‘I’ll tell you what,’ he told the widow. ‘If you persuade Mr. Adams, who owns the land adjoining yours, to sell it to me for a dollar an acre, I’ll give you two twenty-five for yours,’ and when Mr. Adams demurred, Reuben promised him: ‘If you can get me that two thousand acres of bottomland owned by Mr. Larson … obviously floods every year and is worth almost nothing … if you can get him to sell it to me for twenty cents an acre, I’ll give you a dollar twenty-five for yours.’
He now had three owners involved, and was dickering with a fourth, a Mr. Carver, for the purchase of eight hundred acres of the best cleared fields he had ever seen, contiguous to the rest, for a flat three dollars an acre when it was obviously worth at least four.
When the pot was bubbling, with the four owners pondering their parts in the intricate sale, Reuben rode from farm to farm one afternoon, warning each of the people that his offer was good only till noon of the next day, and he came to his quarters that night satisfied that he and Somerset were going to get possession of their land by next nightfall: three thousand of the widow’s acres, four thousand of Mr. Adams’ uncleared acres, two thousand of Mr. Larson’s useless bottomlands, and eight hundred of Mr. Carver’s prepared fields. It was a massive deal, one which would exhaust much of the cousins’ cash, but he was convinced that this was the way to acquire a major land holding in Texas.
He went to bed pleased with his manipulations, but at four in the morning he sat bolt upright, catching for breath as if someone were strangling him. ‘The Raft!’ he told his wife, and he ran across the hall to waken Somerset: ‘Don’t you see, Sett? They’re willing to sell because they know the Great Raft is going to be removed.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The Raft! The Raft! The minute it’s removed, we lose all the water in our river. No boats will ever get to Jefferson. This land won’t be worth fifty cents an acre.’
In real anxiety he threw on his clothes and dashed out to where the Cobb horses were stabled, and calling for Jaxifer, he leaped into the saddle. ‘Meet with them,’ he shouted back to Somerset. ‘Tell them I’ll be back in five days. Appendicitis.’ When his own lead slave could not be found, he pressed Trajan into sleepy service, and off they went to inspect the Raft.
Somerset was embarrassed to visit with the four sellers, but decided to explain to each that his cousin had been called urgently to Shreveport to handle a large amount of money being forwarded from Georgia, and when the widow who was selling the first parcel asked if it was true that the other Mr. Cobb had influential friends in New Orleans, he found himself assuring her: ‘He’ll take care of your interests, believe me.’
Five days later Reuben returned, tired but happy and fully prepared to go ahead with the four purchases. When Sett asked about the Raft, he said: ‘Even God couldn’t remove it.’ The water at Jefferson seemed guaranteed for all time.
The Cobbs got their nine thousand eight hundred acres for the prices that Reuben had wanted, but even when they had them safely in their possession, he wanted two hundred more to make a round ten thousand, and he uncovered a wispy little fellow who owned four hundred of the most miserable bottomland, underwater twice each year, so he bought the whole batch for ten cents an acre.
The Cobbs were finding that Jefferson, settled by responsible immigrants from the Southern states, was almost indistinguishable from a town of similar size in Alabama or Georgia, but what made it especially attractive was the fact that it combined the best features of each of those states, for this corner of northeast Texas was a flowering paradise. ‘No wonder they call it the Italy of America,’ Millicent cried one February morning when she saw the stately trees on their new land, the wealth of casual flowers beginning to appear on all the fields.
Reuben, always with an eye to future business, had been enumerating the trees which awaited the ax: ‘We have six kinds of oak: live, black, post, water and the two tough types, white and red. I’ve seen elm, hundreds of good ash, maple, sycamore and two that are going to be damned valuable for shingles and fencing, cypress and red cedar. But I want you all to see a real wonder.’
He led them to a tree they had not known. It grew abundantly but not in height and produced thorns of immense size. ‘They call it two ways,’ Reuben said, ‘bois d’arc or Osage-orange. You can see a few of last year’s oranges up there.’
