IN THIS SPACE on Jan. 7 I wrote about the membership drive being held by the East Texas Historical Association, and offered to send an application blank to anyone interested in joining. I responded to five requests.

But imagine my surprise, when registering for the spring meeting at the Holiday Inn in Paris last Thursday, to learn that 10 new members had given my name as the person they heard about it from. I was told that I’m leading the new member competition that will be decided at the September meeting in Nacogdoches.

I think this says something about the power of the press, and I am appreciative. I repeat my offer to send anyone interested an application blank.

Three of these new members, Judy Penick Chance and her husband Paul of Tyler and Bill Starnes of Gilmer, made it to the Paris meeting. They and others attending had a rich feast of historical information to choose from.

ARCHIE McDONALD, retired executive director fo the association, sometime columnist on these pages and newly working as a liaison person at Stephen F. Austin State University, gave a delightful program of World War II songs. He accompanied himself on the guitar, and linked the songs with a narrative of why each song was appropriate for its particular year — from Remember Pearl Harbor to the hopeful ballad, The White Cliffs of Dover.

I enjoyed hearing Dr. Jerry Lincecum of Austin College read a paper on Ruby Allmond, a champion woman fiddler who went on to distinction as a song writer recorded by well-known Nashville artists, including Chet Atkins.

RUBY GREW UP on a cotton farm during the Depression and started performing at age four. In the late 1940s she had a fiddle band and one of her fans was the late speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives, Sam Rayburn of Bonham. The band often entertained for “Mister Sam” when he was campaigning.

Ruby’s best friend, Audra M. Brock, was in the audience, and had available the book and CDs that record Ruby’s prolific output. The 41 songs in the book, titled Today I’ll Think About the Rain, are divided into three parts: Sounds of Texas, A Little About Life and A Lot About Love.

My favorite is Texas Red, a paean to chili in our state. A note appended to the lyrics says that when the state Legislature in 1977 made chili the Texas state dish, Ruby’s song was played.

THE MOST UNUSUAL feature of the recent meeting was that it was held, for the first time, in two different towns. Early Friday afternoon the attendees made the 30-mile trip to Clarksville, where they were met at the town square by horse-drawn carriages and wagons that took us on a tour of Clarksville’s many historic sites.

I hadn’t been to Clarksville in years, and the main thing I knew about its recent history was that Wal-Mart had closed its store there, the first to open in Texas. (Mt. Pleasant’s was second and Gilmer’s, third.)

So I was pleasantly surprised to see what the Main Street program has done for the downtown square, which is centered by a tall Confederate monument and is three blocks southeast of the handsomely-restored 1885-vintage courthouse with its tall tower.

AN INFUSION of $400,000 from the local Lennox Foundation helped dig up the solid concrete of the square and replace it with grass and plantings. And many of the old stores have been restored in a picturesque style.

We learned about the Lennox family and its foundation in a talk by Jack Herrington, Clarksville lawyer who has been involved with the foundation. The family owned a large amount of rural Red River County land that produced oil and gas, and had other farming, ranching and banking interests. The last surviving member of the family was Martha Lennox, who was murdered in 1993 at age 85.

TWO MEN were convicted ot the murder, carried out as part of a robbery that netted only $13. One of them, Willie Earl Poindexter Jr., is scheduled to be executed on March 3 and the second one, James Henderson, is on the Texas death row.

A late afternoon program and banquet were held at the Clarksville First Presbyterian Church, which was built in 1905 and boasts a history dating back to 1833, which makes it the oldest Protestant congregation in Texas.

After the banquet we adjourned to the Lennox House, the 2-story, 112-year-old Victorian frame family home located just west of downtown. It has been restored and refurnished as a $500,000 project of the Lennox Foundation.

CLARKSVILLE on the east has in common with Archer City in West Texas the distinction of being the native town of an author recognized around the world for literary merit.

Archer City, of course, is the home town of Larry McMurtry, who has always looked west in his (usually futile) attempts to destroy myths of the Old West.

And William Humphrey (1924-1927) spent his first 13 years in Clarksville. He has been compared with William Faulkner as a chronicler of the Old South, Texas version.Though he never returned except for brief visits, the town and surrounding countryside became the fictionalized scene of much of his work.

The town square where we gathered for our tour was the setting for chapter one of Humphrey’s novel, Home from the Hill. It began with men standing around, commenting on the hearse that was bringing Hannah Hunnicutt home for burial from the mental hospital where she had spent 15 years. The novel, her family’s story, was told backwards from there.

A MOVIE WAS made from the novel in 1960, with Robert Mitchum in the role of Wade Hunnicutt, mighty hunter of both wildlife and women; Eleanor Parker as his wife Hannah and George Hamilton as their son Theron.

In conversation with one of our local hosts I learned that he had been one of the child extras who was hired for the movie, which was mostly filmed in and around Clarksville. He said they were paid more than $3 an hour at a time when the minimum wage was 75 cents. One of his jobs was to climb a tree and hold the rain-making machine over George Hamilton in a Sulphur River bottoms hunting scene.

The tall spire of the handsome Red River County courthouse, the building recently restored at a cost of more than $3 milllion turns up in one of my favorite Humphrey short stories, The Human Fly, which appears in his book, A Time and a Place.

Today, we were told on a tour of the courthouse, it holds only one office, the county judge’s. But the second floor houses an exceptionally handsome district courtroom.

sgreene@tatertv.com Sarah Greene Archives