JEFFERSON GOT a double dose of attention in the March 28 edition of The Mirror, with Fred Tarpley writing about the town’s colorful past in the All Things Historical column on Page 4 and Bob Bowman recounting the story of the Jefferson Carnegie Library on Page 5.

I was familiar with the fact that the Carnegie building near downtown Jefferson is still used as both a library and community center, for when the Texas Folklore Society met there in 1986 the 2-story building provided the necessary meeting spaces.

But there’s much more to the Texas Carnegie Library story, and it tells a lot about what a different place the state has become in the last century.

In 1896, a $5,000 grant gave Pittsburg the first Texas library financed by the steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie’s foundation.

LIKE THE OTHER 31 towns and cities favored by Carnegie, Pittsburg had a new source of civic pride in its library (all the buildings were good-looking and well-built; most had two stories and a basement.)

Between 1898 and 1917, Carnegie gave $645,000 to the five biggest cities and to towns as small as Pecos and Stamford. In our area the favored communities were Clarksville, Winnsboro, Marshall, Tyler and Sulphur Springs.

Women’s clubs often applied for the grants in the smaller places. As has been well documented in The Mirror, it was the 20th Century Club that got what is now the Upshur County Library started in the county superintendent’s office in the courthouse; in the 1930s it was moved to the tiny building that still stands on the north end of Roosevelt Park.

SO WHY DIDN’T Gilmer get a Carnegie Library? According to my mother, the late Georgia Laschinger, who was one of the club women just mentioned, it was because the contract required the town to agree to support the library budget, and Gilmer was way too poor to commit.

It took the great East Texas oil boom of the 1930s to rescue Gilmer from a downhill slide. According to the Texas Almanac, Gilmer’s population dropped from 2,268 in 1920 to 1,963 in 1930, while Pittsburg grew slightly in that decade to 2,640 in 1930.

Upshur County family farmers, many of them sharecroppers, were mostly self-sufficient in raising their food, but cash income depended almost entirely on the cotton crop. And that was in the lap of the weather gods.

Pittsburg was a much more important trading and shipping point throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

THE WPA TEXAS Guide, published as a part of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s, divided the state into convenient tours. Gilmer and Pittsburg were on a tour that started at the Oklahoma line near Paris on U.S. 271 and ended 137 miles later at Tyler.

Pittsburg is described as a town that “spreads out in neighborly fashion, the newer homes and buildings blending with those of more ancient vintage. Few people hurry in Pittsburg. Its most outstanding feature is an odd elbow effect of the main street. According to local tradition, when the town’s one street was being laid out, a huge, beautiful tree blocked the way, and rather than cut it down the citizens chose to walk and drive around it.”

GILMER, THE Guide says, at the end of the 1930s was “a rapidly growing oil and farming center, built around a smart cream-coloured courthouse that is surrounded by drab weathered brick buildings.”

They might have been drab, but they attracted all-day Saturday crowds that stayed into the night, a dramatic contrast to downtown Gilmer today on most Saturdays.

A picture made by Russell Lee in an unidentified town that could have been Gilmer identifies a “farm couple in town on Saturday afternoon.” The husband is wearing a fedora and a handlebar mustache, and the wife’s obviously homemade long cotton dress is complemented by a white sun bonnet.

Lee was one of several Farm Security Administration photographers, later to become famous, who toured middle America documenting the plight of farmers through the Great Depression and droughts of the 1930s.

THE WRITER noted that “Gilmer’s annual celebration is the Yamboree, a gay festival during the early part of October, in celebration of the harvesting and curing of yams.”

A footnote described Kelsey, on a graveled road eight miles west, as “a colony established by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in 1902. Kelsey Academy, a school conducted by the church, with 150 students, places emphasis on poultry and stock raising and dairying.”

The Guide made Gilmer sound more modern than Mount Pleasant, where in such areas far from cities, “rural sports and recreations reflect the daily tenor of the lives of the people.”

Among several examples are fox hunting and community ‘possum hunts. At the conclusion of such hunts, it was said, “it is the custom for those in attendance to concoct huge ‘pot stews’ — a type of ‘mulligan’ made with chicken and vegetables, cooked in wash boilers over open fires.”

MY EDITION OF the WPA Guide is a 1986 reprint by Texas Monthly Press with a new introduction by Don Graham, UT Austin professor of English. He meditates eloquently on what a different state Texas was in 1940.

“Sixty percent of the population lived in rural areas . . . many babies were still born at home; and country doctors still made house calls. It all sounds a bit like a Merle Haggard song about the good old days. Texas in 1940 was a bigger place than it is now. It took a lot longer to get somewhere.”

INDEED, the speed limit was 45 mph, and the narrow 2-lane roads were scarce by today’s standards. The 1940 Texas Almanac map of Upshur County shows only three paved highways: U.S.271 north to south, Hwy. 154 from Gilmer to the eastern county line, and U.S.80 from west of Big Sandy to Gladewater.

The Almanac echoed the WPA Guide in noting that discovery of oil had greatly increased the population and wealth of the county.

What neither book said was that the wealth flowed from wells in the south end of the county to landowners there, and into Gilmer from the oil boom in general. But many of the farmers were still as hard up as the couple pictured in Russell Lee’s striking photograph.

sgreene@tatertv.com

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