Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  Falls County, though, was more than just an agricultural community, thanks to mineral water. In 1908, Dr. John W. Torbett, Sr., built the Torbett Sanatorium next to the hot springs pavilion, starting Marlin’s first general hospital, and the First State Bank opened later that year.18 The healing waters and bucolic setting attracted major-league baseball teams who needed a southern locale for spring training. Charlie Comiskey brought his Chicago White Sox in 1903, and the Philadelphia Phillies, Cincinnati Reds, and St. Louis Browns soon followed, all staying at the New Arlington Hotel, practicing in the mornings and taking baths in the afternoons. In 1908, the New York Giants made Marlin their permanent spring-training camp and built a large ballpark, complete with grandstands.19

  To shore up their power, local governments in 1900 began using white-only primary elections. The U.S. Constitution guaranteed blacks the right to vote in general elections, but primaries were run by the individual parties, which gave them the authority to decide who could participate. Since Republicans stood little chance of winning the general election, the Democratic primaries almost always decided who would win on Election Day. Blacks could vote in the federal election, but since the Democratic nominee would always win, they essentially had no power.20

  Just to make sure blacks couldn’t influence the general election, though, Texas voters, by a 2–1 margin, gave counties the power to impose poll taxes. Supporters believed that eliminating poor people from voting would help pass Prohibition and reduce the influence of recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Whites also argued that a poll tax would reduce voter fraud, but mostly it disenfranchised blacks.21 Voter turnout across Texas plummeted, never breaking 50 percent from 1900 to 1950.22 Black voting dropped from 100,000 in the 1890s to just 5,000 in 1906.23

  Racist whites continued using violence to maintain power, but newspaper reports sparked a backlash among the majority of whites, who grew frustrated with their politicians’ empty rhetoric against vigilantism. Lawmakers soon introduced laws to stop lynchings, and in Texas they dropped from about eighteen a year in the 1890s to ten a year between 1900 and 1903.24

  Simultaneously, though, the same whites who abhorred lynching wanted segregation. In 1907, state lawmakers made it legal for theaters and private amusement parks to segregate whites from blacks, or to ban nonwhites all together. The legislature segregated state prisons and required railroads to build separate waiting rooms in 1909. Every other public accommodation not governed by the legislature took their cues from these new laws, and soon there were white and black entrances to businesses and separate water fountains.25

  BUILDING A BETTER FUTURE

  African-Americans did not fight back, but neither did they sit idle. In Marlin, parents elected P. A. Stamps as the principal of the black school in 1906, and he expanded it to ten grades, for the first time offering more than just an elementary education. Teachers taught classes at the black Davis Chapel Church on the south side of town until the city agreed to build a black high school in 1916 at the corner of Samuel and Aycock streets.26 The new school included facilities to teach home economics, carpentry, and music for the first time and included space for athletics and clubs. The better building and course offerings led black parents to form a parent-teacher association, and more African-Americans sent their children to school than ever before. To accommodate the new students, Stamps rented the Providence Baptist Church and the black Masonic Lodge. In 1925, they named the school after Booker T. Washington.27

  There were still few college-level facilities for blacks in Texas. In those that existed, much of the time was spent teaching remedial classes to get students up to a high school–level of education. In 1914, only 129 African-Americans enrolled in college-level coursework.28

  Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League opened chapters in Dallas and Galveston in 1904, following Washington’s doctrine of developing black communities and avoiding confrontation with whites. R. L. Smith founded the league’s state chapter in Dallas three years later. By 1911, the black business community in Dallas was so robust that it hosted the National Negro Bankers Association’s national convention. Middle-class blacks in Houston and Dallas organized the Negro Protection Congress of Texas in 1906 to enforce law and order when white police would not. Black churches, still the center of the community, counted 396,157 members in 1916.29