‘Are they palatable?’ Millicent asked, and her cousin said: ‘Not even for cows. But I want you to look at the wood,’ and he sliced off a small branch of the Osage to show the women the bright yellow color, wood and sap alike. ‘It’s very hard, and what I like about it, if we plant two rows, side by side with the trees of the second row filing in the gaps in the first, within three years we’ll have fences that no cattle can penetrate. You’re going to see a lot of Osage-orange on Lakeview.’
Reuben had insisted that the name of the plantation be Lakeview, and when Sett objected: ‘But there’s no lake,’ the determined redhead said: ‘There will be.’
Even when the Cobb plantation was finished, the cousins would plant only a relatively few acres of cotton; the major part would be held in woods, or used for cattle and hogs. But as soon as that first small stand of cotton was planted, and before their homes were built, Reuben put all the slaves plus six hired men from town with their mules and iron sleds to work digging out to the depth of four feet an immense sunken area immediately adjacent to the river.
‘Leave a dike wide enough to keep the water out,’ he ordered, and as the depression deepened he worked as strenuously as any of the men, digging deeper and deeper and moving a huge amount of earth to be piled along the rim of the future lake. When everyone was exhausted, he gave the crew two days’ rest, then brought them back to finish off the bottom and dig a six-foot channel from the river to the place where the future plantation wharf would be built.
The men dug this channel in an interesting way. The hired hands from town hitched their mules to a heavy iron implement that looked like a very large sharp-edged dustpan, except that it had higher sides and two handles instead of one. When the mules strained forward they dragged this huge pan behind them, so that the man holding the handles could tip the edge forward and slice off a huge wedge of moist earth, which stayed in the scoop as the mules moved faster, dragging it aloft to the sides of the depression.
When the channel was well dug, wide enough to safeguard a boat coming in from Lake Caddo, Reuben announced: ‘Now for the fun!’ He directed the slaves to pare the top of the dike, which kept out the river, down to the very water’s edge. He then dug holes in the remaining walls, filled them with explosives, and warned everyone to stand back. When he detonated the charges, the dike crumbled and waters from the bayou rushed in to fill the man-made lake and the channel leading to where the wharf would stand.
From the side of the slight hill on which the Cobb mansions would one day be erected, the women and children watched with delight as their lake came into being. ‘How beautiful!’ Petty Prue cried, and Millicent, less openly enthusiastic, agreed. It was a splendid lake, which would be even lovelier when the trees which Reuben proposed planting were established.
The Cobb men were not foolish. They never believed for an instant that two families as distinct as theirs, or two men as radically different as they, could own a plantation in common, and as soon as the purchases of the land were completed they consulted a Jefferson lawyer—there were three to choose from—who drew up a most detailed schedule of who owned what: ‘Now, as I understand it, Somerset is to have the initial three thousand acres purchased from the widow, plus four hundred of the very fine acres of the Carver land. Reuben is to have clear title to all the four thousand acres bought from Mr. Adams, plus all the bottomlands from whomever.’
‘That’s my understanding,’ Sett said. ‘And mine,’ agreed Reuben.
‘But the entire is to be called Lakeview Plantation?’
The Cobbs looked at each other and nodded: ‘That’s what we want.’
‘Most unus
ual. Two plantations, one name.’
‘Doesn’t seem unusual to me,’ Reuben said, and the lawyer coughed.
‘Now, the lake, and ten acres of land about it, plus access to the river, that’s to be held in common, owned by no one specifically, and with each of your two houses to have equal access and equal use, in perpetuity.’
‘Agreed.’
‘And that also includes any wharf that will be built there, and any cotton gin or storage buildings which might be called warehouses.’
‘Agreed,’ Reuben said. ‘We’ll build them with common dollars and have common ownership. But I wish you’d put in there not only the gin but also any other kind of mill we might want to operate.’
‘And what kind would that be?’ the lawyer asked.
