Off bright and early the next morning, bound due East for Orange, seat of Orange County. OK, early, if not bright…
Here’s the day’s itinerary:
Near the courthouse is the beautiful home and garden of the Lutcher Stark family. The house, built in 1894, is a Queen Anne style, over 14,000 sq. ft. According to the information on the grounds, the family adored the garden and spent more on lawn and garden supplies than they did on domestic help and utilities. When the Lutcher Starks died in 1936, the house was closed down for good, but then restored and used as a museum. I found out upon my return home that my old friend George Parks is a relative of the Starks (and is still awaiting, in vain, he believes, his share of the inheritance!)
The rain started in Orange, and escalated in intensity during the long ride north on 87 toward Jasper, where my Uncle Dalton had been a young man before leaving home and eventually joining the Army. This is deep woods territory, and the elegance of the Stark mansion soon gave way to the brooding sensibility of this land. As epitomized by this flag-draped roadside home and produce stall. They also proudly offer “Confedrate (sic) items” – I think the spelling follows the pronunciation in this neck of the woods.
Not much further up the road I encountered this enticing offer to head down a Dead End road to the Texas Hogwallow. With visions of “Deliverance” dancing in my head, I chose to point the BMW north and skedaddle…
Skedaddle right into the rain, that is.
With the refrain of Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm” in my head, I courted divine wrath by pulling the BMW up on the dry porch of a local religious establishment and donned the rain gear for the first, but not last, time today.
A brief respite from the rain gave me a chance to run out and capture one of the defining images of this trip – 18-wheeler laden with logs blasting down the highway in a nasty cloud of crosswind and spray. A motorcyclist’s nightmare…
However, shortly thereafter came the motorcyclist’s dream, a big, swooping downhill curve through the forest toward Jasper.
From Jasper, due east to the little town of Newton, seat of Newton County.
From Newton, north to Hemphill, seat of Sabine County, named for the Sabine River that provides the border with Louisiana. The road leads right through the magnificent Sabine National Forest.
And finally! A Zen moment in the forest. For a brief instant, I know where I am! As is said by many an inveterate traveler: “No matter where you go, there you are”…meaning that there’s no escape from yourself. Or the corollary, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there…”
A fragment of the massive Toledo Bend lake:
And then on to Hemphill…
From Hemphill, northwest on a magical road to a magical town that I had never even heard of, San Augustine, seat of San Augustine county.
So it turns out that this route retraces the old El Camino Real, running from Louisiana through San Antonio all the way to Laredo. It was first established under Mexican rule in the 1680’s, when the governor of Coahuila was trying to find and destroy a fort that had been established by Rene-Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle – about whom we’ll hear more when we get to Navasota. However bloody the original road, the present one is a delight.
From the down-home to the distinctly elegant in San Augustine…
You could say that the courthouse is plain, but it is very tasteful, the green window frames harmonizing nicely with the well-manicured green grass around the courthouse.
Elsewhere around town is this beautiful little Episcopal church, right next to the equally charming Crockett Hall, which may in fact be part of the church grounds, I could not ascertain this.
From San Augustine due north to Center, seat of Shelby county.
The courthouse in this modest little town turns out to be a jewel!
The Rio in Center, Texas
From Center, I begin to leave the deep forest for the wooded terrain of Nacogdoches, seat of Nacogdoches County, both named for the Nacogdoche tribe of Caddo Indians who inhabited this area for up to ten thousand years before the arrival of the Europeans. The road remains stunning:
Nacogdoches is a charming little university town (Stephen F. Austin U), and seems to be enjoying the benefits thereof.
Now you may think that my photographing of the courthouses is as simple as pulling up in front of the courthouse, setting up the tripod, and firing away. Sometimes it IS that simple, but there is usually a challenge of some sort, whether lighting, law enforcement, positioning of extraneous vehicles, foot traffic, etc. Nacogdoches posed the greatest challenge yet, and I fully expected my solution to result in a fine or handcuffs.
