The beginning of the end of Thurber came in 1921 when the company refused to meet miner’s union demands during a strike. Some coal was still mined until 1926 when the company closed. The brick kilns closed in 1930. The offices of Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company remained open until this notice appeared: “Removal notice. On July 1, 1933, the Thurber General Office . . . will be combined with its executive offices and will occupy the 23rd and 24th floor of the Fort Worth National Bank Building . . . ” During the summer of 1936, salvage crews removed water pipes from Thurber to be used in the construction of the Fondren Library at Southern Methodist University. Even trees and shrubs were dug up and moved to be sold elsewhere. An unknown number of houses were sold and moved to Stephenville.

Ken Jones, W.K. Gordon Center and the History of Thurber, W.K. Gordon Museum and Research Center for Industrial History of Texas, Tarleton State University; Mary Jane Gentry. Thurber: The Life and Death of a Texas Town. Master’s Thesis, University of Texas, August 1946.

In June, 1889, William R. Gordon, from Virginia, arrived in Erath County to survey for a railroad. R.D. Hunter of Thurber met him and offered him a job as mining engineer. Thurber began to grow and prosper under Gordon, who replaced Hunter in 1902. Mary Jane Gentry. Thurber: The Life and death of a Texas Town., Master’s Thesis, University of Texas, August 1946.

In 1904, a farmer near Thurber found a buzzard’s nest and brought the eggs to his wife who was trying to get her turkeys to hatch some eggs. He thought she would put those eggs under the turkeys and it would be fun to watch her face when they hatched. Late the next day he asked which turkey she put them under – she replied: “I was a little short on eggs and put them in the custard.” Thurber Journal

In 1904, a band of gypsies tried to camp near Thurber but were driven away by the authorities. Then they camped near Strawn where one of their young women was arrested and held for three days as a result of a near death shoot-out with the deputy sheriff. “Why this band of tramps, petty thieves, and general fakes are allowed to roam at will is a question hard to answer, when far better men are being taken in daily for vagrancy.” Thurber Journal

The first union labor meeting in Thurber in 15 years was held in the summer of 1903. Thurber Papers

1916: The above photo is of Thurber miners from shaft Number One. (Courtesy of the Southwestern Collection, Texas Tech) The mule they’re sitting on was normally kept far underground and fed bananas for high energy. (Thurber Papers).

Colonel R.D. Hunter, president of the Texas & Pacific Coal Company at Thurber, who died in 1902, was described as a “feudalist of old who dreamed of a strictly monopolistic empire.” He is best remembered for the fence he built around Thurber to keep out unsavory influences. The entire town was fenced with six foot high barbed-wire to keep out the peddlers of dry-goods, grocers and all kinds of farm products . . . . Captain Sawyer rode the gates, and believe me, nobody got past him.”

Thurber Papers. Thurber Collection, Southwestern Collection, Texas tech University, Lubbock, Texas

In 1904, “A lady walked into the grocer’s shop with a fighting light in her eyes. ‘This here,’ she observed with a sniff as she banged a yellow substance on the counter, ‘is the soap that gets all the linen as white as snow . . . and lets the happy housewife spend the rest of the day playing with the children?” The clerk replied no, it was cheese. Thurber Journal (a newspaper, I can’t remember which one)

Between 1888 and 1921, Thurber coal mines and brickyards became a cosmopolitan town of nearly 10,000 people from all over Europe, to the dismay of pious Stephenville residents who shared Erath County. [Oral history has it that Erath County went dry by finding a loophole to avoid counting the Thurber vote]. “[Railway] Carloads of grapes would be shipped to Thurber from California and the Italian school kids with grapes in their lunch bags had many friends. The Italians used the leftover grapeskins from wine making to produce a ‘grappo’ whiskey which was about 170 proof. To the ‘grappo’ , sugar and water were added to produce a drinkable ethyl alcohol. With prohibition, the genuine ‘grappo’ whiskey was made with raisins which could be bought in wooden crates or in sacks from Angelo Reck’s store or other grocers. However, some whiskey was made from anything which fermented; peach skins and stones, apples and pears, all of which grew locally. The Minus ‘grappo’ whiskey differed from other bootleg whiskey in that most ‘other’ whiskey was made from grain and mash.”

“One prominent rancher near Thurber loved grappo but could not handle it. He would pass out ‘cold’ sometimes and not remember a thing for a day or two. He had a fear that in such a condition he might be mistaken for dead and be buried alive. While he was still living , he had a telephone line strung to the family burial plot in Davidson Cemetery. His will stipulated that a telephone be placed in his hand, inside his coffin, and if he did not call out within three days, he was sure to be dead and not just passed out.”

Leo s. Bielinski. “Beer, Booze, Bootlegging and Bocci Ball in Thurber-Mingus.” West Texas Historical Association Yearbook, 59 (1983), 75-89.