‘That’s to be seen,’ Reuben said.
So before even the wharf was built, or the family houses well started, he was preoccupied, along with Trajan and Jaxifer, in laying out the kind of mill complex he had long visualized. Because no running stream passed through the land, he could not depend on water power, and he did not want to go back to the old-style gin operated by horses walking endlessly in a circle. Instead, he hired three skilled carpenters from the town—one dollar and ten cents a day, with them supplying all tools and nails—and working alongside them, he built a two-story gin building, traditional except that on the ground floor he left only a small open space.
When Trajan warned: ‘No horse kin walk there!’ he explained: ‘Somethin’ a lot better’n a horse,’ and he had the slaves erect a rock-based platform on which a ten-horsepower steam engine would rest; he would purchase this from Cincinnati, where it seemed that all the good machinery of this period was manufactured.
But the gin was only a part of his plan, for when a heavy leather belt was attached to the revolving spindle of the engine, it activated, on the upper story, a long master spindle from which extended four separate leather belts. There would not be sufficient power to operate all the belts simultaneously, but any two could function. One, of course, led to the gin, and it drew down little power; another returned to the first floor, where it operated the massive press which formed the bales that would be shipped down to New Orleans for movement to Liverpool. It was the third and fourth belts which led to the innovations of which Reuben was so proud, and one might almost say that these accounted for the material growth of Lakeview Plantation.
The third belt carried power to an enlargement of the gin building that housed a gristmill, a massive stone grinder which revolved slowly in a heavy stone basin, producing excellent flour when wheat was introduced between the stones or fine meal when corn was used. The fourth belt powered a sawmill, and it required so much power that it could run only when the press and mill were idle.
Cotton was ginned and pressed less than half the year; the gristmill and sawmill could be utilized at any time, and it was these which determined the plantation’s margin of profit. The gin, using less power than any of the other three, provided the great constant in Texas commerce, the lifeblood, but with this assured, the quality of life depended upon what was accomplished additionally. Only a few geniuses like Reuben Cobb realized this interdependence; the great majority of Texans never would—and from generation to generation producers and their bankers would believe in turn: ‘Cotton is King. Cattle are King. Oil is King. Electronics are King.’ And always they would be deceiving themselves, for it was the creative mix of efforts, plus the ingenuity and hard work of the men and women involved, that was really King.
The four combined mills at Lakeview Plantation constituted an early proof of this truism, and one aspect of the operation was startling: after the buildings were constructed and the machinery installed, Trajan was in charge. He had mastered the technique of mending the leather belts when they tore; he knew how to guard the water supply to the engine; he knew what types of wood to cut for stoking the engine; and he, better even than Reuben, appreciated the subtle interlocking relationships of the four components. The building and its contents had been put together only by the ingenuity of Reuben Cobb, who had learned by studious apprenticeship in Georgia what was needed, but it was managed successfully by Trajan—no last name—who had that subtle feel for machinery which characterized many of the ablest Americans.
The lake had been so judiciously placed that the Reuben Cobbs could build their home on a promontory overlooking it, while the Somerset Cobbs could place another house on their rise and obtain just as good a view. But in the actual construction of the two houses, there was a vast difference.
The cousins had learned from the building of their slave quarters and the dredging of the lake that skilled workmen could be hired in Jefferson for around a dollar a day, and good husbandry advised the Cobbs to pay the fee and use these craftsmen. A good slave shack, caulked to keep out the rain, could be built by these artisans for less than fifty dollars, and an entire house, dog-run style for white folks, could be put up for six hundred dollars. The Somerset Cobbs built such a house, hastily and with no amenities, fully expecting to tear it down and build a better in the years ahead.
