Big Thicket People: Larry Jene Fisher's Photographs of the Last Southern Frontier (Bridwell Texas History)

Big Thicket People

Bridwell Texas History Series

Big Thicket People Larry Jene Fisher’s Photographs of the Last Southern Frontier

Thad Sitton and C. E. Hunt Foreword by Maxine Johnston

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2008 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2008 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fisher, Larry Jene.   Big Thicket people : Larry Jene Fisher’s photographs of the last southern frontier / Thad Sitton and C. E. Hunt. — 1st ed.    p.   cm. — (Bridwell Texas history series)   Includes bibliographical references.   isbn 978-0-292-71782-4 (alk. paper)   1. Big Thicket (Tex.)—Social life and customs—20th century—Pictorial works.  2. Country life—Texas—Big Thicket—History—20th century— Pictorial works.  3. Outdoor life—Texas—Big Thicket—History—20th century—Pictorial works.  4. Big Thicket (Tex.)—Biography—Pictorial works.  5. Big Thicket (Tex.)—Social life and customs—20th century. 6. Country life—Texas—Big Thicket—History—20th century.  7. Outdoor life—Texas—Big Thicket—History—20th century.  8. Big Thicket (Tex.)—Biography.  9. Fisher, Larry Jene.  10. Photographers—Texas, East—Biography.  I. Sitton, Thad, 1941– .  II. Hunt, C. E.  III. Title. F392.H37F57 2008 976.4'15—dc22 2007025086

For Lance Rosier

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Contents

Foreword by Maxine Johnston  ix Preface and Acknowledgments  xiii 1 Introduction: Plain Folks | thad sitton   1 2 The Photographic Legacy of the Renaissance Man of East Texas | c. e. hunt  17 3 Photo Sequences, with Introductory Essays  27 Southerners in the Big Woods  28 Porch Portraits  34 Dogs  40 Camps  46 Deer Hunts  52 Farming: From Hand to Mouth  56 Syrup Mills  64 Rooter Hogs and Southern Stock Raising  70 Tie Makers  74 Stave Makers  78 Chimney Daubings  82 Peckerwood Sawmills  86 Major Logging Operations  90 Turpentining  100 Town Life  104 Church Picnic at Pine Ridge  112 Funerals and Golden Weddings  118 Fundamentalist Church Services  124 Dances and Other Amusements  128 Lance Rosier and Family  132 Notes  137 Bibliography  139

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Foreword by Maxine Johnston

Larry Jene Fisher was legendary in the Southeast Texas of the 1930s and 1940s. His legend has diminished somewhat with time, but this extraordinary work by two perceptive interpreters like Thad Sitton and C. E. Hunt should remedy that. Everything that Larry Jene did attracted friends and attention. He was an accomplished organist—even if he played pieces often foreign to Saratoga ears. He was a pilot with the Civil Air Patrol. In his Saratoga years, his camera was part of his habitual appearance, and he was a superb photographer. He was interested in virtually everything that people did for their livelihoods or for their amusement, and he seemed compelled to record every living thing that grew. His sidekick was Lance Rosier, “Mr. Big Thicket.” Can anyone cite a more advantageous combination of talents? I only met Larry Jene once—when Alice Cashen and I were mowing the grass and clipping around gravestones at Guedry Cemetery near Batson, Texas. That was also my first look at Lance Rosier. The date ­doesn’t matter, and I’ve forgotten anyway—I was probably around 18 or 20 years old. On that occasion at Guedry Cemetery, Larry Jene bounced out of an old battered car, acknowledged my introduction, and turned to Alice. He and Lance were looking for a flower that supposedly grew on Batson Prairie. While Larry and Alice talked, Lance put me through a battery of questions: Where was I from? I ­didn’t sound like an East Texan. Was I married, etc., etc.? That may have been the first face-to-face meeting, but I had already heard and read stories about both men. While I was Alice’s English student at South Park High School in Beaumont, she suggested I write a paper on the Big Thicket. I read my way through numerous articles about Lance and about R. E. Jackson of the East Texas Big Thicket Association, and I was captivated by some of Larry Jene’s feature stories in

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the Beaumont Enterprise. That study had a profound influence. I began collecting Big Thicket stories by “Ab” Abernethy, Milton Turner, Donald Streator, Louis Hofferbert, Sig Byrd, Frank X. Tolbert, and others. And I started inviting myself on field trips with professors from what was then Lamar State College of Technology—often led by Lance. In the 1930s R. E. Jackson, president of the East Texas Big Thicket Association, had recruited Fisher to serve as “official photographer” for the Association. The Biological Survey of the East Texas Big Thicket Area (Parks, et al. 1938) is illustrated with his pictures. The ETBTA letterhead identified Fisher as secretary-treasurer and carried his photo logo, the “Lone Monarch,” a longleaf pine towering over the forest. The importance of Jackson’s and Fisher’s efforts to save 435,000 acres of the Big Thicket cannot be overestimated. Fisher left the Thicket shortly after I met him, but Lance never tired of talking about him. A lot of Thicket folks shared that affection—people like Harold Nicholas, another Thicket naturalist and artist; Juanita Martin, an English teacher who kept a scrapbook about Larry; and Batson native Alice Cashen. Of course, no one ever lacks an enemy or two, and during World War II one of Larry Jene’s accused him of being a German spy. This allegation was debunked in a delightful tongue-incheek article by Donald Streator in the Beaumont Enterprise. Around 1968, Lance Rosier mentioned to me the Fisher albums and negatives and asked what I thought he should do with them. They were stored in a shed near his house, subject to all manner of heat, humidity, and insects. After looking at them with Lance, I recommended placing them in a library and special collections. At the time Lamar’s library ­didn’t have such facilities, but Lois Parker and I were collecting Big Thicket material, and this would be an incentive—indeed, a “coup.” The transfer was not immediate. Lance died on March 12, 1970, and his nephew, James Elmo Rosier, presented the collection to Lamar on his behalf. In April the Library issued a news release about the gift and opened an exhibit of selected photographs. Over the years, the negatives were used a few times, including in the Thicket Explorer, a festschrift honoring Lance. George Hardy, a descendant of R. E. Jackson, used Fisher photographs in exhibits for the observance of R. E. Jackson Week in 1997.



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Although my acquaintance with Fisher is mostly secondhand, one comes to know others by working personally with their legacy—in this case Larry Jene’s photos, plays, and research. He is one of my Thicket icons, and thanks to Sitton and Hunt, Fisher will now be introduced to new audiences in perpetuity through his incomparable images of Big Thicket people and environments.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

Choosing a selection of photographs from the surviving work of Big Thicket photographer Larry Jene Fisher seemed like an easy task until we actually began the process. Seventy-year-old 35mm contact prints proved hard to see, decisions between images proved difficult to make, and in the end we needed an embarrassing amount of time and all the help we could get. On several occasions, after planning to spend a long day in the library archives working with the photos, we found ourselves exhausted and incapable of making decisions after only three or four hours. In addition, unbeknownst to us, a cruel reality lay in wait for would-be editors of the Fisher photo collection. Not every wonderful Fisher contact print had a wonderful negative to accompany it, and so our selection process was periodically interrupted by intervals of Biblical weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. The results are worth it, we think. As a professional photographer, Larry Fisher seems self-trained and at times a little conserving of film, as the lines of contact prints reveal, but Fisher had a wonderful eye and great empathy for his Big Thicket subjects. Like the old story of the Hardin County boy sent out to hunt with only three shells for his gun, Fisher rather often returned with three squirrels for the frying pan. Fisher’s photos often record scenes from the now-remote world of the Southern countryside before the great cultural watershed of World War II. Sometimes they depict people and places specific to the Texas Big Thicket. And sometimes they go beyond these things to depict human realities at the level of great photographic art. To our eyes, the photo on page 36, “Jordan family portrait,” is one such example. In this sickbed scene, family members gather in loving communion around the bed of the elderly person, but at the same time they seem to exist separately, each by herself or himself, in different planes of light. Their faces also display very different attitudes toward the photographer (or at least to-

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ward being photographed). The more one studies this extraordinary image, the stranger it appears. We found the photo on page 36 in a line of negatives of other subjects. In a way often characteristic of the photography of Larry Jene Fisher, it is a single unerring shot to the heart. UT Press is to be commended for waiting for a manuscript delayed far beyond the date in its original publishing agreement. Maxine Johnston and the Big Thicket Association made the whole project possible, and Maxine personally came to our rescue on several occasions. Photo technician Cathy Spence did a fine job processing excellent prints from Fisher’s now-antique negatives, some of them badly curled from too many years languishing in hot rooms before donation to Lamar University Library. We owe thanks to the staff of the Library, especially to Charlotte Holliman of Special Collections, who helped us in many ways on many days. Bruce Drury of Lamar University also ably advised and assisted us on the project. Finally, when the photos and manuscript at long last arrived at UT Press, Sponsoring Editor Allison Faust sent them out for review and comment to arguably the foremost authorities on the Texas Big Thicket, F. E. “Ab” Abernethy and A. Y. “Pete” Gunter, men who are not only scholars of the Thicket, but also hunters, fishermen, naturalists, photographers, and canoeists of its woods and waters. Their comments and suggestions helped a lot. We think that Larry Fisher—and his friend Lance Rosier—would have been pleased.

