For those of my Small but Faithful Readership who aren’t Texan, or who haven’t lived in Texas long, I’ll start by saying that Texas declared its independence from Mexico on Wednesday, March 2nd, 1836 at Washington-on-the-Brazos, Texas. The independence convention was a rushed, get-it-done-and-let’s-get-out-of-here affair, because the delegates knew Gral. Santa Anna’s army was beseiging the garrison at San Antonio de Bexar, and they feared that Gral. José Urrea’s army was moving toward Washington. (As it happened, Urrea was still down around Goliad foolin’ with James Fannin, but the delegates didn’t know that.)
The convention met on March first in an ill-constructed, unfinished house; the windows were only closed with cotton sheeting, which did little to keep out the norther that was shaking the building. A committee of five drafted the declaration that day, and after a brief review and perfunctory debate, delegates began signing it the next day. (The short delay was so the secretary to the convention could make a fair copy of the error-ridden draft.) Delegates continued to straggle in from the forks of the creek for a week, and the final signatures weren’t affixed until the tenth. Among those few latecomers was my great-great-great-great-great-uncle, Samuel Price Carson of North Carolina.
Washington never became a real town—the residents were stupid enough to run off the railroads in the 1850s—and almost the only reason for its existence today is that the state parks department maintains a historical park and museum commemorating the independence convention, and every year the park stages a festival on the weekend closest to Independence Day, so M and I drove down to Washington yesterday for the festival. It began late in the morning, so we could leave Austin at a civilized time and make the two hours’ drive to Washington without missing much.
Suitably enough, and like the convention delegates, a blustering norther with winds as high as thirty-five miles an hour kept us company. Unlike them, we didn’t have to deal with cold rain. Other than the wind, the weather was very pretty if chilly.
We arrived just before lunch, in time to take a fast look at the visitors’ center, which was full of families with children, all wanting to be out of the wind. Since it was almost impossible to look at any of the exhibits without being banged into by half a dozen kids yelling “Hey, come look at THIS!” and then dashing away at once, before they could possibly look at anything, M and I started down the hill toward the Texian Army re-enactors’ camp. Along the way we stopped to look at a knife-maker’s booth, with some very pretty pieces displayed for sale, many of them with polychrome-looking handles. I asked, and learned that the handles are dyed using a vacuum process, which I took to be rather like the process used to make Heathergems. I toyed with the idea of buying one, but his prices suggested he was awful proud of his work, so I gave it up.
While we were looking at the knives we heard several loud BOOMs, which I took to be artillery practice in the middle distance, but once we got to the re-enactors’ encampment, it turned out we’d just missed a riflery demonstration. Interestingly, the Texians all seemed to be using percussion-cap rifles—not impossible in 1836, but certainly unlikely. The great majority of guns at that time were still flintlocks. Our bad luck at watching riflery continued throughout the day; it seemed we always arrived just as “the soldiers were excused shooting.”
Instead we went over to the “Texas Institute of Oxenology,” the ox-drover’s tent. The drover had a pretty pair of five-year-old Longhorn steers named Liberty and Justice. After an invitation, M gathered her courage and went up to scratch them gently on the forehead. In a few minutes, the drover got the oxen up and tied them to a gentle tree, then yoked them and hitched them to an artillery caisson. I was impressed at how quickly he got it all done, working on his own. At the tent, the drover’s wife was dextrously twisting together dolls from ragbag scraps of calico; she nearly finished one in the five minutes we stood watching and talking with her.
We had a quick concession-stand lunch, then went into the Star of the Republic Museum. Again, dozens of kids dashing from one case to another in exhibit overload, and probably unable, fifteen minutes later, to describe anything they saw. M went at a more civilized speed (i.e., one you could keep up with), and got stuck for a while at the riverboat exhibit, turning the pilot-house wheel and watching a video shot from a boat working upstream from Navasota. Downstairs, I showed her a broadsheet printing press and quickly described how it was operated. (Yet again I’m reminded that we need to make a trip to Houston Museum of Printing some day soon, on a day when the volunteers who can still run a hand press and a Linotype will be there to put the machines through their paces.)
As we left the museum, we walked up on a woman who was re-caning period cane-bottomed chairs. I would have been happy to stay and watch a while to see it done, but M wasn’t interested, so we went on. Instead, we went down to the Barrington Living History Farm, a historic re-creation of the farmstead belonging to Anson Jones, last president of the Republic of Texas. Along the way, I admired the huisaches, which are in full bloom about now and very pretty, and M admired a pair of grey draft horses out at grass.