Reuben, with a keen sense of his position in Jefferson, did not do this. Instead of the traditional four small rooms at the compass points, he built four surprisingly large rooms, and instead of perching them on piles of stone at each corner, he used slaves and employed townsmen to dig substantial footings, four feet deep, which he filled with stone and rubble and sloppy clay in order to establish a firm, unshakable base. It, too, was a dog-run, but the central breezeway was twenty-six feet wide and the roof was not thrown together; it was most sturdily built and covered with cypress split shingles hewn from Lakeview trees.
To everyone’s surprise, Reuben paid little attention to the porch, accepting one that was both shorter and narrower than his cousin’s, so that when the unusual house was finished, several people, including some of the workmen, said in effect: ‘Hell of a big breezeway. Itty-bitty porch. It don’t match.’
He did not intend it to, for as soon as the plantation began prospering he did three daring things: he boarded up the two open ends of the breezeway, paying great attention to the architectural effect of door-and-window; he built at each far end of the axis a stone chimney, tying the two halves of the house together; and he tore off the inadequate porch and installed instead a magnificent affair supported by six marble Doric columns shipped in segments and at huge expense from New Orleans.
The red-headed Cobbs, as they were called in the community, now had a mansion which would have graced Charleston or Montgomery. It was clean, and white, and spacious, and the happy combination of the two stone chimneys and the six marble pillars gave it a distinction which could be noticed when one first saw it from the steamboat landing down on the lake. But what pleased Reuben most, when he surveyed the whole, was the developing hedge of Osage-orange that enclosed and protected his grand new home.
When the mansions were livable, Sett, as the steadier of the two Cobbs and the more experienced in managing a sizable plantation, cast up the profit-and-loss figures for their enterprise, and when he displayed them to his partners, the wives declared that with Reuben’s sharp purchasing and Sett’s good management, the family was on its way to having a very profitable operation:
10,200 acres bought at various prices, total cost
$14,590
81 Carolina and Georgia slaves, less Hadrian stolen, plus 12 additional acquired en route means 92 at $425 per head, fair average
39,100
Cost of equipment for the slaves, plus cattle, hogs and fowl to keep the plantation running, at $62 per slave
5,704
Total investment $59,394
Counting all slaves, each slave produces .89 bales of cotton per year times 92
82
Each bale contains 480 pounds times 82
39,360
Each pound sells at 10.8¢
$4,250
$4,250 divided by $59,394 yields yearly profit of 7.11%
‘An
d remember,’ cried Reuben when he saw the final figure, ‘nine of us Cobbs had a good living from our land. Each year the value of our slaves increases. And I’m convinced cotton will sell for more next year when it reaches Liverpool.’
Cautiously, lest he excite too much euphoria, Sett added: ‘We’ll soon be showing substantial profit from our mills and gin,’ and Petty Prue burbled: ‘Hail to Cobbs! Best plantation in Texas.’
While the Cobbs were establishing themselves so securely, Yancey Quimper was taking his own giant steps down in Xavier County, for at the moment back in 1848 when he learned of Captain Sam Garner’s death on the uplands of Mexico, he thought: He leaves a widow, damned nice, and two children. With all that land, she’s goin’ to need assistance.
Actually, Garner had not acquired a great deal of land: six hundred and forty acres because of his services at San Jacinto; some acres that his wife, Rachel, had managed to acquire; and a couple of hundred that he had taken over for a bad debt. Right in the heart of Campbell, the county seat, the Garner lands were worth having.
Keeping a watchful eye on the Widow Garner lest some adventurer sneak in ahead of him, General Quimper waited what was called ‘a decent interval’ and then swooped in, his colors flying. Actually, in a frontier settlement like Texas where women were scarce, the decent interval for an attractive widow to mourn after the sudden death of her husband was anywhere from three weeks to four months. Men needed wives; wives needed protection; and orphaned children were a positive boon rather than a hindrance.
When Quimper first began speaking to Rachel Garner about her perilous condition, he stressed only her responsibility for the rearing and education of her children, and in this he was not being hypocritical, for he liked the boys. ‘These are children worth the most careful attention,’ he told her, sounding very much like a clergyman.
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