Thad Sitton and C. E. Hunt

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Big Thicket People

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1 Introduction: Plain Folks

Thad Sitton

The Southern backwoodsmen who lived in the Big Thicket of East Texas had no agreed-upon name for who they were and what they did for a living. They described themselves to the census takers of 1900, 1910, and thereafter as farmers, stockmen, tie makers, loggers, and other things, seemingly at a loss to choose a single occupation from the many activities they engaged in to get a living from the woods and swamps. (They tended to list themselves by what they had been doing most lately; one man reported his vocation as “frog gigging.”) They were nothing special, they told outsiders, just “plain folks.” During the 1930s, organist-turned-photographer Larry Jene Fisher settled at the village of Saratoga in Hardin County among these plain folks and began twenty years of recording the backwoods lifeways of Big Thicket people. Not long after his arrival, Fisher photographed a work party of neighbors building a “mud-daub” chimney on Virgil Rosier’s log house near Thicket, Texas. As in this case, the community social event of the “chimney daubing” came at the very end of log cabin construction. A pole-and-stick chimney frame previously had been built on the north end of Rosier’s cabin; now a social party of men assembled to make light work of a heavy task. They gathered dirt from a nearby “mayhaw flat,” mixed it with water and a binder material of grey moss in a low box, then treaded it into the proper consistency with their bare feet. At this point, skilled mud daubers took positions at either side of the log frame while other men tossed them bread-loaf-sized “mud cats,” hand-formed from the mixing box, to be “daubed” into the chimney. As hours passed, the chimney rose toward the eaves, while the party of mud daubers labored, talked, and joked, and Larry Fisher recorded the process.1 In landscapes deficient in native building stone, mud-daub construction was a basic part of the bag of tricks rural Southerners used to wrest a living from the wilderness, but almost nobody had photographed these old folk techniques. Later, Larry Jene Fisher would record images of many other neglected occasions of Southern backwoods life—deer-hunt camps, stockmen ear­­marking “rooter hogs,” rural church congregations engaged in “dinner-on-the-grounds,” syrup processing, and “tie hackers” and “stave makers” at work in the deep woods. A well-traveled outsider from North Texas, Larry Fisher had the perspective to recognize that he had arrived at one of the rare places across



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the South where wilderness, and the old lifeways based on wilderness, persisted. There were a few others beside the Big Thicket of Texas, almost equally unrecorded—parts of the Appalachian highlands, the “Scrub” of north Florida, the “Ten Thousand Islands” west of the Everglades, and other places. In 1930 a good many smaller pockets of Texas wilderness and wilderness ways also persisted in areas generally given over to cotton farming, railroads, and progress. More often than not these were swampy bottomlands—for example, the many miles of river bottoms that local people called “the Bends” along the San Antonio River in Refugio County, Texas, and the “Between the Creeks” area south of the Sulfur River in northern Titus County, Texas.2 A diverse lifestyle of small farming, free-range stock raising, and subsistence-based hunting, fishing, and gathering characterized such zones of surviving frontier culture all across the South, with the primary marker being the absence of a stock law. And this “free range” meant a great deal more than the simple right to range one’s stock on others’ land. People fenced out woods stock from their cotton, corn, and cane fields with zigzag rail fences or barbed wire, but outside the fences the hogs and cattle from many families mixed and merged on the open range. From 1930 to 1960 local traditions not only gave southeastern Texans the right to trespass and to range livestock on others’ property, but they could, in addition, go on other people’s land to hunt, fish, trap, cut firewood, collect hickory nuts, harvest bee trees, build stock pens and fishing shacks, and improve the common range by setting the woods on fire. A perimeter fence around one’s property was an un-neighborly act, violating the customs of the free range, so virtually nobody had one (even if they wished for one). At the outer limits of generally accepted free-range rights were such practices as fur trapping, stave making, tie hacking, and shingle making—all of which were disapproved by some users of the open range because they were done for profit and not for personal use but which were still common, especially on the lands of absentee landlords.3 Not surprisingly, a lot of land squatting also typified these zones of surviving free range and frontier lifestyle. Traveler John A. Caplen from Georgia crossed a portion of the Big Thicket in 1887 and well described the wilderness and its denizens. Very similar words could have been written about parts of the Thicket as late as Larry Fisher’s arrival. pl a i n fol k s |



In a ride of 150 miles through these two counties, [Hardin and Polk] there is one continuous dense growth of tall pines, oaks, magnolias, and numerous other forest trees. As far as the eye can see, it is the same; the tangled undergrowth and fallen trees block and interpose an almost impassable barrier in the way of any kind of vehicle. In many places we have to get down our hands and knees to crawl through the thick, close-knitted growth of baygall bushes and cane breaks. Not a human can be seen for miles. Very few of the descendants of the old settlers own any land. For the last forty years they have been in the habit of settling upon any land fit for cultivation. After finding a good, rich land (hammock) the piney woods settler will commence felling and cutting the trees and underbrush away from where he will have a log rolling. The people have been in the habit of using every man’s land for their own for so many years that they have come to believe that the land has no owners.4

And why not? As a former squatter explained to a visitor around 1960: “I can’t tell you how long we used that land for nothing. That’s the reason we ­didn’t own none of it—we ­didn’t have to buy it, we already had it! We ­didn’t want to pay taxes on it, when we already had it.” 5 Land squatting lasted as long as the tradition of the free range in some places, including in the Big Thicket. Superiors transferred Game Warden Clarence Beezley to Hardin County from his native Central Texas in 1950, and Beezley found East Texas customs astonishingly different. For example, free-range hogs still roamed the courthouse lawn at Kountze, and local courts refused to convict “outlaw hunters,” no matter the game warden’s evidence against them. After experiencing much “culture shock,” as he called it, Beezley aptly summed up what was different about the Big Thicket in two related points: the survival into the middle of the twentieth century of a tradition of “living off the land,” and the “Indian idea that the land belongs to everybody.” 6 Subsistence lifestyles based on use rights of other people’s land lasted much later in the Big Thicket than in other parts of the country. Citizens of Hardin County and Polk County did not vote for a comprehensive stock law until 1957, the year after photographer Larry Jene Fisher’s untimely passing, and only then did the death knell finally sound for



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the old lifeways. Ellen Walker lived until 1974, and near the close of her long life she narrated the following detailed account of growing up in a frontier Big Thicket at the turn of the century. Her testimony recalled the lifeways of the early 1900s, but the patterns of daily life she described might easily have come from the 1850s (or from 1930). No wonder that Larry Jene Fisher tried so persistently to photograph their remnants. Walker recollected: When I was a girl there was big timber on the high ground, virgin pines five feet through, and just a little underbrush. In other places it was so thick you ­couldn’t get through without a hack knife, and ever’ kind of animal you heard of, nearly. Turkey go in herds, just like a bunch of chickens. Deer aplenty, and I’ve seen wild horses that ­didn’t belong to nobody, ­couldn’t catch ’em. I guess there’s been wild hogs in here always, and wild cattle. Anybody could go and kill one when he wanted to. They’d go out and kill a wild beef, kill one and divide it with the neighbors. ­Didn’t everybody have a gun, and a lot of ’em that had guns ­didn’t have enough money to make bullets. There was plenty of blackberries and mayhaws and worlds of black walnuts and chinquapins. There was worlds of wild flowers in the woods. Wild honeysuckle was my favorite. Over yonder, that big cypress brake was just covered in palmettos. Ma used to make fans out of ’em. Sometimes she made ’em out of turkey feathers, from the wing and tail. That made a good ’un. We raised what we eat, had a garden. Always had a patch of corn and sweet potatoes, sugar cane and maybe some peanuts. We’d raise peas and when they’d get dry Ma’d put somethin’ in ’em to keep the weevils out. Had all kinds of meat: venison, turkey, squirrel. We’d cure bear meat. You can cure it just as good as you can hog meat, and you can season with it, too. You can eat all you want of it and drink the lard, and it won’t make you sick. I liked bear meat, but in the summertime, I wanted venison. We could get that any day we wanted it, and turkey too. I loved squirrel just any time, and we eat rabbit, and sometimes coon in the wintertime, when they was big and fat. We’d cut venison up in strips and dry it on a scaffold in the sun, jerky. When it dried, put it in a sack and hang it up. We ­didn’t farm but a little. We had a horse and a plow, but we done it mostly by hand. We had an old hand mill and ground our own cornmeal, and we made good hominy. Made it with fireplace ashes. We’d make our soap pl a i n fol k s |



out of hickory ashes. Make you a hopper and put the ashes in it and let it stay four or five days. Pour a little water on it and after a while it’d go to drippin’. Put a pot under it to catch it. Put your grease in there and go to cookin’. It’d make good jelly soap, never very hard. When we killed hogs we’d make enough lye soap to do all year, stored it in big old gourds, sugar gourds, maybe eight inches across. I’ve still got my mother’s iron skillet, has legs and a lid. We’d cook our bread in it, put the lid on and put a little fire on top and on the bottom. That’s where I learned to cook, on a fireplace. Nearly everybody had some fruit trees and we’d preserve our peaches, use homemade sugar, made it ourselves from sugar cane. We always growed enough cane to make our own sugar and syrup. We growed nearly everything we needed except coffee. We’d buy a big sack of green coffee beans and roast it ourselves. There were some salt licks where people got their salt, and there was salt springs where people would go and camp out maybe for a week and get enough salt to last all year. Made our shoes out of wild cowhide; used a wooden trough for tanning. Soak the hide in alum water and red oak bark, bark turn it yellow. Lay the hide on a log and beat it with a club, while it is wet, to get the hair off and make it soft. Don’t dry it in the sun; that would make it stiff. Daddy made the sole first and then put the top on with wooden pegs. Had an awl, punch a hole, and put a peg in there, and them pegs ­didn’t come out neither. Ma made all our clothes, the thread, the cloth, all by hand. Made cloth on Grandma’s old loom, made it out of cotton or wool. They’d dye it different colors. Get bark off of trees to dye it. And they raised their indigo bushes. They’d dye blue with it, the prettiest blue you ever did see, and it ­wouldn’t wash out. Indigo grows in the Thicket now. We used to have revivals in the summer, last a week or two, and the girls would dye their dresses two or three different colors during the revival so it would look like a new dress.7

Europeans had not arrived in the New World with the fine-grained survival skills for the Southern big woods suggested by Ellen Walker’s account. The three shiploads of settlers sent out by the London Company starved to death at Jamestown during the winter of 1607–1608 in the midst of a wooded landscape teeming with game—large herds of deer, bears in every thicket, flocks of turkeys, and fish so plentiful that