  Houston blacks formed the first Texas Chapter of the NAACP in 1916, and by 1919, there were thirty-one chapters and seven thousand members across the state, making it the largest state chapter in the South. White authorities opposed the organization’s confrontational approach, shut down their meetings, and refused to register the group.30 When the NAACP’s white executive secretary, John R. Shillady, met with blacks in Austin, Travis County judge Dave Pickle was waiting. He had warned the Irish New Yorker against “inciting negroes against the whites,” but Shillady held the meeting anyway. Pickle, Constable Charles Hamby, and Ben Pierce found Shillady and beat him unconscious, causing injuries that led to his death in 1920. Pickle said, “I told him our negroes would cause no trouble if left alone. Then I whipped him and ordered him to leave because I thought it was for the best interest of Austin and the state.”31 Local police arrested no one, and the governor, William P. Hobby, said the attack was justified.32

  ENTERTAINERS AND ATHLETES

  Paradoxically, African-Americans became prominent in popular culture. A Texas musician became nationally famous in 1901 for a new style of syncopated, or “ragged,” piano playing popular in red-light districts: ragtime. After writing the “Maple Leaf Rag,” this composer and songwriter, Scott Joplin, moved from Texarkana to New York and became known as the “King of the Ragtime Writers.” In 1905, black cowboy Bill Pickett joined the 101 Ranch Wild West Show and gained fame as a trick rider.33

  Jack “the Galveston Giant” Johnson, an African-American stevedore from Galveston, made history in 1908 by defeating Canadian Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, to become the first black heavyweight champion of the world. Boxing promoters immediately began recruiting white boxers to take back the championship, billing each as “the Great White Hope.” Johnson defeated four of them in 1909 alone. The following year, Johnson scheduled a fight with retired heavyweight champion James Jeffries, a match billed as the “Battle of the Century,” mostly because whites desperately wanted to see Johnson defeated. On the Fourth of July, before twenty thousand people in Reno, Nevada, the fight lasted fifteen rounds before Jeffries threw in the towel to keep a knockout from blemishing his record.34

  Johnson’s victory sparked race riots in fifty cities in twenty-five states, particularly in Texas. Whites felt Johnson had humiliated the entire race, and police scrambled to stop several lynchings that night. African-Americans celebrated with parades and prayer meetings, recognizing a dramatic validation of their equality.35 A team of filmmakers shot extensive footage of the bout and turned it into a film, Jeffries-Johnson World’s Championship Boxing Contest. The Texas legislature banned that film and all future movies that showed Johnson defeating white contenders.36

  Earning huge sums of money, Johnson lived extravagantly, owning fancy cars and tailored clothes. His wealth and fame allowed him to break the biggest taboo of all by openly dating white women, marrying three of them, and prompting white supremacists to call for his lynching. A month after his first wife committed suicide, Johnson was arrested on October 18, 1912, for violating the Mann Act, a federal law that punished the interstate transport of women for immoral purposes. Johnson was traveling with Lucille Cameron, whom some alleged was a prostitute. Cameron refused to cooperate with police and married Johnson six weeks later, making the charges moot. They remained married for twelve years.37

  That didn’t keep federal authorities, though, from arresting Johnson again in Illinois on the same charge, this time involving another alleged prostitute, Belle Schreiber. She did testify against him and an all-white jury convicted him in June 1913. Johnson posted bail and fled the country with Cameron, living
in exile for seven years. In a fight in Havana, the Galveston Giant lost his title in 1915 to Jess Willard, a white boxer from Kansas. Johnson returned to the United States in 1920, surrendered to federal authorities, and spent a year in prison. Many believe racist federal authorities framed Johnson, and in 2009, Congress passed a resolution calling for a presidential pardon, which has not been granted.38

  BEYOND COTTON, CORN, AND CATTLE

  R.E.L. celebrated the birth of his first and only son, Albert Edward Lee Tomlinson, on October 17, 1901. Albert, who was nicknamed “Tommy,” in many ways came of age with modern Texas. He was born the year the state’s most famous oil well, Spindletop, came in outside of Beaumont, unleashing 100,000 barrels of crude a day. That salt dome became the most productive oil field in the world, giving birth to Gulf Oil, Texaco, and Chevron. Suddenly, Texas had more to sell than just cotton and cattle.39