The Nacogdoches courthouse is right on a very busy corner. It is behind walls, and looks more like a hacienda than a courthouse. I could find no way of getting anything that even superficially looked courthouse-like from the outside. The only solution I saw was to bring the motorcycle INSIDE the courtyard and photograph from there. I tried to find an authority figure from whom I could get an OK for that idea, but not finding one, I readied all the camera equipment inside the courtyard, and then, breathing deeply, pushed the bike into the courtyard and into a suitable position. I made the shot, thrust the tripod aside, and manhandled the heavily laden bike back out onto the sidewalk – still a violation of some sort, but a lesser one, I hoped. (If I had been caught out there, I was going to say that the engine had stopped running and I had to get it out of the way of traffic…) Anyway, what the following photo lacks in visual intensity does at least reflect a “get ‘er done” resilience. A deviant mind is a terrible thing to waste… I offer you Nacogdoches…
Believe me, it was with a huge sigh of relief that I fled due south toward Lufkin, seat of Angelina County. The county is named for a Native American woman who helped Spanish missionaries – they called her “Angelina”, though it’s highly unlikely that that was what her tribespeople called her. Anyway, it’s a nice thought, and better than yet another Confederate slaver. And in fact Angelina County was the ONLY county in East Texas to reject the secession vote in 1861. Here’s how Angelina county was described by John N. Lomax (my mother was born a Lomax):
“Culturally, the county was less moonlight-and-magnolias Dixie than a little pocket of Appalachia, where pioneers, often from similarly hardscrabble areas of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, wanted nothing more than to carve homesteads out of the Piney Woods and river thickets, farm a little, maybe raise a scraggly herd of tough cattle to drive to market in New Orleans.” And, he added, “[t]hey also wanted to brew up a little whiskey and subsist on the bass, catfish and perch they hauled from the Neches and Angelina rivers and whatever they could trap and shoot on dry land.” Doesn’t seem like it has changed much…
Katherine Ann Porter and her sister were married together (to two guys, not each other – those were different times…) in Lufkin, and both Brookshire Brothers (of grocery store and pharmacy fame) and Atkinson Candies, inventor of the mighty Chick-O-Stick novelty candy, are HQ’d in Lufkin.
They also have The Pines, where you can still see the original Magnificent Seven. I’d surely go if I were there..
Because of the constant rain, I shot my first photo of the courthouse while I was still wearing my rain gear. Luckily I noticed that it made me bear a resemblance to the Michelin Man, so there is a corrective photo that shows the real me. It’s not much of an improvement, I concede…
From Lufkin, to paraphrase “A Day in the Life”, “somebody spoke and I fell into a dream”. That dream was the nearly surreal drive between Lufkin and Groveton, seat of Trinity County. The road runs right through the middle of the Davy Crockett National Forest, which is itself a high order spectacle. Then, as you near Groveton (I had also never even heard of the place), I spied a sign or two leading to a place called “Nigton”. As a place name, it seemed to bear an uncanny resemblance to another place name that I knew in my youth, but is now something that cannot be uttered by people of my hue. I could not tell how far off the trail it would take me (the afternoon was getting on), so I plowed on to Groveton, but wondering about Nigton.
Subsequent research, however, showed that Nigton is a “ghost town”, notwithstanding still having a population, founded in 1873 by ex-slaves, and named by one of the ex-slaves. It’s an interesting story, you can look it up at this site: “Uncovered Texas | Ghost Towns”. (Sorry, I did not succeed in embedding the link…)
Actually Groveton is pretty close to being a ghost town itself, though it has a fine, large courthouse:
Here’s downtown Groveton. I never saw moving car nor living human the whole time I was there.
From Groveton, I headed northwest to a place that, finally, I had heard of before: Crockett, seat of Houston County. As a small boy I had been infatuated with Davy Crockett (“King of the Wild Frontier”), and had owned and frequently worn a real coonskin cap, just like Davy’s (or Fess Parker’s, of San Angelo, who played Davy on TV). Crockett, Texas is so named after the same Crockett, who died in the siege of the Alamo. The famous Kenny Rogers is from Crockett.
Houston County is itself named after Sam Houston, and was the very first county established by the Republic of Texas. More on Sam Houston when we get to Huntsville…
I had originally thought to spend the night in Crockett, but, not spying much in the way of food or lodging, decided to make my way west to Centerville, seat of Leon County (and conveniently located on I45).
The roads had finally dried out, and I removed my rain gear for the last time today, and had a serene run in to Centerville.
Centerville’s not much more than a wide place in the road, but by chance I discovered while looking at my itinerary that this was the 200th courthouse I have visited on this adventure. Fifty-four to go!
I was so happy to be driving in the dry that I decided to continue on to Madisonville, from where we resume the travelogue tomorrow morning.