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horses sometimes refused to wade creeks where they were running. Unable to pen or feed their hogs and cattle in late autumn, Jamestown settlers released their stock into surrounding woods to die and were astonished to find them fat and prosperous the following spring. Hogs had prospered on the acorns of numerous oaks and cattle on the cane of canebrakes. The Jamestown settlers had done much less well than their livestock, however. In the spring of 1608, only 38 men remained alive of the original 105.8 By a decade later, as historians Ray Allen Billington and Martin Ridge noted, the Jamestown settlers had learned a “rudimentary knowledge of frontier technique.” Friendly Indians taught them to plant corn, hunt deer and wild turkeys, catch fish, and clothe themselves in the skins of animals. Another half century later, forest adaptation had progressed much further, and the Southern frontier produced real woodsmen. Billington and Ridge concluded: In 1682 both Virginia and Maryland began employing patrols of mounted border rangers to ride constantly along the frontier, ready to fend off minor raids or give warning of major attacks. Clad in buckskin, carrying guns and long knives, mounted on spirited ponies, and steeped in the lore of the Indian and the forest, these rangers were true frontiersmen whose wilderness skills testified to the amount learned by the English since the first colonists starved to death amidst plenty at Jamestown.9

The settlers who moved into southeastern Texas in the midnineteenth century were the inheritors of over two centuries of accumulated experience of hunting, fishing, gathering, farming, and stock raising in the southern forest. Folklorist William A. Owens, who interviewed the children and grandchildren of the Big Thicket pioneers in the 1930s, described a typical arrival. Camping out under trees while they worked, they built log houses, covered them with hand-split boards, and chinked and daubed them with red clay. They built stick-and-dirt chimneys. Fireplaces were for heat and cooking, and for light at night, the only light except for the red smoky glare of a lightwood knot. They cleared only as much land as they could work with one horse hooked to a Georgia stock or Kelly turning plow, enough land for a little cotton, a little corn—for a patch pl a i n fol k s |



of sweet potatoes and black-eyed peas. Their cattle grazed on the open range. So did the razorback hogs. There was elbow room and to spare. They had no wish to obliterate the wilderness.10

Early definitions of the Big Thicket included a large part of southeastern Texas. The pioneers’ Big Thicket (or “Big Woods”) extended all the way from the coastal prairie north to the Old San Antonio Road that passed through Nacogdoches, and from the Sabine River west to the Trinity River (or even to the Brazos). Later estimates placed the “real” Big Thicket somewhere between the Neches and the Trinity rivers on the east and west and the Alabama-Coushatta lands and the town of Beaumont on the north and south. When William A. Owens began his fieldwork in southeastern Texas during the 1930s, he found few people willing to admit to living in the Big Thicket. It was always located “down yan ways a piece.” He thought he understood the reason: “By too many the Big Thicket was thought to be the worst of the backwoods.” As one elderly man told him, “there’s a heap of bad blood in here ain’t never been bred out.” By the 1930s rural Southerners who persisted in living the old backwoods lifestyle had accumulated a variety of derogatory labels, mostly applied to them by townsmen. These included hillbillies, sandhillers, crackers, and rednecks, among others. Natives of Hardin and Polk counties in Owens’ fieldwork area often divided Big Thicket inhabitants into “pineys” and “swampers,” with the former somewhat looking down their noses at the latter. Based on his interviews, Owens thought he discerned a historical basis to this. At first, the stream of western migration had bypassed the Big Thicket to the north and south. Over time, migrants settled the better-drained pine hills of the Upper Thicket and around the edges of the Lower Thicket—sandy, drier, more open woodlands that resembled their previous lands back in Alabama and Mississippi and were more amenable to traditional crops of cotton, corn, sweet potatoes, and peas. Only after a generation or two did the children and grandchildren of the pioneers venture out to settle higher ground, “hammocks,” in the swampy, less familiar, and somewhat forbidding Lower Thicket.11 This latter-day peopling of the wilderness went on even after 1900. As A. Randolph Fillingim told an interviewer, around 1904:



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Daddy moved into the Big Thicket, the real Hardin County Big Thicket. South of Kountze seven miles, we chiseled out—I say chiseled out because it was a pain to put that land in cultivation—a little field, with virgin timber on it and no market; we had to cut and burn it. The Big Thicket ­wasn’t touched except for a few acres each family whittled out for growing corn for the horses and hogs. It was so thick and so much big timber on it, it was just impossible to have a big farm. Now we had about eight acres and there was four of us boys to do that, clear it and put it in cultivation.12

Fillingim did not exactly say so, but this may have been “lost land” acquired by “squatter’s rights,” an old tradition around the Big Thicket. Swampy bottoms had long held little value, and absentee landowners often left their holdings unvisited for decades at a time—hence, “lost land.” A homestead of a few improved acres openly occupied for ten years could establish a claim to 160 acres of somebody else’s land by the “law of adverse possession,” otherwise known as squatter’s rights.13 Brown Wiggins of the Big Thicket accurately explained: “If you went and settled on a place and went to living there, anywhere in these woods, if you paid taxes on it and they ­didn’t bother you for ten years, the court would give you a title to 160 acres. Some of these squatters would get 160 acres off most any big land owner before he would know it.”14 In truth, the Fillingim and Wiggins homesteads and others like them did not even need as much as 160 acres, so long as the customs of the free range persisted. Until 1960 families in the Thicket earmarked hogs and branded cattle and turned them loose to roam and fend for themselves across thousands of acres of other people’s land. As at Jamestown, the hogs ate mast (and many other things), and the cattle consumed bottomland switch cane and the thin grass under the pines. Stockmen kept their free-range hogs and cattle in tenuous semidomestication by feeding them occasional treats of corn and salt. At least twice a year, usually in the spring and fall, stockmen went out with herder dogs on “hog hunts” and “cow hunts” to locate and work their hogs and cattle in the deep woods. They marked and neutered young animals, doctored sick ones, and selected meat stock for butchering and sale. Often stockmen drove them to a nearby pen in the woods to do this, but sometimes they worked them on the spot.

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Stockmen varied among themselves about how much time and trouble they took with this working of stock. Rougher stockmen with wilder hogs might choose to accomplish all these things at once, usually in the late fall, “hog killing time.” While his dogs bayed the furious hogs, the horseman might reach into the bunch with a cord loop on a cane pole, snag the unmarked pigs of the year one by one, and haul the squealing swine to his saddle for swift castration and ear marking. Then he might draw a rifle from his saddle sheath and shoot all the “meat hogs” “barrs” (barrows)—he needed for smokehouse or sale, releasing all the rest. An adaptation to the big woods, this Southern stock tradition practiced in the Big Thicket little resembled the stock tradition of the classic western cowboy. Hogs, forest animals, often were more important than cattle to the southern stockman, though both species were raised in the woods and in much the same way. Stockmen used horses for transport and for protection in working their dangerous semi-feral animals, but rarely for roping. Southern cowboys (and hogboys) favored stock whips, flat English work saddles, and herder dogs. Dogs, not horses, were the key; they used their fine sense of smell to locate hogs and cattle in the trackless Thicket, to “bay them up,” to drive them to the nearest stock pen, and to protect the stockmen when—as often was the case—they worked their dangerous animals on foot. Up to around 1910 and the virtual elimination of Big Thicket bears and cougars, stock dogs often did double duty as predator hounds.15 In truth, residents of the Big Thicket valued their dogs almost beyond anything else. The multi-purpose stock dog, especially the favored “black-mouthed cur,” served as an essential tool (the essential tool, many would say) of the Southern frontier lifestyle. A. L. “Leak” Bevil, former county judge, stockman, and bear hunter explained to an interviewer: Folks in this country had to have dogs and had to have vicious dogs. A good cur dog, properly trained, was worth just about whatever you had to pay for him, for you used your dog every day for everything. A man used his dog to pen his cattle; he used his dog to pen his hogs; he used his dog to protect him at night; and he used him to hunt. He was used for hogs, bear, deer, cattle, panther, everything.16

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For forty years before Larry Fisher’s arrival at Saratoga in the 1930s, the plain folks of the Big Thicket had lived in an uneasy relationship with the coming of major industries—railroads, big timber companies, and the oil boom that centered around Saratoga, Batson, and Sour Lake—but these things had impacted their way of life far less than in other places across the South. Avoiding the depths of the Thicket, railroads were built through the region in the 1880s, followed immediately by sawmill towns that located along the new tracks and constructed branch railroads to lumber surrounding pine forests. Lumber operations like the huge Kirby Lumber Company amassed large timber holdings by 1910, but Kirby and other lumbermen mostly ignored the hardwood creek and river bottoms and the swamplands. Much of the Big Thicket wilderness, especially in the Lower Thicket, remained intact. The lumbermen wanted pines, especially the longleaf variety which grew in open stands on higher ground and wonderfully lent themselves to heavy-industrial logging by tram railroad and steam skidder.17 Just after 1900, beginning with Spindletop near Beaumont, flash oil booms erupted around Saratoga and Batson in the Lower Thicket, but the hundreds of oil derricks and thousands of oil boomers came and went in very few years. By the time Larry Fisher settled in Saratoga, the place had become a backwoods village once again. Boom and boomers had departed, leaving behind oil field wreckage and thousands of nearby acres damaged by oil pollution and the dumping of salt water. Fisher saw this destruction in the 1930s when he first flew over the Big Thicket in a small plane on his way to the coast, but the cut-andget-out loggers and pump-and-get-out oilmen had only nibbled at the edges of a great wilderness that yet maintained intact. Looking down, Fisher saw what naturalists later called “the Biological Crossroads of North America,” a forest that contained elements common to the Florida Everglades, the Okefenokee Swamp, the Appalachian region, the piedmont forests, and the large open woodlands of the Coastal Plains. Some large areas even resembled tropical jungles in the Mexican states of Tamaulipas and Veracruz.18 No wonder, then, that when the East Texas Big Thicket Association began its lobbying for a national park after 1927, it mapped a huge 430,000-acre expanse for inclusion. Larry Fisher’s photographic skills soon were recruited to the Big Thicket cause. pl a i n fol k s |

