Dac Crossley's Western Blog: Beginning my Memoirs

Kingsville was a railroad town. You can find it on the road map, down in south Texas near the Gulf, a bit west of Corpus Christi. Kingsville called itself "The Home of the Famous King Ranch." Grandma King herself donated the land for the townsite. If you took to the air in one of those little two-seater airplanes of the 1930s, you'd look down on a neat little rectangle of streets, bisected by north-to-south railroad tracks. See, there's the east-to-west main street with two city blocks of businesses. Look at those cars angle-parked along main street -- Fords, Chevys, Plymouths of the day. A few Model-A's and Model-T's thrown in to boot. Across the tracks there's the railroad General Office building and the railroad shops and roundhouse. A railroad town, despite all those automobiles. If you took a trip in your car, you'd have to drive north. No highways south, east or west. Passenger business was good, on the railroad.

In the early 1900s the St Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway Company drove its rails south through the Wild Horse Desert to reach the Rio Grande Valley. Kingsville became its headquarters and home to its employees. The King Ranch benefitted from Grandma King's gift. No more long cattle drives, up through San Antonio. Cattle cars were loaded at Kingsville.

Let's turn our little airplane to follow the railroad to the south. A few little fields of cotton, scattered here and there. Some truck farms, mostly watermelons and cucumbers, crops that survive in sandy soils. Patches of grass and mesquite trees, a few rangy cattle. Some twenty miles to the south we begin to see sand dunes. No more farms; roads disappear. Only sparse desert vegetation as far as we can see. Look, there's a windmill, and cattle trails radiating away from it. This is ranch country.

Now turn back to Kingsville and let's fly to the west. We'll see some tiny farms and homesteads that abruptly give way to the vast expanse of the King Ranch. Look, that large white building over there is Ranch Headquarters. Turn the airplane around; they don't like visitors.

Swoop low to spot a dirt road that approaches the high wires of the King Ranch fence. The road shines white from the caliche that fills its ruts. And down there is my father's little house on four acres, a chicken farm. My childhood home.

Not much of a house, my father says and laughs about it. Four rooms sloping away from a central chimney, he says. Yellow clapboard walls with the cracks sealed by wallpaper. Indoor plumbing, yes, a tiny bathroom tacked onto the kitchen. I go back to that house in my dreams, walking through doorways much taller than I, my mother smiling down at me, my baby brother at my feet. That's my "happy place," where I go when I must retreat from a troubled reality.

Hey, get that airplane outa here! Chickens think it's a big hawk. They crowd up in a corner of the hen house and some of them get smothered.

Comments

You have great memories!
Never stop writing.

Posted by: shirley | December 08, 2018 at 08:18 AM

Dac...

enjoyed reading another two seater plane trip around your homestead near Kingsville.

Inspired me to write one about my homestead in northeast Detroit in the last block of Joann Street in the city with 8 Mile bordering us on the north and Collingham on the south.

Posted by: Alan | December 07, 2018 at 05:16 PM