Texas People, Texas Places: More Musings of the Rambling Boy

44. Adventures in Albany

✥ 44 ✥ Adventures in Albany Several weeks ago I went to Albany to speak to the annual Chamber of Commerce dinner there. I do not mean Albany, the capital of the state of New York, but Albany, the county seat of Shackleford County, Texas, a town of two thousand people about thirty miles northeast of Abilene. I went there at the invitation of Shirley and Clifton Caldwell, who are among the main movers behind the cause of historic preservation in Albany, and who own the Mitre Peak Ranch between Fort Davis and Alpine and so can be counted as local folk here as well as in Albany. Albany is a strange and wonderful place. When I was a teenager and would drive through there with my father on trips from Fort Worth to West Texas, Dad would always point to the old men whittling on the courthouse steps and say, “See those old gentlemen? They all went to college with F. Scott Fitzgerald.” In fact, a number of old ranching families in Albany sent their male offspring to Eastern prep schools and then to Princeton, providing the little town with a group of well-educated community leaders for several generations. One of the best-known Albanians was Watt Matthews, Princeton class of 1921, who died in 1997 at the age of ninetyeight . Matthews was the youngest of the nine children of John and Sallie Reynolds Matthews, whose respective families settled in the Albany area in the 1860s and intermarried to the point that Sallie Reynolds Matthews’s history of the region is called Interwoven. Watt Matthews came home from Princeton to his family’s fiftythousand -acre Lambshead Ranch and never left it, managing it ✥ 173 from his father’s death in 1941 until the day of his own death fiftysix years later. He held a number of his Princeton class reunions at the ranch, which is about twenty miles from Albany. Shirley Caldwell told me that you never knew who you would meet at Lambshead; on one occasion Matthews called her and Clifton and said, “Come out here to the ranch for supper; there are some folks here I want you to meet.” They went and found themselves having supper with the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who was a friend of Matthews’s nephew, John Burns. On another occasion they answered a last minute invitation and discovered Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson sitting in the Lambshead living room. Matthews, who never married, had a remarkable capacity for friendship as well as for ranch management; when he was buried at Lambshead, seven hundred people attended his funeral. Another Princetonian who had a great influence on Albany was Robert Nail, class of 1933. Robert Nail’s family owned a ranch outside of Albany that sat over what, when it was discovered in the 1920s, was the largest shallow-well oil field in the world, and it provided the Nails with enough income to develop their talents. At Princeton Robert Nail discovered that he had a talent for the theater , and after graduation he tried his hand in New York for a while, and directed community theaters in Dallas and Fort Worth. But in 1938 he came home to Albany and wrote the Fort Griffin Fandangle, a musical historical pageant that, seventy years later, is still being performed annually in Albany. The Fandangle was inspired by productions like Paul Green’s “symphonic drama” The Lost Colony, but the music, much of it composed by Nail and Watt Matthews’s cousin Alice Reynolds, has the lilting quality of a Rodgers and Hammerstein production, and the whole show has a homegrown quality that sets it apart from the slicker summertime theatricals that flourish in places like Branson, Missouri. The script is loosely based on Sallie Reynolds Matthews’s book Interwoven. Anyone who grew up in Shackleford County can be in 174 ✥ it, and the cast and crew has grown over the years to about four hundred people. One of the features of the production is a steam calliope built by an Albany man, who also built the stagecoach and the portable blacksmith shop used in the pageant. The Fandangle changes a little each year as new songs and scenes are added and old ones dropped. It runs for two weekends in June and is attended by about ten thousand people every summer. Robert Nail’s nephew Reilly Nail, also a Princeton graduate...