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As the wilderness had survived in 1930, so had much of the frontier lifestyle based on herding, small farming, hunting, fishing, and the free range. Assessing their situation, wary of local traditions, the bonanzaera lumber companies had not tried to establish fence lines and stock laws and had dealt gingerly with their many squatters. Even John Henry Kirby, the so-called “Prince of the Pines,” feared forest (and sawmill!) arsonists and in any case needed the sons of the pioneers to augment the workforce of his woods crews and sawmills. Kirby’s numerous landmen negotiated with the thousands of squatters on his vast holdings and rarely took them to local courts, which had proven all too willing to rule for squatter’s rights. Since the cut-and-get-out lumbermen wanted only the pines, a common deal was the right to cut all the marketable timber on the property for nothing in return but a clear deed for the squatter.19 Big Thicket families contributed many younger sons to the woods crews of lumber companies, and some of them became sawmill gypsies, moving from mill town to mill town for forty years, but other family members remained on the land and continued to live the old frontier lifeway described by Ellen Walker. Thicket dwellers also adapted piecework occupations utilizing woods skills but servicing the industrial present, and many of these woods products had free-range origins— that is, they came from other people’s land. In one classic case, locals gathered pine knot fuelwood from lumber company land, then sold it to the lumber companies by the stacked cord along lumber company tramways. In the early days, Thicket hunters supplied sawmill commissaries with bear meat, bear oil, wild honey, and venison, and in later years with acorn-fattened woods hogs, driven to town with herder dogs. Trapping for fur continued in the Thicket, waxing and waning as an economic activity with the vagaries of fashion and the price of pelts. Big Thicket people used their backwoods skills to make or gather shingles, white oak staves (for the foreign wine industry), hickory barrel hoops, Spanish moss, pine knots (for lumber company woods locomotives), charcoal, and other things, including rather large quantities of moonshine whiskey—a classic double-run beverage cooked in hidden stills.20 Perhaps no woods product was as important, or involved so many people, as railroad ties. From the 1880s to World War II, railroads and

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lumber companies needed millions of ties, and several generations of Big Thicket axmen augmented their cash flows by hewing ties, sometimes on their own land, sometimes on the free range. After she married, Ellen Walker often made ties with her husband. Walker recalled: It was three-and-a-half miles from our house to where we cut. We had a baby then, and I had to take the baby with me. Took my old coat, spread it down and put her on it. She’d set there and I’d watch her. I’d score hack and my husband would take his broad ax and bust the slabs off and level it up. We made about twenty a day. We got ten cents for the regular ties and twenty cents from them long ’uns. I enjoyed making them ties. We sold ’em to the Santa Fe Railroad and they paid off good. I was 53 when we quit making ties.21

Larry Jene Fisher accompanied friends into the woods to photograph tie hackers, stave makers, charcoal men, trappers, turpentiners, and other rare and vanishing traditionalists. Only the numerous Big Thicket moonshiners declined to be recorded at their ancient craft. Sometime in the late 1930s another outsider joined Fisher in recording frontier lifeways in the Big Thicket. This was young folklorist William A. Owens, whom Fisher first met on a visit to Texas A&M University. Fascinated by Big Thicket people and environments, Fisher and Owens were kindred spirits, and they must have crossed trails many times in the next twenty years. Fisher recorded his impressions of the Big Thicket and the changes caused by World War II and the onrush of civilization largely in his thousands of photographs, but Owens described their common fieldwork experiences in words. Owens (and doubtless Larry Fisher) discovered the swampers and pineys of the Big Thicket to be independent, individualistic, and wary of strangers up to who-knows-what, but they were also quick to shift from suspicion to frontier hospitality. Big Thicket people seemed highly social, ready to travel long distances to a house party or a church revival. Owens interviewed one old fiddler who recalled dances at his home where “so many folks crowded in we ­didn’t have room for fiddlin’ and dancing, too.” The fiddlers moved overhead to the rough twelveby-two roof joists. “We clomb up there and set a-straddle where we was out’n the way o’ the dancing. You never in your life heered sich fiddling and stomping. It purt nigh lasted all night.”22 pl a i n fol k s |

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Owens and Fisher found Big Thicket people to be at least as sociable as they were solitary, often with each extreme in turn. One native claimed that Hardin County men preferred to live far enough apart to be able to urinate unobserved in their own front yards. Another noted a famous local fiddler, much sought after to play at house parties, who sometimes went around with one hand in a phony bandage to escape excessive requests.23 Up in the hills and down in the swamps, Owens located “back settlements” of rural traditionalists still functioning during the 1930s, their frontier ways still alive. The Great Depression hung on, times were hard, but old subsistence techniques still worked. People practiced “living on the place,” as in the days of Ellen Walker’s childhood, though now perhaps with greater difficulty. One after another, the sawmills shut down, and the empire of John Henry Kirby fell into decline and bankruptcy. Unlike in most of Texas, deer could still be found in the Big Thicket to put meat on the table, but wildlife populations diminished under relentless subsistence pressures. Woods hogs provided an important source of food, and Owens noted squabbles breaking out between herders and herders, herders and suspected hog thieves, and herders and corn farmers. Old time “neighborliness” ran thin. The possibility of stock laws became a hotly contested political issue. “Armadillos, moving north and east at the time in great numbers, provided a source of meat for those who could stomach them, and quite a few confessed they could,” Owens noted. “Like their pioneer ancestors, Thicketers had learned to live on what their land provided. If it was only armadillos, they would live on them, fixed up a little with pepper sauce and eased down with turnip greens and blackeyed peas.”24 Owens soon completed his fieldwork and departed, but Larry Jene Fisher continued to live in Saratoga and photograph the Big Thicket during the war years and into the early 1950s, while the rural lifeways that so fascinated Fisher and Owens passed slowly away. Owens returned to the Thicket during the 1950s only to discover great changes in the land and people. He wrote: The Thicket appeared to have dwindled. New roads had been cut, new houses built. The people had changed even more. Young men had gone off to war and returned with memories of far-off places and

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different ways of living. They had returned to new advantages. Rural electrification had brought lights to houses once lit only by a lighted knot. Most of the homes had radios. Jukeboxes blared in dives on what had been lonely stretches of roads. Women had been able to replace the washpot and rub board with an electric washing machine on the front porch.25

All had not changed, at least not yet. Owens generalized elsewhere: “The pines have been mostly cut away, and the hardwoods are going fast. State and national highways through the area bear a heavy traffic of people who have never heard of the Big Thicket. Change is apparent, but not everywhere. There are still pockets of untouched land, settlements of old-time people, but in another generation they, too will be gone.” 26 Owens’s fellow Big Thicket researcher, Larry Jene Fisher, was gone, too—dead of pneumonia in 1956 at the age of 53. Owens took writer Roy Bedichek to meet Big Thicket naturalist and field guide Lance Rosier at the Vines Hotel in Saratoga, only to learn of Fisher’s death. Rosier’s Aunt Mattie Evans, proprietor of the Vines, mourned Fisher’s untimely passing. Fisher and his photographs had meant a great deal to R. E. Jackson and others involved with the movement for Big Thicket preservation, as well as to Aunt Mattie. “When she talked about the Big Thicket she became tearful,” Owens remembered. “Larry Fisher had recently died of pneumonia. Some of his things were still in a room in the hotel, including many of the pictures he had made of plants and flowers. She mourned for him as a friend. She also mourned that there was no one else who could or would do the work he was doing for the Thicket. Lance agreed with her.”27 Several years later Lance Rosier guided painter Michael Frary to a remote spot near Menard Creek in the Thicket, just as he had guided his friend Larry Jene Fisher in earlier times. Judging from Fisher’s images, Frary’s experiences with Rosier must have exactly paralleled those of photographer Fisher. Lance took us to see fields of carnivorous plants, four or five different varieties. He showed us where bears had scratched the bark on trees; he showed us beaver dams, “bee” trees, sassafras trees, iron wood, huge magnolias, [the] biggest holly tree in the world, sweet gums— pl a i n fol k s |

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ten feet in diameter—rattan and wild grape vines hanging from limbs of trees one hundred feet above the ground. Lance identified with every living thing in the Thicket. When I returned it was practically dark and everyone was sitting by the fire. Lance was explaining the sounds of the approaching night. He related each sound to a specific insect or animal and told something of interest about each one. As he did this, I began to “see” into the forest even though it was dark.28

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2 The Photographic Legacy of the Renaissance Man of East Texas

C. E. Hunt

In her 1958 book I’ll Take Texas Mary Lasswell referred to Larry Jene Fisher as “the Renaissance man of East Texas.”1 In truth, Fisher had many talents and interests. He flew airplanes during the seat-of-thepants era of general aviation. He was a talented musician and served as an organist for silent movies at many prominent theaters across the United States—making this his career during the 1920s and early 1930s. After he settled in southeast Texas, he wrote plays, including his well-researched historical drama, The Keyser Burnout; he took thousands of photographs, recording life in Texas from the 1930s to 1950s; and he produced promotional and educational films for Texas A&M University and various industries and communities. Aviator, musician, photographer, playwright, filmmaker, passionate researcher of this and that—none of Fisher’s friends knew just what he might turn his attention to next. He was not an easy man to know for his contemporaries and even less so for historians following scarce documents half a century after his death. However, this chapter provides a glimpse of Fisher’s background, a very brief summary of his life’s work, and a more detailed perspective on the important legacy he left us in his unique photographic work. Fisher was born June 18, 1902, on a ranch near Wichita Falls, Texas.2 His father, Gustave Henry Fisher, came from Wisconsin, and his mother, Lena Frey, had been born in Pennsylvania.3 It is uncertain what brought Fisher’s parents to Texas, or how they met. His father is variously described as a jeweler or a watchmaker. Fisher’s name at birth was Lawrence Orsino Fisher. About 1916 he changed his middle name to Jean, which in later life he spelled “Jene.” Details are lacking about Fisher’s early days, and little information is available to explain how he developed such a passion for the arts. It was reported that Fisher “picked out his first tunes on an old pipe organ when four or five years old.” 4 Some of his early work as an organist had a religious orientation, suggesting that he might have been exposed to music in a religious environment. In fact, his first public performances sparked quite a controversy in Tyler, Texas. During 1919 a teenaged Larry Fisher collaborated with a Tyler theater operator to offer “sacred concerts” on Sundays. Fisher noted in the local paper that the concerts were intended to “give to those in Tyler

