Big Thicket Legacy

Brown Wiggins

Introducing Brown Wiggins If one listens very long to Brown Wiggins tell a story he gets the feeling that he is listening to a gifted historian. He supplies a wealth of detail without becoming tedious. His restrained enthusiasm and interest in the things he tells are obvious, for he tries to make clear any event or process he describes. He tells his stories deftly. Brown Wiggins is tall and thin, soft-spoken, mild-mannered, his large eyes twinkling with humorous recollections, hair parted down the middle; it is hard to imagine him wearing a sixshooter as he operated the loader on a tram line in a logging camp. He didn't usually wear it, only when it seemed appropriate. ''I'm made aware," he said, "of the advance we've made in that we don't have to shoot and fistfight like they did fifty to a hundred years ago." Brown's mother died when he was nine, and he lived with his father and sister until he was fifteen. He attended business school in Houston but came back and spent years in logging camps, usually operating the loader, ajob he always preferred. He ended his active career as a longtime operator of a grocery store in Votaw, a short distance from where he was born. Brown liked music, and his resonant voice equipped him for singing. His favorite entertainment for years was group singings on weekends at church or at someone's home. He was instrumental in getting a music teacher to work with the Alabama-Coushatta Indians and, according to Brown, with great success. "They had some of the best quartets in the country." From reading Brown's story one gets the feeling that he was a part of the fun and mischief of the times. He knows many of the old timers and was most helpful to us in locating persons who could supply information on unusual aspects of Big Thicket life. The only time I ever saw him even mildly impatient was when he went with us to see one of his friends who answered my first question for two-and-a-half hours. Mrs. Wiggins died in 1971, and Brown lives in a large house trailer near the home of Ludy and Veston Oliver, in Saratoga, and enjoys Ludy's fine cooking. Ludy is his niece. BROWN WIGGINS was born and raised down here about three miles from Votaw. I'm eighty-two. At about nine years my mother died, and me and my sister and my father kept house at this old place right on. So when we broke up housekeeping, we turned the place over to my sister and her husband, Eli Collins. My grandfather 's name was Ed Wiggins; my grandmother was Josie Wiggins. Her maiden name was Clark My father was Henry Wiggins, born in 1854, and he married Sapphire Davis at Big Sandy. Came from Mississippi about the time all the rest of them. These old folks filled up this country; that was about 1840. My grandfather didn't die until Iwas about sixteen or seventeen . He very often told me of the journey. He said they bunched up, probably a dozen wagons, and their milk cows and their saddle horses would follow after they traveled a week They all had ox wagons, generally two yoke of steers to each wagon, with a cover on it. Some had a little tent packed away in their wagon. He said they'd come a piece and camp, and the young men would get out and work a while, if they could find something to do. At times, along these rivers, they'd cut timber and float it down the rivers-about the only way of logging they had. He said when they came to the Mississippi, it was just level banks, and the kind of boats they had them days it was dangerous to tackle it. So they just camped till the river went down before they'd risk crossing-crossed in ferry boats and came on by old Town Bluff on the Neches River. They landed up here at what we call Big Sandy. It was a mighty pretty place, nice little stream run through there with springs all over it. It was open pine woods as far as you could see. They decided that would be a good healthy countrylots of mosquitoes in the low country, lots of...