Published: November 01, 2009 11:18 pm      

County’s history is full of wet times

The current long wet spell reminds me of several other times when Hunt County experienced excessive precipitation.

The year 1907 was a very wet year that, according to contemporary accounts, literally drove many farmers from the blacklands of Hunt County. Families left their farms and went west looking for employment. Because of the heavy rain, farmers could not get into the fields to plant crops, and those who succeeded in planting crops saw them rot from too much moisture.

But 1913 was even wetter than 1907. September 9, 1913, began six weeks of rain with seldom a day without some shower or mist. The rain continued sporadically through the fall of 1913 and on into January and February of 1914.

Heavy rains, electrical storms, cyclones and tornados struck north Texas in October and November inflicting minor damage on buildings, livestock and humans.

The heavy rains made it especially difficult for farmers to get to town to purchase supplies. To move at all, some farmers took off the back wheels from their wagons and hitched four horses to the front running gears of their wagons and still had trouble negotiating the muddy, sticky black gumbo roads.

Also, farmers found it impossible to get into the fields to pick the cotton in the fall because of the rain-soaked soil.

The rains frustrated one penny-pinching farmer from Wolfe City who had hired out-of-town cotton pickers and agreed to feed them until they could start picking. But day after day it continued to rain as the farmer became more and more disturbed as he lost more and more money feeding the idle pickers. Finally he got to the point that every time that it started to rain he would get down the old-style coffee mill and begin grinding it to “drown out” the sound of the rain.

Those fortunate enough to get their cotton picked had the further problem of transporting the cotton to the gins across muddy roads and flooded creeks.

Conditions in the cities seemed a little better. On the way to a cotton gin in Commerce, Bob Culver had two wagons loaded with cotton bog down in a field so deep in soft blackland soil that he could not pull them out with horses or mules. Fortunately for him, Honest Bill’s Circus was visiting Commerce with its two show elephants. The owner of the circus offered to use his elephants to pull out the wagons for a fee of $5. He hitched one elephant to the tongue of the wagon and the other got behind and pushed. The two pachyderms had no trouble getting the wagons out of the mud.

In several places in Hunt County, the heavy and continuous rains caused creeks and rivers to escape their banks and over run bridges and roads with disastrous results to transportation in the county. Water ran over the top of the Cotton Belt Bridge on the South Sulphur River two miles out of Commerce, and the Sabine River flooded over the Midland Bridge between Quinlan and Terrell, stopping traffic on the Midland Railroad. The railroad bridge between Dallas and Rockwall also washed out.

The high water even prevented some rural mail carriers from making deliveries because they could not cross flooded streams.



Conrad is archivist and oral historian at Texas A&M University-Commerce and is a member of the American Audi Murphy/Cotton Museum board of directors.