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who seek a place of recreation on Sunday afternoons, a series of sacred musical programs which in my opinion, are in keeping with the day.”5 The concerts, which were actually a mixture of religious and other classical works, were apparently well received by most residents of Tyler. One Presbyterian pastor, however, strongly objected to the concerts, charging that they were nothing but a scheme to set the stage for moving pictures to be shown in Tyler on Sundays, something then prohibited by law. A war of words in the local paper ensued, with Larry Fisher accused of being a mouthpiece for the theater owner while Fisher defended his concerts. As other clergy began to attend the concerts, however, the Presbyterian minister gradually was won over, and the controversy subsided.6 It is unclear just how Fisher perfected his skills on the organ, but he must have become very good. During the 1920s Fisher went on the road as an organ gypsy, playing in over a score of movie theaters in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Nebraska, and Wyoming. Every up-and-coming silent movie theater needed a proficient organist. During an appearance in Wyoming he was billed as the “Texas Organist,” a title that stuck throughout a portion of his career. Displaying a streak of showmanship, he sometimes took on a cowboy or Texas persona when he played outside Texas, sometimes dressing in showy cowboy regalia. In Texas, however, he tended to display an air of eastern sophistication. Audiences appreciated Fisher’s talents. In Ohio the Lorain Times-Herald described him as “one of the best theater organists in the business.”7 “He is a marvel,” wrote popular actress Eva Fay after hearing Fisher play.8 During the 1930s “talkies” replaced silent movies at more and more theaters, converting movie organists like Larry Fisher into an endangered species. Fisher stayed close to Texas, with his final engagement as a professional organist at the Jefferson Theater in Beaumont from March 1931 to August 1934. Fisher also dabbled in other artistic and literary pursuits. During his career as an organist, he directed various revues and wrote newspaper columns concerning the performing arts. Although he began to wrap up his career as a theater organist, Fisher continued to give concerts, and he achieved a local following as the director of the “Accordionaires,” an accordion band that per-

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formed throughout Texas. He also worked in photography and journalism, writing a number of articles for the Beaumont Enterprise and other Texas newspapers. It was also during the 1930s that Larry Fisher embraced a new passion—aviation. He took flying lessons at the Beaumont Municipal Air­port, earning his private pilot’s license in 1931. During 1932 Fisher flew himself to various cities along the Gulf Coast, including Lafayette and DeRidder, Louisiana, and Galveston, Victoria, and Brownsville, Texas, to put on organ concerts. Fisher’s interest in flying would continue. With the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Civil Air Patrol. Stationed at Beaumont Municipal Airport, Fisher flew submarinedetection missions over the Gulf of Mexico. Sometime during the 1930s, while Fisher still played the organ at the Jefferson Theater and flew back and forth from Dallas to Beaumont, he became passionately interested in the Big Thicket. Nearly half a million acres of wilderness yet remained in those days—hard to see from the highway but readily visible from a light plane flying just above the treetops. Flight after flight, shimmering swamps and giant trees passed beneath Fisher’s wingtips. Reports of wild orchids in the Big Thicket piqued his curiosity as a photographer and were reportedly the clincher for Larry Fisher. He became obsessed with all things Big Thicket and spent more and more time exploring the woods. Meanwhile, as Fisher’s friend Merita Mills reported in the Beaumont Enterprise in 1940, Fisher “did a fadeout on the local [Beaumont] scene” to pursue his Big Thicket passions.9 By late 1939 or early 1940 Fisher moved to Saratoga, in the heart of the Big Thicket, to begin “his serious work of collecting data and preserving the remnants of a fast-vanishing primitive area.” As Mills noted after interviewing Fisher, “He has gone hunting, chewed the rag (and ‘tobaccy’) with old codgers, fed sugar cane to old fashion mills, helped build stick-and-mud chimneys—and participated a la native in all of the Thicket’s normal and every day activities in order to get firsthand information, photographs and atmosphere for his files.” Exaggerating perhaps a little, Fisher told Mills that he had already amassed some “ten thousand photographs, dozens of notebooks and even some recordings of native chants.”

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Larry Fisher already had leagued himself with environmental defenders R. E. Jackson and Lance Rosier—men known as the “father of the Big Thicket” and “Mr. Big Thicket,” respectively—because of their tireless efforts to save the remaining wilderness. Perhaps even more than Jackson and Rosier, however, Fisher recognized that he also witnessed the close of a historical era, the last stand of Southern frontier lifeways begun on the East Coast in colonial times and carried westward with the moving frontier. Fisher knew the Big Thicket was what folklorists called a “survival area.” Many practices that he documented in notes and photography, such as tie hacking, stave making, chimney daubing, turpentining, and sugar cane milling, had their roots far to the east in places where such practices had largely slipped into oblivion. In rural southeast Texas, Fisher witnessed and photographed these activities as part of daily life—not as exhibitions or curiosities but as an integral means of making a living in the big woods. He feared that the end might be near not just for the old lifeways but for aspects of the natural environment of the Thicket. Rare plants that might disappear under the crush of development were also of particular concern to Fisher and a frequent subject of his photography. This knowledge and concern motivated Larry Fisher to create a large body of work during the fifteen years he lived in Saratoga. He set up shop as a professional photographer in the village and took the usual array of jobs photographing graduations, weddings, funerals, and golden anniversaries, but—as thousands of negatives in his photo archives attest—he spent much of his time roaming and recording the Big Thicket. Customers who sought photographer Fisher’s services at the old house on the edge of town where he hung his business sign must have found him seldom at home. Fisher also collected oral accounts and did historical research, then drew upon his background in the live arts to create historical dramas about the Big Thicket. Fisher’s first and most successful play, “The Keyser Burnout,” was initially performed at the high school auditorium in Saratoga on the evening of November 22, 1940. The three-act play told the story of an alleged Civil War incident involving a group of Big Thicket “jayhawkers,” men refusing to serve in the Confederate Army,

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and an ambitious Captain Keyser, a Confederate officer determined to apprehend men he viewed as deserters and draft dodgers. Fisher meticulously did research for the play, interviewing local people who claimed to have knowledge of the incident and researching the locations of Union Wells and Drew’s Landing on the Trinity River, where much of the action took place. His research file contained hand-drawn maps of Drew’s Landing, copies of 1860s ledgers from a mercantile store in the community, and other evidence of his extensive research.10 Two years later, in 1942, Fisher completed a second historical play, this time in a lighter vein. In Gusher: So Lived an Oil Town he chronicled the humor and tragedy experienced during the Batson, Saratoga, and Sour Lake oil booms in the fictional town of “Batoga Lake.” It is likely that some of his characters for this play, set in 1902, such as “Flirdy” and “Smoky,” were modeled on former “boomers” or their descendents, still walking the quiet streets of Saratoga in 1942. Larry Fisher’s chief legacy will probably be his thousands of photographs of Big Thicket people and environments, but there is no doubt he was very serious about his plays. His extensive research makes clear that Fisher’s goals went well beyond entertainment. He sought to bring Big Thicket history to life by using an art form that appealed to him and was potentially of interest to a large audience. Knowing that the region suffered from a lack of recorded history, it is entirely possible that he wrote the plays in an effort to offer local people a history to honor, celebrate, and call their own. During the mid 1940s Larry Fisher closed down his photography studio in Saratoga, moved to College Station, Texas, and became a filmmaker for the Texas Forest Service. As a film producer, Fisher must have learned on the job, but he learned fast. In 1946 he won much praise and a national award for What He Hath Planted, a movie effectively blending religious themes with a discussion of modern forestry conservation practices. Fisher remained with the Texas Forest Service and made several other successful films. He often not only produced and directed the films, but also wrote their scripts and composed and performed the accompanying music. Larry Fisher left the Texas Forest Service in 1951 to pursue an independent career in filmmaking and moved his studio to Denton. Few documents cast light on Fisher’s life in the next few years, but he con-

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tinued to work in film. He was in Nashville, Tennessee, making a movie in 1956 when he contracted pneumonia and died suddenly.11 Thus, at age 53, a life devoted to a wide range of artistic and historical pursuits came to a tragically early end. Evaluating that life is difficult. By all accounts, Fisher’s contemporaries found him to be a private person of artistic temperament, enigmatic and somewhat unpredictable. Historians trying to trace his affairs in scarce documents half a century later have even greater difficulties. People liked Larry Fisher— that much is evident from the many portraits of Big Thicket residents in the photo archives. Fisher charmed and disarmed his subjects and seemed incapable of taking a bad portrait shot. Big Thicket dwellers were supposed to be somewhat suspicious of outsiders, but they invited the indefatigable photographer everywhere—to their workplaces, deer hunts, fox hunts, fishing camps, funerals, church picnics, and front porches. This discussion of Fisher’s life is a very simplified and inadequate presentation of the depth and range of his artistic pursuits and intellectual curiosities. He had periods when he was consumed by, among many other things, aviation, Big Thicket traditions and botany (especially orchids), African masks, and Mexican culture and history. In the written record, very little is revealed of Larry Fisher’s education or his private life, but his passions for art, history, and social service are very evident. Though many of his contributions to society are of value, it is his photographic legacy that will likely prove to be the most enduring. Fisher moved through this “last Southern frontier” of the Big Thicket recording images of many things soon to be seen no more. On April 2, 1970, Lamar University announced that the late Lance Rosier had donated “a collection of negatives and photograph albums, including many of the Big Thicket area, by Larry Jene Fisher.” The press release stated, Lumbering and oil industries are represented by a series of pictures on logging, tie-making, stave-making, oil drilling, and oil well fires. Home related activities include chair making, syrup milling, and chimney daubin’. Implements such as firepans and milk warmers are also illustrated. Numerous places and buildings are covered such as the Keyser Burnout and Union Wells areas, the Concord Church and Saratoga t he r en a iss a nce m a n of e a s t t e x a s |

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saloons. Among the persons pictured are R. E. Jackson, president of the first Big Thicket Association formed in the early 1930’s; Dr. H. B. Parks, one of the compilers of the “Biological Survey of the East Texas Big Thicket Area;” and “Daddy” Skaggs, the late Saratoga resident about whom many tales have been spun.12

