The Hawkins Ranch in Texas: From Plantation Times to the Present

Introduction

Introduction teachers in Texas used every means they could imagine to impress children with the importance of that year. It was the Texas Centennial , the hundredth anniversary of the independence of Texas from Mexico. From Jefferson Davis Grammar School in Bay City, we were marched two by two to the City Auditorium, with my first grade teacher Miss Tenie and others patrolling. There we sang the official state song that we had rehearsed, “Texas, Our Texas! All Hail the Mighty State!” Appropriate school and city dignitaries listened and spoke. Back at our classroom tables, using small, blunt scissors, we cut out the traced outline of Texas. We saw how its rectangular panhandle pushed into the border of Oklahoma, how the “Big Bend” of the Rio Grande drooped like an elephant ear into Mexico, and how the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, where we went to the beach on Sundays, made a gentle crescent. The Red River made an irregularly chiseled border with Oklahoma, as did the Sabine River with Louisiana. We were asked to consider where we ourselves were located, and it turned out to be in Matagorda County, close to the Gulf Coast, between the Brazos and Colorado rivers. This was always the location of the Hawkins Ranch families, whether they were in town or country, or whether the date was their arrival about  or many decades afterward. Place was of central importance to the Hawkinses in every decade of their experience, and place included broad coastal acres, the Hawkins Ranch House itself, and, once it was established, the town of Bay City. James B. Hawkins and his wife Ariella, my mother’s grandparents, were the antebellum pioneer generation who “set forth.” In the century and a half that followed, the next Hawkins generations, including my mother’s, “settled in.” This story is about the Hawkins family who came from North Carolina, settled in one Texas location, and stayed for five generations. The changes that impacted their lives derived from changing times, attitudes, and social assumptions—not changing locations. The coastal region where J. B. and Ariella Hawkins first established a sugar plantation and then a cattle ranch included leagues colonized by 2 introduction Stephen F. Austin beginning about . The Texas Hawkinses were not original Austin colonists, but the leagues within land they acquired bore the names of Austin’s colonists: Pickett, Duke, Defea, Dinsmore, Dwyer, McCarty, Fry, and Byrne. The Hawkins Ranch House was and is located within the league originally assigned to Thomas M. Duke, one of Austin’s old three hundred who served as an alcalde under him. There is some indication of kinship between the Hawkins Ranch family and Joseph H. Hawkins, who came to the aid of Stephen F. Austin in New Orleans, but neither Stephen F. Austin nor Joseph H. Hawkins is mentioned in J. B. Hawkins’s letters. After the Civil War and Emancipation, my mother’s father, Frank Hawkins, the first Texas-born child of J. B. and Ariella, helped his parents change from planting and sugar production to raising cattle. Beginning in  my mother, Meta Hawkins Lewis, and her sisters continued their father’s cattle business for three decades. Having spent many days and years in their company, I have been able to describe the way they took over the management of their ranch, their deliberation about the fate of their then-collapsing Ranch House, and their grave concern over the separation from them of their sister, Lizzie. From my firsthand experience I have also described the post–World War II management of the Hawkins Ranch by my brother Frank Lewis. A brief outline of the current management by the younger generation of partners does not so much conclude the story as it foretells the question for the future: Will place, in the sense of location, in the sense of the town of Bay City, and especially of the house and acres of the Hawkins Ranch itself, continue to be the keenly-felt mooring of a family if it has scattered to many places? Or when the assets to be managed include impersonal ones like securities that, unlike a place, do not compel allegiance? My Main Sources For the antebellum Hawkinses and their plantation life, I have used letters sent by J. B. and Ariella Hawkins from their Texas plantation to relatives in North Carolina from  to . These letters are archived in the Southern Historical Collection of the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at...