The town of Mingus was founded by a woman of that name in 1856. The settlement began to grow with the opening of nearby Johnson mines. When Colonel R.D. Hunter took over the management of the mines, known as Thurber after 1888, he lowered wages – which caused discontented miners to move to Mingus and to a tent city between Mingus and Thurber known as Striketown, then as Grant Town, then as Thurber Junction. The community was a thorn in the side of Thurber in other ways besides serving as a haven for radicals: low cost groceries were smuggled into Thurber to avoid company stores. Thurber Papers. Thurber Collection, Southwestern Collection, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas.

1899: “It will be a good thing when all the people awake to the evils of pistol carrying [in Stephenville].” A few years later carrying pistols was outlawed because of the frequent complaint of “rudely displaying pistols” whatever that meant. Stephenville Empire

1888: James McCoy was sentenced to be hanged for the murder of the Erath County sheriff and the wounding of his deputy in December of 1886. Stephenville Empire

1908: “Tuberculosis, called the great white plague, is becoming a serious menace to like in Erath County, and many homes have been already been made desolate. By following rigid sanitary rules the disease will be prevented; of course those who now have it will die.” Stephenville Tribune

When I was going around to old blacksmiths in the mid 1970s, asking for blacksmithing tips and stories, I was told that each morning, when the smith was just firing up the forge, while the coal smoke was still green and loaded with sulphur, TB victims would pay 50 cents per week to crowd around the fire, trapping the smoke under quilts and breathing the sulfurous smoke in gulps. I doubt that the treatment helped, but people have to try something. Dan Young

1860: John R. Baylor, [with Erath vigilantes among his party], were returning this month from an Indian hunt when they came upon seven Natives and began firing. One of the campers was a young boy who could have escaped but he stopped to help an older, wounded man trying to mount his horse. “He tried to lift him up, but the man was unable to stand. When the boy saw he could not help the man, he gave a loud cry of anguish and and started toward the white men, determined to avenge the death of his comrades. The white men began shooting at the Indian boy, with six-shooters and rifles. [the 1857 musket shown could have been the type used] The boy returned their fire with arrows – striking the nearest man in the hand – then a second arrow into his gunstock. The Indian boy was then stopped by a blast from John Baylor’s shotgun. When the body was examined [and scalped] it was found to contain one rifle hole and nine pistol wounds besides the fatal shot which stopped him.”

Betty Elliot Hanna. Doodle Bugs and Cactus Berries: A Historical Sketch of Stephens County. Breckenridge: Nortex Press, 1975.

John Baylor’s statement on scalping: “And here our eastern friends are entitled to an explanation – especially those who get their ideas of the noble red man from Cooper’s novels – as to why we scalp our enemies. The Indians believe that if they can carry off their dead and hide or bury them with a whole scalp, they will go to paradise . . . and we as are not in the missionary business we sent everyone to hell we could by scalping them.”

John L. Waller. “Colonel George Wythe Baylor.” The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, 24 (June, 1943), 23-35.

A thousand years ago the Bosque River Valley was a series of wet meadows through which the river meandered, laying down alluvial sediment that had been accumulating for centuries. But the earth began to dry up during a period of increased solar radiation and orbital forcing caused by a wobble in earth’s orbit that overheated the upper atmosphere which conspired to lock in the dry-with-big-storms La Nina for centuries, a period known as the Medieval Warm Period (CE 950 to 1250). The Southern Great Plains were also dry, activating the sand dune field from Monahans to Nebraska that had been dormant under grass cover for a thousand years. This same warm period brought successful grain crops to Europe and Greenland look like a nice place for a colony. But for the Bosque River, the semi-permanent La Nina drought was punctuated with tropical cyclones and hurricanes that eroded the nearly bare ground and flooded with such intensity that the valley core was washed away all the way down to the bedrock. [The alluvium has since been replaced] The Indigenous People living along the Bosque since the CE 600’s were the Scallorn-point users, whose Archaic wetland, rock-oven and deer centered lifestyle dissipated. As agricultural resource-collectors intruded into the area they were met by violence. Some archeologists say this was the most violent period in ancient Texas history. The Scallorn people were gone by CE 1300. This bleak mega-drought should serve as an analogue for the need for regional plans for water sustainability. Major 20th century droughts pale in comparison to droughts documented in paleoclimatic records over the past two millennia. We may be in the first decades of a centuries long warm period now as the climate is already warmer than the worst of the Medieval Warm Period. Anthropogenic [people-caused] activities are forcing whatever the natural climate drives are, toward long-term heating and dryness. A series of volcanos cooled the earth between CE 1300 and 1860 (The Little Ice Age) and the cooler weather enticed the bison herds back into Texas providing centuries of good hunting for those who came after the Scallorn people.

Dan Young. Unpublished Manuscript, 2022

Connie Woodhouse. “A 1,200-year Perspective of 21st Century Drought in Southwestern North America,” Arizona State University (December 7, 2010)21283-21288.

Earth Institute at Columbia University. “Climate Change could Revive Medieval Megadroughts in US Southwest”, ScienceDaily, (July 24, 2019).

1901: “A lady teacher having applied for a position n the Stephenville public schools had an interview with one of the trustees, and then withdrew her application, stating that the views of the trustee as what is required of a teacher are about on a par with that of a wolf’s views on the sermon on the mount.”

Erath Appeal (early Stephenville newspaper)