With the exception of a few individuals, such as Lamar University’s Maxine Johnston and Lois Parker, most people did not recognize at the time what a treasure this donation was. The announcement of the library’s acquisition of the Fisher Collection attracted only limited attention. Over the next three decades, Larry Jene Fisher’s photographs remained a seldom-visited collection of Lamar University Library, though scholars and enthusiasts of the Big Thicket never quite forgot about them or about the role they had played in the historic fight to save the Thicket as a national park. A selection of Fisher’s photos had formed the core of the traveling exhibit that his friend and perhaps patron R. E. Jackson took with him in his tireless travels around the United States during the first campaign to save the Big Thicket. Thousands of people must have seen the photos during the 1930s and 1940s, and many newspapers of the time used them with feature articles. Up until recently, Larry Fisher’s photographs languished in relative obscurity. From time to time a few publications about East Texas and the Big Thicket have drawn upon the Fisher Collection, sometimes without proper attribution. Finally in 2000 a flurry of attention began when the National Park Service’s Big Thicket National Preserve selected about forty of Fisher’s photographs for an exhibit entitled, “The Big Thicket Through the Lens of Larry Jene Fisher in the 1930s and 1940s.” I selected the photos for the exhibit, and—quite by chance—coauthor Thad Sitton came upon them hanging on the walls of the Big Thicket Preserve Visitors’ Center. For an entire afternoon, Sitton wandered around the exhibit room in increasing astonishment. Someone he had never heard of named Larry Jene Fisher had somehow managed to photograph all the topics of East Texas folk life in which Sitton was most interested! Nobody else had recorded images of tie choppers and stave makers in the deep woods or fox hunters in the dead of night. The Fisher Photography Collection of Lamar University Library may

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be grouped into eight categories—lifeways, town scenes, natural landscapes, plants and animals, historic personages, aviation and military scenes, portraits, and miscellaneous. Lifeways: Although the entire collection is of value, the lifeways photographs are its jewel, providing unique documentation of many traditional practices of Southern backwoods culture. Subjects include traditional logging, peckerwood sawmills, Southern stock raising practices, tie making, stave making, turpentining, charcoal making, chair making, syrup milling, chimney daubing, and deer and fox hunting. Fisher preferred to photograph lifeways as living traditions, but at times he photographed their accouterments and artifacts—for example, a “fire pan” used in night hunting for deer and a “rassle-jack” used to maneuver log rafts around sharp river bends. Related to the folklife category are groups of photos of rural social life—church picnics and homecomings, deer camps, funerals, dances, weddings, and family gatherings. Town scenes: The collection contains scenes from most towns of the Thicket, including Saratoga, Honey Island, Sour Lake, and Batson. These images depict schools, school sports (six-man football), street scenes, and oil field activities (including oil field fires). Natural landscapes: The many landscape images depict various panoramas typical of the Big Thicket, including hardwood bottoms, swamps, palmetto flats, longleaf forests, and sandy land prairies. Plants and animals: This part of the collection records a variety of plant and animal life characteristic of southeast Texas and the Big Thicket. Included are images of feral hogs, opossums, raccoons, and foxes, as well as a great many photos of the rare plant life of the Thicket. Historic personages: The collection includes important photos of R. E. Jackson, Lance Rosier, Dr. H. B. Parks, and others who played important roles in the fight for preservation of the Big Thicket. Aviation and military scenes: There is a large group of aviation and military related images, many related to Fisher’s enthusiastic participation in the Civil Air Patrol during the World War II years. They include vintage aircraft, flying groups, military bases, ships, etc. Portraits: Fisher made his living as a small-town photographer, and the collection includes hundreds of portraits taken in his Saratoga studio of school graduates, newlyweds, and a great variety of other local

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people. They reveal the former organist as a talented portrait photographer. Related to this category is the large group of more informal portraits typically taken on people’s porches or in front of their houses. Miscellaneous: Last, there are a good number of images related to the photographer’s varied interests. These include photos of courthouses, scenes outside Texas, Mexican villages, African masks, and other things. The following pages selectively explore the Fisher Collection, emphasizing photos that document the now-vanished lifeways of Big Thicket people and—thanks partly to Fisher himself—the still-existing wild areas of the Big Thicket. Fisher loved to photograph big trees, palmetto flats, and wild rivers—things that exist today in the Big Thicket National Preserve. We chose photos based on their historical importance, artistic excellence (so far as we could discern it), and what they came to mean to us personally, and the selection process proved time consuming. Sometimes we argued. Sometimes we were in enthusiastic agreement, but the wonderful image in the contact prints turned out to have no negative. Selecting photos became a difficult task; we were photographic laymen laboring with an embarrassment of riches. With little doubt, other persons would have chosen somewhat different photos. We think, however, that other editors might have agreed about one shot—Larry Jene Fisher’s ghostly self-portrait, Leica in hand, his image in a broken mirror of an old house, deep in the Big Thicket.

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3 Photo Sequences, with Introductory Essays

Southerners in the Big Woods During the mid 1930s, when Larry Jene Fisher first moved to Saratoga in Hardin County, the Big Thicket often began only a few hundred yards off the public roads. R. E. Jackson and others of the East Texas Big Thicket Association, the first political group assembled to try to save the Big Thicket, campaigned for a national park of 450,000 acres of largely untouched wilderness. The Big Thicket included a diversity of environments. Guided by Lance Rosier, Fisher explored flood plain forests with their giant trees, watery baygalls and cypress sloughs, palmetto flats, sandy land savannahs, mixed hardwood and pine forests, and pure stands of longleaf pines. As Fisher learned, the Big Thicket was not one thing, but many. He tried repeatedly to capture the essence of these varied environments on film and to suggest something of the intricate relationships between Big Thicket people and the wild landscapes where many of them still lived. Certain environments and human relationships fascinated Fisher beyond others. He took numerous shots of horsemen and hikers immersed in palmetto flats and of people standing beside giant trees. Fisher found many targets for his camera. As symbolized by the boy holding the pet fox, wilderness and wilderness ways were still very close to home for Big Thicket people in 1935.

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Man and giant pine tree

Palmetto scene

Boy with pet red fox

Man and cypress

Horseman in palmetto

Porch Portraits Fisher had a special talent for portraiture—whether for pay at his Saratoga studio or just to record his friends during visits to their homes. He especially liked to photograph people in natural light in front of their houses or seated or standing on their porches. Porches often must have been where he found them when he came to visit. Families spent a lot of time outside on their porches in the semitropical Big Thicket in the time before air conditioning or even electric fans. Electric power was a latecomer to the Thicket outside of towns. People did chores on their porches (for example, shelling peas and churning milk), socialized on their porches, and sat around porches in the evenings waiting for things to cool off enough to go inside and go to bed. Sometimes things never did, and they slept on their porches as well, despite the mosquitoes. A lot of working gear hung on the walls of porches or stood on their floors, and Larry Fisher clearly enjoyed photographing rural residents in their normal haunts, ordinary working clothes, and with the tools of their trade (including dogs). The porch swing portrait comes from Saratoga, and Larry Fisher (doubtless recorded by a mechanical timer) sits at far left. Fisher also photographed himself, camera in hand, in the broken mirror of an old house.

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Mayo family portrait

Jordan family portrait

Lighting the pipe

Larry Fisher and friends (Fisher on swing, left)

Fisher self-portrait in mirror

Dogs Dogs show up in many Fisher photos, often standing beside their masters and mistresses. Sometimes they must have just wandered in, but in other cases owners pushed them front and center. As others have noted, including hog raiser and bear hunter Judge Leak Bevil, Big Thicket people strongly valued their dogs, often for economic reasons. Many rural residents made a living more as free-range stockmen than as farmers, and dogs were absolutely necessary to locate, bay, drive, pen, and “work” semi-feral hogs and cattle in woods, thickets, and palmetto flats. No amount of horsemen could accomplish this. You could not rope or use a cutting horse at most locations in the Thicket. Dogs had other practical purposes. People used dogs to guard remote homeplaces and to hunt game large and small. Small terrier-sized feists located squirrels, possums, armadillos, and (sometimes, if trained to do so) snakes venturing too close to the house. Black-and-tan, Redbone, Plott, and Bluetick hounds (and every conceivable interbreeding of same) treed raccoons, and Walker, July, Trigg, and Birdsong hounds coursed deer, fox, and wolves. Many Big Thicket stockmen and hunters favored the “Black-mouthed cur,” a stocky, strong, medium-sized informal breed that—according to admirers like Leak Bevil—did just about everything the owner wanted it to do, including locate lost objects and fight bears. Only long-running, bugle-voiced foxhounds coursed the red and grey foxes across miles of dark woods, however, while fox hunters stood around a fire on a hilltop and followed the chase entirely by sound. Fisher used his flash attachment to record just such a scene near Saratoga.

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Porch scene with dogs

Woman feeding dog with spoon

Fox hunt near Saratoga

Hunter calling dogs

Dog and wheel

Camps Around 1900 the famous Hooks brothers, Ben and Bud, established a hunting camp in northern Hardin County not far from the last refuge of Big Thicket bears in an area of downed trees and thick brush known as the “Hurricane.” At a time of bad roads and slow transportation, many sportsmen maintained hunting and fishing camps close to the scenes of action in deep woods and on remote streams, and Fisher often visited them there to take photos. In the Thicket, camps like that of the Hooks brothers had a social importance not suggested by their humble appearance; momentous events happened there, giving rise to epic stories. Camps began as minimalist shacks for the most part, especially if only males used them. Wives and children often showed up, though, and over time, camps tended to accumulate screened dining porches, outdoor pit toilets, and other amenities. Camps on the Neches River, Trinity River, Pine Island Bayou, and Village Creek (as well as other places), needed to be raised on stilts because of frequent floods. Otherwise, you expected to periodically scrape river sediments from the floors with cotton hoes. In free-range times, a man’s camp might be built on his land, or it might not. Camps along the river in particular partook of the freedom of the river commons. The river belonged to nobody and everybody. If you wanted to throw up a primitive shack on a particular river bend or “bluff bank,” you might just go ahead and do it, with little concern about who owned the land. Some fishing and hunting camps—called by name, highly valued, and often occupied— existed for years as little more than (as old timers said) “a tarp and a coffee pot.”