  Tomlinson Hill was becoming more divided with every generation of white Tomlinsons. The family’s penchant for naming their children after their brothers and cousins makes telling their story difficult, so I will not try to give a complete accounting of all of them, or where they went. But by 1900, the sons of James Tomlinson, William Tomlinson and Albert Perry Tomlinson, were comanaging the farm on Tomlinson Hill. Albert Perry’s wife was Bennie Etheridge, the younger sister of R.E.L.’s wife, whose twin was married to Frank Stallworth.40

  The white Tomlinsons spent most of their time managing sharecroppers and the black workers on the land they had retained for themselves. They kept track of what the tenants owed in seed, fertilizer, and equipment and checked on their crops about once a week, because a failed crop would hurt the planter and tenant equally. The whites devoted most of their effort to livestock and land trades, where they made even more money.41

  In 1908, Gus was the oldest living Tomlinson, at the age of sixty, and worked his farm in Lott. He and other early settlers watched the modernization of Falls County and worried that the younger generation would soon forget their work transforming the prairie. Gus was ten years old when he arrived from Alabama and first saw the Texas savanna filled with deer, bear, and snakes. Now automobiles whizzed past him as he rode horseback, and he recognized fewer and fewer people when he went to town. So on the Fourth of July 1902, he and thirty-one other men founded the Old Settlers Association of Falls County. They appointed committees to write bylaws and to organize a reunion of old settlers the following year on July 3. They announced the group’s purpose was to “brighten and quicken our interest in the history and traditions of our county.”42

  Membership was open only to white residents who had settled in the county prior to 1887, but that was soon expanded to include “all white persons who have been citizens of Falls County ten years and all native born, female white citizens who have arrived at the age of 18.” At the 1909 reunion, the local chapter of the United Confederate Veterans made a strong showing and were invited to attend all future meetings as full members. The Marlin and Lott chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy participated in the 1910 reunion, and soon membership in the UDC automatically meant membership in the Old Settlers Association. In 1911, the association changed its name to the Old Settlers and Confederate Veterans Association.43

  The association initially declared itself nonpartisan, and forbade all talk of politics, but when it filed its charter with the state in 1911, the group added a new purpose: to support an educational institution “to teach the rising and younger generations the true history of the South and the perpetuation of the memory of those who engaged in the Civil War; and of the early pioneers who underwent hardships in the settlement of Texas.”44

  From the very first year, the Old Settlers wanted a plot of land of their own for the annual reunion. Albert Tomlinson offered to donate some land and sell more to the association at the geographic center of Tomlinson Hill, near a highway intersection less than a mile from the Brazos River. The association agreed to Albert’s offer of seventeen acres, and members raised money to buy the tract. R.E.L. and William Tomlinson joined Albert, along with Harry Stallworth, Pete Landrum, George Gassaway, and a half dozen other members of the Old Settlers to clear the land, build a shed, and construct barbecue pits. The Old Settlers and Confederate Veterans held their first reunion on Tomlinson Hill in 1912. An open tabernacle, built by members in 1914 from rough-hewn posts, still stands today.45

  The summer reunions attracted people from across the region, and the early membership constituted a Who’s Who of Falls County. Albert, whom everyone called “Uncle Albert,” was one of the most active members and often served as an officer of the association. The group hired blacks from the Tomlinson and Stallworth farms to help at the reunions, which were basically huge picnics. The organizers established a tradition of saying a special prayer for the early settlers and Civil War veterans who had died since the last reunion.46

  TOWN LIFE

  R.E.L. and his family attended the First Baptist Church in Marlin, and as conservative churchgoing folk, they supported Prohibition and welcomed the 1917 local election that banned alcohol sales in Falls County.47 The ban did little to slow the sale of beer and whiskey, though, as an underground market quickly emerged, and cafés resorted to speakeasy tactics or simple bribery to keep the alcohol flowing. A farmer named Bozeman diversified from roses and honey to keeping a still behind the hives, a tactic to discourage the law from snooping around. He delivered the bottles hidden in bunches of roses.48

  R.E.L. expanded his realty business and specialized in royalty and lease agreements for oil prospecting and tenant farming. But he remained interested in education and served on the Marlin Independent School District Board of Trustees while Tommy was in junior high and high school. He helped negotiate the financing for a new white high school, and his name was on the cornerstone when construction began in May 1917. Tommy was one of the first students to enter the new school at the corner of Capps and Oak streets that fall.49

