Old Time Texas

[Subdeacon Joe]

Found on FB:

 

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The BONUS Texas Quote of the Day is super. I hope y'all appreciate the effort I go to to read and pull out these old newspaper accounts!

"San Antonio was a very primitive town when we first came here. The houses were one-story and built of adobe, one room deep with dirt floors, and no connecting doors leading from room to room; a person went outside to enter another room at the back. The sills were more than a foot high, the window sills were three feet wide and the walls were three feet thick. The windows were iron-barred and one could sit in the window seat and chat with a passerby or flirt with an admirer. The floors were of dirt and kept hard by sprinkling and sweeping with brooms of brushy wood tops.

"The houses of the very poor were merely poles driven into the earth close together and the cracks filled with mud. Dried beef hides were spread on. the floor and the family sat on these to eat, breaking off small pieces of tortilla and folding these to form a spoon to dip up their chilli con carne and frijoles. The coffee was black, or, if diluted, goat milk was used. Frequently you saw a baby in a hammock hanging from the rafters. The hammock was made of hide. 

There were no timid, frightened women there, nor were there women with frazzled nerves. Vicissitudes were their daily atmosphere and God's fresh air was their lipstick.

I remember the dreadful epidemic of cholera which followed the end of the war in 1865. People died on the streets, many from fear. So fast did they die and so many that there were no men to make  the coffins. People were forced to nail pine boxes together as quickly as possible, haul them to the cemeteries and bury them in trenches side by side. But tragedy often has its comic side. There was a man in town who had never heard of prohibition, and his task of burying the dead was a gruesome one . He must have something to give him courage, so he took his courage in hand and started up to the cemetery on Dignowity Hill with a pine coffin on his dray. 

"His eyesight was uncertain, the wheel struck a stump and when the driver looked back to ascertain what was the matter he saw his dead man sitting in the road with the broken coffin scattered about him. The "corpse" had only been dead drunk [not dead at all]."

----- Mrs. H. Lucas, San Antonio Express, November 22, 1925

Shown here: a photo taken from the Menger Hotel in San Antonio. It is circa 1867,  making it one of the very oldest photos I have posted on this page. Understanding what it looks like now, it's hard to believe that it ever looked like this."