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Hunting camp scene

Close-up of same camp

Man, dog, and camp house

Primitive lean-to camp on river

Boy tries to hold heavy rifle

Deer Hunts By the time Larry Fisher came to reside at Saratoga during the 1930s, white-tailed deer had been hunted out of most parts of East Texas, but the Big Thicket still contained some deer. This was not because of a better local conservation ethic, but because of wilder woods, deeper swamps, and more impenetrable brush. Free-range customs gave hunters access to every man’s land, game laws had no teeth, but even the usual no-holds-barred methods had failed to exterminate all the deer. Few people “still hunted” from blinds in the modern fashion, however; there were not enough deer for that. Big Thicket meat hunters often hunted deer by night, carbide lamps on their foreheads. They illuminated the deer’s eyes, stealthily approached the mesmerized deer, then shot—buck, doe, or yearling, it usually made little difference to the “fire hunter.” “Drive” hunts for deer were different—more social and more sporting—with people hunting together as a group and meat for the pot not the main concern. Groups of men, women, and children moved out to deer camps in the fall, often to reside for days or even weeks. On the day of the hunt, “standers,” usually all males, took positions spaced out at intervals on likely deer trails, dogs and dog handlers moved a mile or so upwind of the standers, dogs were launched, the deer jumped, and the hunt began. As the minutes crept past, every stander waited by himself in the remote woods, listening to the baying hounds coming ever closer, shotgun at the ready, wondering if the running deer would “come out” on him. The lucky individual whose shot dropped the deer became the focus of a social celebration. If he missed, the other hunters usually cut his shirttail off.

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Deer, hunters, and hound

Deer, men, boys, and camp cook

Hunting camp families assembled around deer

Farming: From Hand to Mouth A good many Big Thicket families in 1935 still raised a little cotton or some other minor cash crop (for example, sugar cane to produce syrup beyond the family’s personal needs), but Thicket soils were poor, agricultural prices low, and most local farming was aimed at providing subsistence—for “living on the place.” Split-rail fences and wire fences kept hogs and cattle from a family’s garden and field crops. Without such fences, carefully maintained, there would be no crops to harvest. Free-range livestock still roamed everywhere in 1935. Large gardens not only provided fresh vegetables in season but gave rise to zealous food preservation. Big jars of garden produce covered the floors of smokehouses and ringed the walls of people’s bedrooms two and three jars deep. Beyond the garden was the realm of “patches”—big clumps of subsistence crops that grew well on sandy soils, such as cowpeas, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and other things. But no field crop was as important as maize, Indian corn. Corn was the triplepurpose crop, the crop that you could not afford to have fail. It provided human food, “gasoline” to power the family’s work stock, and food for the menagerie of domestic animals that people kept around and relied on. These always included chickens, milk cows, and hogs, and sometimes turkeys, ducks, geese, and peafowl. Even the valued stock dogs and hunting dogs ate a lot of ground corn, cooked up with leftover bacon fat and other ingredients by zealous dog men. When Big Thicket farmers said “meat,” they usually meant “pork.” Hog-killing time was the major subsistence event of early winter and filled the smokehouse with the tasty flesh of swine.

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Farmhouse

Rural road and rail fence

Woman feeding pigs

Woman feeding chickens

Canning green beans

Young couple and preserved vegetables

Hog-killing time

Syrup Mills Cane syrup was a mainstay of the Southern diet, along with corn bread and pork. People typically consumed syrup with every meal, an open gallon or half-gallon can sitting out on their “eating tables” ready for use. Big families might feel they needed as much as fifty gallons of syrup to properly get through the year. Many rural East Texans raised enough ribbon or sorghum cane to provide the family syrup, but only an occasional farmer, usually one or two in every rural community, had the equipment (and the cooking skills) to process it into syrup. Other community cane farmers took their cane by wagon to one of these men to be made into a finished product, usually for a “toll” of one can out of three or four. Cash money rarely changed hands in these transactions. Loads of syrup cane from different families often piled up near the syrup mill, waiting to be processed, and the mill became a social gathering spot. Visitors met with neighbors, refreshed themselves with a glass or two of fresh cane juice, right from the mill, and watched the mule or horse go round and round squeezing juice from the cane. In earlier times the cane juice had been cooked into syrup in large black iron pots, but by Larry Fisher’s day syrup makers used large compartmented “pan” cookers of copper or galvanized metal. Cane juice went in one end, moved through two or three compartments down the pan as it cooked, and emerged at the far end as completed syrup. At a minimum, it took three people to process the cane juice into syrup—one to manage the mule and feed cane into the crusher mill; one to move the juice down the pan, skim off impurities as it cooked, and feed the cook fires; and one to mastermind the whole operation, manage the syrup at the far end of the pan, and make the critical decision about when it was done.

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Cane mill in operation

Cane mill in operation

Cane juice being strained into barrel

“Skimmings” being removed at cooking pan

Socializing and chewing cane

Rooter Hogs and Southern Stock Raising Most rural farming families in the Big Thicket had “rooter hogs and woods cattle” roaming the free range around their homeplaces. They depended on these animals for subsistence, especially the hogs, and they sold a good many for cash. In truth, many of these Thicket families were more stockmen than farmers, though most of the time their stock operations were invisible—out of sight in the woods. Rail or barbed wire fences protected their cultivated fields from their own, and other people’s, free-range hogs and cattle, who otherwise wandered, earmarked or branded, across every man’s property. Nobody built perimeter fences around their land during free-range times. According to the ethos of the free range, your hogs ate your neighbor’s acorns and his hogs ate yours, and if you had thirty acres and he had three-thousand it was not supposed to make any difference—even if you had more hogs than he did! Hogs and cattle lived at least semi-feral lives—they existed more as wild animals than as domesticated stock. They hustled for their own food, fought off predators, and took their losses. Stock raised like this required little maintenance. A stockman rode out with his dogs once or twice a year to find his hogs, “bay them up,” drive them to a pen in the woods, “work them” (inoculating this year’s pigs for hog cholera, marking their ears with his mark, castrating them, etc.), then—if the time was right—shooting several for the smokehouse. Only the valuable stock dogs made all this possible; woods stock, especially hogs, were wild and dangerous. Larry Fisher understood the importance of rooter hogs in the backwoods economy, and he photographed hogs almost as often as he did big trees and palmetto flats. Many tens of thousands of rural Southerners once participated in the free-range stock tradition; county courthouses across the South register tens of thousands of stockmen’s earmarks, but we have never seen another photograph of someone earmarking a pig. The image symbolizes a whole Southern way of life that has passed away almost without historical notice.

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Razorback hog

Earmarking a pig (each stockman had his special mark)

Inoculating a pig for hog cholera

Tie Makers Tie makers practiced an ancient axmen’s skill of hewing logs flat on four sides, but linked themselves to the industrial present of railroads and logging companies. However, by Larry Fisher’s time at Saratoga, local men had long family traditions of tie hacking for off-season cash, extending back at least half a century. From the 1880 census on, forced by the census taker to declare one formal occupation from the many things they did to make a living, a good many people in the Big Thicket counties chose “tie maker.” Some men tie hacked professionally yearround in special tie camps; many more did it part-time. Railroads and logging trams used a lot of ties, over two thousand for each mile of track, and for decades the companies preferred hewn ties, made by hand with scoring ax and broadax. Tools and techniques to hew logs arrived with the first pioneers to the Big Thicket and were necessary to build log homes, barns, and smokehouses. It was only natural that after the railroads began to build across the landscape, the skilled axmen turned to making ties. Family crews of tie makers—fathers and sons, brothers, husbands and wives—made ties in agricultural downtimes, usually in the winter. They felled small hardwood or pine trees—usually hardwood—and sawed them into the right lengths for railroad ties. Then, one tie maker moved down each length of log, “score hacking” it in diagonal cuts to the right depth with a double-bladed ax, followed by the second tie maker “knocking out the slabs” with a broadax. The second person operating the heavy curve-handled broadax needed to be the most skilled. A good ax team could make twenty to thirty ties a day, at ten to twentyfive cents apiece, working daylight to dark. Then they marked the ties with their mark, hauled them to a certain place at the railroad, stacked and left them, and later the check arrived in the mail. Tie making could be an independent man’s occupation. There was no need to sell your soul to the big company. In rural counties all across the South, part-time and full-time tie hackers numbered in the thousands, and collectively in the many tens of thousands, but almost no one photographed them at work. Larry Fisher did.

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Tie makers at work

Tie makers’ camp

Tie maker and son

Stave Makers Many Big Thicket people made ties, and virtually every family had a tie maker or two. Stave makers were a much rarer breed. Any small hardwood or pine tree would do for a tie; staves came only from virgin white oaks located deep in creek and river bottoms, and by Fisher’s time these had become hard to find. Stave makers resembled tie makers in that they used pioneer woodworking skills involving the crosscut saw, maul and splitting wedge, riving froe, and draw knife to produce an industrial product—the white oak barrel stave, much in demand by European wine producers. Stave makers located rare white oaks in the deep woods, then—perhaps with knowledge and permission of the rightful owners of the land, or perhaps not—they moved in to set up temporary shop. Every big tree was a project, processed on site. They cut it down, used a crosscut saw to buck off two or three sections of the lower trunk of the right length for staves; then, by a process of splitting and re-splitting each length of trunk with wedge-and-maul, they made it into square “bolts” that resembled skinny railroad ties. Bolts might be further “rived” or split into the finished product of barrel staves, or they might be shipped to Europe for this process. The landowner needed to watch his woods rather closely to avoid losing valuable white oaks to the stave makers. An abandoned stave maker site might seem rather depressing. These masters of the wedgeand-maul took only the bottommost sections of the trunk, leaving everything else to rot.

