In the early 20th Century single-shot bolt-action and rollingblock 22s became inexpensive enough for for every family to have one. The main targets were owls and hawks because they preyed on chickens at a time when these fowls were a very important food source. My family in the 1950s had a horror of hawks and would drop everything to get a shot, even though I never saw one bother our chickens. So many hawks and owls were killed in the 1920s that rat populations exploded in Erath County. Individual farms held rat-hunts that yielded hundreds. The August Stephenville Tribune reported in 1920 that Bob Croft had all 72 of his recently hatched chicks stolen during the night. A search discovered that rats had packed all of the chicks into a nearby stump; eleven of them were still alive. A mostly ignored article later that month reported that “Harper Herring’s Stephenville barn is not overrun by rats as are so many other other area barns. He recently found out why – two screech owl nests – each containing two young owls. Each nest was provided with a heap of rats for them to feed on.” A county-wide rat-killing contest held the following April in which $50 was offered for the most rat tails collected. The winner was from Huckabay with 6,800 tails. Stephenville Tribune

September 10, 1922, Reverend B.B. Hooper was conducting a revival meeting at Duffau, part f the service included 25 robed Klansmen that marched in, forming a crescent around the front. They read a letter to the congregation: “We, the Order of the Knights of Ku Klux Klan, reverently acknowledge the majesty and supremacy of the Divine Being, and recognize the goodness and providence of the same. We heartily indorse the good work you and the protestant ministers are doing . . . ” Stephenville Tribune

“Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.” Friedrich Nietzsche

In October of 1922, 31 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched into the Stephenville First Baptist Church, lined up in front of the congregation and presented a well planned program. The congregation sang the Star-Spangled Banner, and afterwards the Klansmen filled out as quietly as they came in. (This is the same year that blacks were removed from West End Cemetery). Texas House Bill 3979 forbids the teaching of critical race theory to stop students from discovering the deep roots of white supremacy in our history. Stephenville Tribune (October 6, 1922)

1924: 1In Stephenville 1000 Klansmen were fed sandwiches, fried chicken, ice cream and cake. “The hooded Klansmen gathered on the east side of town and silently, but surely, marched to the square.” I was told by C. Richard King that during an earlier march, Judge Oxford stood facing the approaching klan on Washington street, and punched the leading marcher in the mouth. Stephenville Tribne (July 1924)

1922: “Remember . . . the all-seeing eye of the Invisible Empire, knights of the Ku Klux Klan is upon you.” Stephenville Empire (March 1, 1922)

1890s: “In the summers the Erath churches had debates on the Bible as they understood it. As they had a different understanding of it, those debates always ended in a fight.” Sue Sanders, Our Common Herd

In 1883 an old black man was taken from his tent in Alexander, beaten and shot. Local citizens were afraid to interfere. A man who spoke against lynch mobs found a note on his door threatening his life if he “did not cease to give his opinion on the subject.” Stephenville Empire

I forgot to include the sources for the Stress post.

DeNeen Brown, “The Preacher who used Christianity to Revive the Ku Klux Klan,” The Washington Post, (April 10, 2018); “New Look at 1918-1919 El Nino Suggests Link to Flu Pandemic,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, United States Department of commerce, NOAA Public Affairs, 2010;”Brutal Winter Weather of December 1917 and January 1918,”Louisville, Kentucky: Weather Forecast Office; and Patricia Bernstein. “Apology for Slavery from Texas Wouldn’t be Enough,” The Houston Chronicle (March 28, 2007), and my lecture notes from decades in the classroom.

On April 22, 1922, the Stephenville City Council approved the removal of African-American bodies to a new cemetery to be called mount Olive. The Stephenville Tribune ran an article in May of 1922 entitled “Negro Burial Grounds” which spoke of beautification by black community leaders, but failed to mention that the removal was forced. Many of the earliest graves lost their wooden markers during the removal, among those was the first Stephenville family, an enslaved couple who names are lost, were sent a year ahead of the settlement of Stephenville, by John M. Stephen, to build a trading post and establish relations with the two Indigenous groups that frequented the area, the Anadarko and the Comanche. The Anglo-friendly Anadarko Natives and the Anglo-tolerant (at the time) Comanches, traded smoked buffalo hams, deer-skin bags of honey and other articles for hardware. A year later, in 1855, Stephen and George Erath, led thirty families up the Bosque River from Waco to build the village of Stephenville around the current square. The peace established by the black couple only lasted three years before Stephenville’s residents angered the Natives, causing years of Comanche raids.

“Segregated History Haunts Cemetery,” Texannews (February 26, 2013)

Spectacle lynching and pogroms directed at African-Americans accelerated into the 1890s and really took off across the South in the 1920s. After Civil War Reconstruction failed, the Ku Klux Klan had gone dormant with the onset of Jim Crow because there was no need for a faith-based insurgent group when the local governments promoted white supremacy. Nobody wore robes at the Comanche purge because the extremest were in sync with enough public opinion. In 1915, Methodist preacher William Joseph Simmons brought out the flag, a sword, and the Bible on Stone Mountain, Georgia and tried to bring back the klan. There wasn’t much interest because the economy was good and it rained. By 1920 it was a very different story and klan membership shot up to five million. What had happened? During WWI President Woodrow Wilson stoked bogus treasonous fears and the Red Scare of Communism which lasted long after the war; then President Wilson had a stroke during which his wife concealed and together with a few others, made dingbat decisions for a year, contributing to a horrendous recession; 1918-1919 were drought years (of course) and the knockout punch – in 1918-1919 , the misnamed Spanish Flu which swept the globe, killing fifty million people and around 500,000 in the United States; and the winter of 1917-1918 was brutal. These years were (probably more stressful than today) happened just as the boll weevil ruined cotton production and high wartime wheat prices collapsed, as did the Erath and Comanche populations as young people moved to Fort Worth and Dallas, where they developed a taste for motor cars, speak-easies, female employment, and evolution taught in the public schools. [I obtained a stack of recent KKK newspapers and had my history class list the most frequent articles – the winner was The Horrors of Women who Worked Outside the Home.] So. What did the Stephenville City Council decide to do on the night of April 22, 1922? They voted to exhume the graves of black pioneers from the West End Cemetery.