The Hoggs of Texas: Letters and Memoirs of an Extraordinary Family, 1887–1906

Part IV High Hopes1901–1906

Part IV High Hopes 1901–1906 O n January 10, 1901, the Spindletop gusher blew an oil boom into Texas and ended an era of happy domesticity in the Hoggs’ Nineteenth Street home. By September the house’s occupants had all left it for good, and they would never again all live under the same roof. Jim Hogg, building his oil syndicate, shuttled like a great black-coated beetle between Beaumont, Austin, and New York. Ima went off to study music in New York, and Mike and Tom were again sent to boarding school in Texas. Will practiced law in San Antonio until 1903, when he rejoined his father’s Austin firm. He would not stay there long. Hogg’s oil syndicate merged profitably with J. S. Cullinan’s Texas Fuel Company, and for a time the former governor reveled in his newfound affluence. There were happy times at “the Varner,” a Brazoria County plantation he had bought because he believed there was oil under the land. (He was right, but his family would have to wait until 1919 to make its fortune in oil.) When oil prices dropped precipitously in 1903, Hogg’s business interests suffered, and so did his family’s finances. There was no festive family Christmas in Texas that year, and Mike and Tom had to spend the holidays at their respective boarding schools. In the fall of 1904, Will left Austin to take a position with a St. Louis bank. The rest of the family had scattered by 1905: Tom took a job as a ranch hand in Colorado, and Mike prepared to enter the University of Texas. Jim Hogg moved his law office to Houston. Ima divided her time between the social scenes in Austin and Houston. Early in 1905 an accident changed the Hoggs’ family life forever. Jim Hogg was injured in a train collision, and he never fully regained his health. But he was characteristically optimistic, as he wrote to his nephew William Davis: “If I finally recover, as I now believe I will, from the illness which yet afflicts me, I have no fear of the future.”1 But that future was cut short. James Stephen Hogg died of congestive heart failure in Houston on March 3, 1906, three weeks short of his fifty-fifth birthday. He was buried beside Sallie in Austin’s Old Oakwood Cemetery. •฀฀฀฀•฀฀฀฀• At the beginning of 1901, Martha Frances Hogg Davis, “Aunt Fannie,” sixty-seven, was again living with the Hoggs in Austin. Her granddaughter Pearl was also visiting them. Martha Frances insisted on keeping house for the family, but she was not in good health, as Jim Hogg wrote to her son William: The Hoggs of Texas 204 January 25th, 1901 Dear William: I note what you say by favor of the 14th instant, which I have not answered until now on account of a variety of causes which do not involve a lack of respect or appreciation of you or the suggestions you make. Sister has been in feeble health for several months and especially so since she got the impression that you were sick. She has been up most of the time with the exception of a few days from about the 12th to about the 16th of this month. She is growing stronger apparently and says that she will start within a few days to make you a visit. En route she will stop over at Brother John’s to spend awhile. I believe that after you see her and administer some of your “magnetic medicines” she will rapidly improve and fatten up again. The blunder I made in the first instance was in going to housekeeping but I was absolutely miserable away from the children and felt compelled to take this step. Had I left her in some boarding school with them, she would have had less anxiety and been relieved of a heavy encumbrance, which you know she always would assume in house-keeping. I have kept her two servants all of the time and have endeavored to make the burden as light as possible to her. The more servants, the more work she would do. Indeed it looked to me like she felt called upon to help the servants, if not wait on them. You know she has always been a diligent, faithful hard-worker and I have been unable to check her at all in her...