A Walk Across Texas

Chapter Twenty-Three

ChapterTwenty-three When we walked into Breckenridge We were feeling the toil We looked at all those derricks Many still pumping oil. Walk across Texas With its wonderful sights. Walk across Texas With its beautiful nights. We made it a part of our routine to stop at local newspapers and tell them about our walk, and ask about local history and attractions. We also said we would gladly take time out for an interview for a possible story. Everyone we had stopped to talk to seemed appreciative. So after we checked out of our motel, we stopped at the Albany newspaper. The editor barely acknowledged us. “Uh, aw, I’m sorry but I just don’t have the time to talk to you,” she said. “I am working on a very big project that will take me to lunch. And, then I’ve got to go meet somebody for lunch and do a possible interview there. And, then . . .” I interrupted her. “Well, thanks. We didn’t want anything and we are not selling anything. We just thought you might want to interview us and since you obviously do not have the time and are not interested, we’ll go on down the road.” She looked up briefly and said, “You boys be careful and maybe I’ll see you on down the road.” We drove to where we had ended our walk yesterday. Eddie let me out and he and Norm drove to their stations. I began walking and immediately noticed how beautiful the skies were. They looked like somebody had taken a big, blue bowl and stuck it up there. I walked across Hubbard Creek and then came to Hubbard Creek Lake. I realized that I was in Stephens County, which originally was named Buchanan County after President James Buchanan. The county became Stephens County in 1861. The landscape is rugged with hills and has topsoil of red clay on which grow mesquite, hackberry, and elm trees. Broomweed, wild rye, bluestem, and milkweed grow abundantly over the pasturelands. The early settlers faced a hard life trying to make a living from the country. One schoolteacher said his pen was incapable of doing justice in recording the horrible depredations committed in this territory by the barbaric, uncivilized savages. “But, after the Indians removal, the settlers had to deal with disagreeable peculiarities that included sandstorms in the spring, northers in the winter, traveling grasshoppers in the fall, and long, severe parching droughts in the summer and all other seasons of the year.” The droughts were bad. One writer said the drought of 1886–1887 dried up most creeks. “You could follow the bed of the creek by the buzzards that flew over,” he wrote. We drove into Breckenridge, the county seat that originally was called Picketville. The town exploded with growth when oil was struck in 1920. In one year, the Breckenridge oilfield produced fifteen percent of all the oil produced in the United States and supplied one third of the petroleum produced in Texas. Thousands of workers and speculators came to the county seat and lived in acres of tents and shacks. The boom intensified in 1921 when drillers hit Stoker No.1 near the edge of the city. Breckenridge quickly became a forest of derricks as more than 200 wells were drilled within the city limits. The oil production was credited with the city’s explosive growth that saw the establishment of ten theaters, eighty-nine oil companies, seventy-nine eating places, and two daily newspapers. We stopped at The Breckenridge American, the remaining daily newspaper , and visited with Don Truel, editor. He’s a friendly person who looks like Dustin Hoffman or Richard Gere. He laughed at the description and said he preferred the latter. “I’m from California but please don’t tell anybody. I have lived here thirty-one years and I am still trying to get the Texas accent down,” he said. “I had never lived in a community smaller than half a million before coming here. But, I love this country and this city.” He worked at a local golf course for several years before becoming sports editor of the newspaper. He talked about the power of high school football. “Football runs this town and always will,” he said. “For example, we have won six state titles. Brownwood is the only other town in the area that has more state titles than we do. One year we were headed to state but got beat...