  Tommy was a typical teenager, playing baseball at Rimes Park with his cousin John. When he was a junior and John was a sophomore at Marlin High, they played one another on class teams, Tommy in the outfield and John as a pinch hitter. The juniors won in 1918.50 Tommy also kept score at the school’s basketball games. He and his friends would sometimes sneak out in the middle of the night and shoot at the school bell with a .22 rifle, waking up everyone who lived nearby, or sometimes they’d tip over an outhouse with someone inside.51

  World War I made headlines in the Marlin Democrat from 1914 onward, but not until German submarines sank seven U.S. merchant ships in early 1917 did President Woodrow Wilson join the fight. Congress declared war on Germany on April 6 and instituted a draft a month later. The president activated 116 Marlin men serving in the National Guard and transferred them to the Thirty-sixth Infantry Division. By July, more than 3,800 Falls County men had registered for the draft. The War Department conscripted 402 whites and 80 African-Americans.52 About 25 percent of the 31,000 men conscripted from Texas were black, even though African-Americans made up only 16 percent of the population. Many whites opposed conscripting blacks, who largely supported the war, because they objected to giving African-Americans weapons.53

  R.E.L. was too old to fight, and, at sixteen, Tommy was too young. But they participated in dozens of patriotic rallies and fund-raisers. The Marlin High School band played concerts of patriotic music and sold Liberty Bonds to raise money for the Red Cross. About 115 local men organized a home guard using their hunting rifles and became Company H of the Texas National Guard, known locally as the Tom Connally Rifles, after their congressman.54

  The first Falls County soldier to die in combat was Irby Curry, nicknamed “Rabbit” for his speed on the football field. Curry was Tommy’s cousin from the Stallworth side of the family. Rabbit had played football at Vanderbilt University, where the stadium is still named after him for his battlefield heroics. The First Baptist Church held a memorial service for him, but his body was buried in France.

  The
warring nations signed an armistice on November 11, 1918, with the fighting ending at 11:00 A.M. Like people in most American small towns, Marlinites took to the streets in a giant, joyful procession and afterward went to their churches for prayer services.55

  Tommy was in his senior year, and after the armistice his final semester was especially festive. He had a great year playing football and was named a letterman.56 For their senior play, the class of 1918 performed The Yokohama Maid to a standing-room-only crowd in the school auditorium, and Tommy donned Oriental makeup to sing in the chorus. Tommy’s commencement ceremony took place on May 26, and the Marlin Democrat ran portraits of all of the seniors in the newspaper that afternoon. As a school board member, R.E.L. sat proudly on the stage when Tommy collected his diploma. R.E.L. convinced Tommy to follow in his footsteps and attend Texas A&M. While more than two million American men were taking off military uniforms, Tommy put one on as a member of the Corps of Cadets.

  R.E.L.’s minerals royalty and leasing business was going strong in the late 1910s and early 1920s, a period of crazed oil and gas speculation. Wildcat oilmen drilled wells all over the state, hoping to strike it big. R.E.L. drilled two test wells on Tomlinson Hill and struck both oil and gas. He founded the Deer Creek Oil and Gas Company, and he ran ads in the Dallas Morning News in October 1918, announcing that he had six thousand acres leased, and offered an “attractive proposition to driller with rig who can move at once.” R.E.L. had big dreams of making a fortune, but the deposits ultimately turned out to be insufficient to make money.57 Oil wells dotted Falls County, but none of them became fortune-making gushers.

  Marlin businessmen formed a Chamber of Commerce in 1919, and among its most prominent members were the Levys, who ran a general store, a retail grocery store, and eventually a wholesale grocery operation. Marx Levy was a Jewish traveling salesman originally from Poland who arrived in Marlin with the first railway in 1870. He was one of the first Jews to settle in the county and built his business near the train station. Marx was instrumental in building the hotels and bathhouses for the mineral-water tourism business and had several sons, including Moses Levy, who expanded the family’s businesses.58