For my money, the farm was the best-done part of the entire site. The re-enactors were dressed in really period-appropriate dress, adults and children alike, but weren’t painful about trying to pretend they knew nothing of events since 1845, à la Colonial Williamsburg. M got pulled in by a grandmotherly woman doing shuttle tatting, and with a bit of assistance managed to do several double stitches and a picot or two of her own. I was impressed by how quickly she picked up the tatting motions, and if she had a lesson or two I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she got the hang of it.
Outside the house, we had a quick look into the kitchen, where the docent explained they’d butchered two hogs recently and had a mess of sausage curing now, and that a half-dozen roosters who’d gotten old enough to go to fighting had found themselves doing a star appearance last week in chicken-and-dumplings. This along with a discussion of whether hanging chickens upside down so they lose consciousness before slitting their throats or just wringing their necks was the better method of slaughter. The docent went on to say they’d spared the most docile of the cocks, one named Earl, and that as soon as he worked out he was cock of the walk again, he was crowing all over the henyard. We went out and had a look at Earl and his harem, all of whom had sensibly gotten under shelter and out of the wind.
By this time, two more drovers had brought up a pretty pair of Shorthorn oxen hooked to an open wagon, so we stood and admired them for a bit, then walked down to the vegetable garden to see what was growing (onions, cabbage, lettuce, spinach, and greens, mostly).
Down at the far end of the homestead were a pair of slave cabins and the barn. M wanted to see the barn, because the drovers up at the house had told us they had a new pair of calves and were just starting to work them at breaking and socializing. “Socializing,” we found, turned out to be one of the drovers just hanging out with the calves in the pen, talking to them, rubbing them, and generally getting them used to being around people.
The barn also served as a place to demonstrate woodcarving, blacksmithing, and rope-making. The poor man working the rope machine was also a wood-carver, and horribly harried by kids running around and getting into his work, meddling with everything without permission, and since he was stuck at the rope machine, he couldn’d do a thing to chase them out except yell, with little result. M helped twist a short length of rope, which she got to take home as a souvenir. (The whole time I was wishing for a whistle, to accompany her with a verse of “Casadh an tSúgáin.”)
After that, we watched one of the blacksmiths cranking his fan to blow up the fire in the forge and heat a rod, while I explained to M that when I was a little older than she is now, my father had had a portable forge and he would let me blow the fan for him while he heated the metal. The smith began hammering out the rod, explaining that he thought this time he’d make a decorative pecan leaf. I was willing to stand there and watch him do it, but M began to get bored and fidget, so we caught the shuttle back up the hill, got the car, and drove round the other side of the park to look at the reconstructed Independence Hall. The original was allowed to fall down through neglect, so the state had to build another for the Centennial celebrations in 1936, working from contemporary descriptions and a later photograph. The reconstructed building is nothing extraordinary, just as the original was; indoors, there was a long table with goosequill “pens” and inkwells set out, for kids to try writing. The pens were all cut without a proper nib, so of course writing with them was quite impossible. There was also an oversized photo-reproduction of the Declaration laid out on the table, and I showed M her “Uncle Sam”’s signature, among the last half dozen; Sam didn’t arrive at Washington until March 10th, because he had to come from an area that’s now mostly in Arkansas, more than three hundred miles as the crow flies, and over roads that mostly weren’t there. (As my father used to tell the story, Sam and his companions arrived to find everyone gone but a few clerks frantically packing up the archives, trying to get out before the Mexicans arrived, and they made the clerks get out the Declaration again just so they could sign it. It’s a nice legend, even if it isn’t true.)
After that, we had about seen all there was to see in Washington, so we stopped for ice cream at a general store that’s been converted into a restaurant, and then turned for home.
At Ledbetter on the way back, I noticed something on the south horizon that I first thought was a cloud bank, but realized that it wasn’t shaped right for a cloud bank and couldn’t possibly be. Along about Giddings, I realized I was looking at a king-hell fire of some kind, and my “cloud bank” was the smoke plume, stretching thirty or forty miles downwind (a gusty wind was still blowing out of the north at twenty-five miles an hour or so). That night I learned it was a wildfire in Bastrop County that so far has taken out about two square miles of the Lost Pines forest. I hope the two state parks that bracket the fire area haven’t been too badly damaged; as of this evening, the fire is still only seventy percent contained.
Will you come to the bower I have shaded for you? Fnord.
