“Our Grand Excursion”: A North Carolinian’s Trip across Texas by Rail, May 1874

Joshua Addison Stradley was born on March 17, 1832, in Buncombe County, North Carolina. Like his father, Thomas Stradley (1798–1891), an Englishman, J. A. Stradley became an ordained Baptist minister. He attended Wake Forest College for five years and during the early years of his ministry served as a chaplain in the Confederate army. During the Civil War he married Mary Ann Fowler of Wake County, and after the war they made their home in Oxford, North Carolina, until his death on February 13, 1912.¹

On April 30, 1874, Stradley departed Raleigh by rail to attend the 1874 Southern Baptist Convention in Jefferson, Texas, as one of two delegates chosen to represent North Carolina; the other delegate, Rev. R. H. Marsh, also of Oxford, met Stradley’s train in Greensboro and accompanied him to Texas. The two men stopped in Atlanta and spent three nights there before resuming their trip, reaching Jefferson on the evening of May 6.² The 1874 Southern Baptist Convention was that body’s nineteenth annual conclave and the first to be held in the state of Texas. The meeting took place May 7–11, 1874, at the Jefferson Baptist Church. Stradley served as a member of the convention’s committees on finances for the denomination’s Foreign Mission Board and for its Sunday School Board.³ In connection with the convention, the organizers of the event successfully persuaded three of the state’s railway lines to provide free rail passes to each delegate so that they might participate in a “grand excursion” across Texas by rail. “By this kindness,” one Baptist editor wrote, “many of our brethren who have never been west of the Mississippi will have an opportunity to see much of the ‘Lone Star State.’ … No people ever proposed to do so grand a thing for the Convention as Texas does, in this respect.”⁴ Moreover, Baptists and others who resided along the state’s main rail lines were enlisted to “meet the crowded trains of tourists with abundant refreshments during the day, and provide for their accommodation in the cities at night.”⁵

During his brief time in Texas, Stradley recorded his observations of the state in four letters he dispatched to the editor of the Biblical Recorder, the official newspaper of the North Carolina Baptist State Convention, published in Raleigh. Stradley’s four missives, reproduced below with original spellings and punctuation, appeared in the Biblical Recorder sequentially in four installments during June 1874. From his letters, Stradley appears to have been considerably more interested in reporting on the topic of railroad travel in Texas than on the proceedings of the convention. He opens his first letter with a brief description of the town of Jefferson and briefly characterizes the Baptist gathering as “one of its most pleasant and profitable sessions.” He thereupon begins a detailed description of the Texas countryside encountered during “our grand excursion” of “eleven hundred miles over the State” by rail, beginning at Jefferson and proceeding to Mineola, then to Dallas, on to Bremond, then to Waco, Hempstead, Austin, and Brenham, then to Houston—where he and his party visited the Texas State Fair—and finally passing by Crockett on the way to Longview and ultimately out of Texas.

Stradley’s fourth and final letter focuses on his overall “impression and views of Texas.” He praises the fertility of the soil “for the raising of grain and stock” but also notes “the great scarcity of water during the droughts of summer” that beset portions of the state. Stradley likewise expresses his dissatisfaction not only with the taste of well water throughout Texas—he blames “lime-stone, or some mineral substance,” for its “very unpalatable” nature—but also its consistently tepid temperature, “too warm to be pleasant without ice.” He also attributes what he perceives as a “scarcity of wood” to the vast tracts of timberless prairie he encounters during his travels. Stradley is somewhat conflicted on the topic of the Texas climate...