the tracks the hobos would be sleep everywhere. “Men outta work, lookin’ for work and they were always hungry,” she said. “They would stop at people’s homes and ask for something to eat.” She even heard they would sleep in the boxcars or even underneath them!

Both Joe and Dorothy recall Oscar Rassmusen, lifelong resident of Seadift was the Railroad Depot agent. Oscar Alvin was born February 9, 1895 on Matagorda Island to Andrew Teresa Smith Rasmussen. Dorothy thinks she agitated him, “He had a telegraph machine and I’d love to watch and listen, I’m sure that irritated him. People didn’t have radios back then to get storm reports, so they’d go up to the depot and listen to the storm reports coming in via telegram – it was a busy place.”

History is all around us and we need to realize the value and importance of documenting it will be in our future, our children’s future and those generations we will never have the opportunity to meet. It was not easy for me to find information about the depot, train or railway; much less find residents that were around in those times. Head out to the county museum and learn more about our coastal community! Till next time…

Show below, clippings from Seadrift Success, Seadrift’s first newspaper, May 1915.

The Calhoun County Democratic Club holds its monthly meeting at the IBC Bank in Port Lavaca on the last Thursday of the month.

The meeting starts at 5:30 p.m. with a social with snacks and soft drinks.

The General Meeting starts at 6:00 p.m. and usually there is a guest speaker.

The meeting usually lasts no more than an hour and a half at the most.

-G.B. Robertson