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Stave makers sawing section from white oak

Stave makers splitting section to make “bolts”

Wasteful leavings of giant white oak

Chimney Daubings Old ways persisted in the Big Thicket, and many got a new lease on life during the Depression, when do-it-yourself techniques of food preservation, house construction, and other things took on a renewed importance. If your roof began to leak and you had no money to fix it, grandpa’s old-time skills at riving board shingles now came to the fore. Likewise, if your mudcat chimney burned out or collapsed, or if you built a new log cabin, you needed to find neighbors who knew how to build such a chimney. “Stick-and-daub” chimneys had been the norm in settlement times in the Big Thicket. Rocks were not to be had, and bricks cost money. Larry Fisher photographed a work party building a mud chimney at Virgil Rosier’s house near Thicket, Texas, soon after he arrived in Saratoga. Such work parties were common in pioneer times and persisted until World War II in the Big Thicket, as helpful neighbors turned out to shingle a house, build a barn, build a rail fence, erect a mud daub chimney, pile logs for burning at “new ground,” and a score of other tasks. Many hands made short work—almost fun—of a hard task, and each person’s participation not only demonstrated “neighborliness” but set the precedent for help with his own hard tasks in the future. One day Larry Fisher photographed the building of Rosier’s chimney. Someone, perhaps Rosier himself, had previously built the pole frame for the chimney. Now, workmen joked and socialized while they brought mud from a nearby mayhaw flat, mixed it with grey moss, and tossed bread-loaf-sized “mud cats” up to the men building the chimney, where they plastered them into place.

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Mixing mud for “mud cats”

Folding mud cats around chimney framing

Work party at chimney (Clint Cooper and Virgil Rosier on house, J. E. Rosier and Bill Smith on ground)

Peckerwood Sawmills Small-scale water-powered or steam-powered sawmills produced rough lumber starting in the 1860s, though their daily and annual cuts were small, and the virgin pine forests in and around the Thicket stood virtually untouched. Big mills first began operations at Beaumont and Port Arthur during the 1870s, using pine timber floated down the Neches and Sabine. During the 1880s railroads were built across southeast Texas, with sawmill towns springing up behind the track construction crews even as the lines progressed. From 1880 until the last big mill “cut out” in the virgin longleaf of Newton County in 1942, tramway logging dominated the industry. Mill towns were established in remote sites close to the timber. Then, as the years passed, from every mill town a spider web of company railroad lines was built farther and farther into the big woods to provide fresh timber for the saws. By Fisher’s time, most of the pine timber around the Thicket had been felled, and many big companies had either cut out or gone bust during the Great Depression. At various places around and in the Thicket, however, small “peckerwood” mills still persisted, pecking away at the remaining forest, making the most of scraps and remnants (and second growth) left behind by the big mills. Fisher visited several small sawmills, some operated by the members of a single family, and photographed them in action. Most sawed rough lumber for local sale, just like the pioneer mills after the Civil War, or they sawed cross ties. As Fisher’s photos make clear, peckerwood mills had one thing in common with the huge sawmills of the cut-and-get-out era of southeast Texas sawmilling: they were very dangerous work places.

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Peckerwood mill

Saw in operation

Peckerwood mill

Major Logging Operations Fisher’s Saratoga years coincided with the last decade of old-style steam-powered logging in the remaining virgin pine forests, and these woods operations clearly fascinated the photographer. Despite the fall of lumber prices during the Depression, Wiergate Longleaf Lumber Company in Newton County, the Carter Lumber Company in Polk County, and a few other companies still maintained limited operations in the big woods. Fisher visited the woods crews to record tree fellers at work, steam skidders skidding logs to the railroad tram, big-wheel ox and mule carts pulling logs to the tram where skidders could not go, steam loaders loading flatcars, and big-stacked Shay locomotives pulling strings of loaded flatcars to the mill. Generally, such operations went on around the edges of the Big Thicket, though many Thicket people worked in the logging crews. “Cut-and-get-out” aptly describes the economic strategy behind this kind of logging, which was awesome, environmentally destructive, noisy, dirty, and dangerous. No industrial operation in the United States was more likely to maim and kill workers than this one—not even coal mining.

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Old-growth pine forest

Tree fellers (“flatheads”) at work

Scene at steam skidder

“Tong man” at work

Steam loader

Steam loader

Woods locomotive

Logging train speeding through woods

Logs beside tram railroad awaiting loading

Turpentining Fisher also visited and photographed turpentining operations in the longleaf woods and at turpentine distilleries, possibly at Wiergate in Newton County or possibly closer to home. Turpentine was distilled from raw pine sap—resin. Thicket settlers chiefly used resin from pine trees in the form of “lighter pine”—fiercely burning pine knots or pine splinters for torches, fire pans to hunt game at night, “kindling” for fires, and fast-burning fuel under black wash pots to boil water for clothes washing, hog scalding, and a hundred other purposes. Turpentining, however, was an industrial operation closely linked to cut-andget-out lumbering of the primal forest. Specialized crews of turpentiners (often African Americans) worked a year or so ahead of the cutting edge of lumbering operations, the “front.” What the turpentiners did severely injured the trees but did not lessen their value as timber, and the logging crews usually reached the trees before they died. Using special tools, turpentiners slashed the big pines in a herringbone pattern, directing resin to a cup or box. Periodically they went through the woods collecting resin into barrels. Then they took the barrels of resin to a nearby turpentine camp and distilled the pine sap into turpentine in a process very much like large-scale whiskey makers distilling moonshine from corn “mash.”

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Barking (“boxing”) a pine to cause resin production

Barking a pine (note the tin resin collector already in place at the older cut on right)

Dumping resin from the tin collector into a barrel

Town Life Saratoga, Kountze, Sour Lake, and Honey Island were some of the main towns of the Big Thicket, though in 1935 they were the kinds of places where dogs might lie long undisturbed on dusty main streets, and a boy might ride his pet ox down to the drugstore for a fountain Coke. Fisher lived in an old house on the edge of Saratoga, and from time to time he took shots of town scenes in that place and in other Big Thicket villages. Saratoga in particular had seen much wilder and more populous days during the oil boom at the turn of the century, and some remnants of that industrial past still lingered. The famous Vines Hotel in Saratoga, operated for decades by Lance Rosier’s Aunt Mattie Evans, once had two shifts of oil field guests for every room, a night shift and a day shift. By 1935 few persons boarded at the Vines, Lance Rosier (and in slightly later times, Larry Fisher) among them. Public schools were often the center of recreational action in the Big Thicket towns, as when Saratoga fielded its athletes for six-man football.

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Downtown Saratoga

Mattie Evans, proprietor, and her Vines Hotel in Saratoga

Saratoga Cafe

Kirby Lumber Company commissary

Alabama-Coushatta School

Six-man football at Saratoga

Man leaving post office

Church Picnic at Pine Ridge Outside of Big Thicket towns like Saratoga, Kountze, and Honey Island—really just crossroads villages—lay the domains of “settlements,” dispersed rural communities loosely centered on church and school. Pine Ridge was such a place. Once or twice a year, church members, former church members, and all their kin came home to the community for a special service followed by a church picnic—“dinner on the grounds,” most called it, although long, rough board tables had become more the norm, as at Pine Ridge. In reality such an occasion was a community reunion, with many smaller satellite family reunions staged at the same time. Such events might occur at Easter, though most came later, during the hot summer, after crops were “laid by” and agricultural work slackened, and perhaps in association with an annual graveyard cleaning. Larry Fisher photographed Pine Ridge’s successful community reunion picnic in 1940, doubtless after someone invited him. Perhaps he was paid for his services, more probably he was not. In any case his photographs masterfully capture the assemblage of rural generations present in 1940 in the last year or so before countryside communities like Pine Ridge disassembled for World War II. Big crowds gather down the long wooden tables, women meet and socialize, old men with nineteenth-century clothing discourse under the shade trees, rural youths stand around talking and looking bored.

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Food on board tables

Picnic crowd scene

Women friends

Elderly men take a rest.

Youths meet and talk.

Funerals and Golden Weddings The success of Larry Fisher’s photography business in Saratoga is un­ known. His surviving records do not tell. Certainly, the collection con­ tains hundreds of studio portraits, which must have brought in needed cash, and at least two sequences of photos seem to indicate paid em­ ployments—the group of images labeled by Fisher “Jordan Funeral, taken for Oscar Jordan 3-11-40” and those noted “Marcontell Golden Wedding Sept 28, 1947.” The funeral and golden wedding photo se­ quences indicate rather similar scenes, the gathering at ancestral home­ places of multi-generational families to assert the continuity of blood relationships and the power of life over death. Funerals still took place at home in the Big Thicket in 1940. Family members took turns “sitting up” with the sick and dying, stood vigil over the body after death, then accompanied it to the last rites at the graveyard.

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Casket and mourners at Jordan funeral, 1940

Casket and mourners at Jordan funeral, 1940

Mourners at Jordan funeral, 1940

Old friends meet at the Marcontell Golden Wedding celebration, 1947.

The Marcontells cut their Golden Wedding cake, 1947.

Fundamentalist Church Services Presumably, Fisher felt himself welcome wherever he went to take pho­ tographs. A possible exception to this rule was the series of images he took at an unspecified fundamentalist church service. Perhaps this was at Saratoga, but that is impossible to know for sure. In any case, the ac­ tion is dramatic; in the complete series, the minister begins at the pul­ pit, then approaches the congregation and thrashes his hand in the air, and a woman—overcome with emotion—stands up and raises both arms to “testify.” Then most of the congregation does the same. Fisher thus captures a swift and dramatic series of interrelated actions, as he did at the six-man football game. Some Protestant denominations of the Big Thicket believed that a profound religious experience should occur at the time of an individual’s profession of faith. Others, like this one, believed that possession by the Holy Spirit should occur over and over again and—at least for some members of the congregation—be part of every church service.

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The preacher exhorts his congregation.

A woman rises to “testify.”

More of the congregation rise to testify.

Dances and Other Amusements As Ellen Clark asserted (and despite the opposition of fundamentalist churches), many Big Thicket people loved to dance. Fiddle players were so much in demand that they sometimes had to go into seclusion to avoid overwork. Fisher photographed several dances—perhaps at rural schools, stores, lodge halls, or private homes. Schools often served as neutral locations near the epicenters of dispersed rural communities, as did lodge halls and country stores. Or, rather commonly, a family might announce a “house dance,” move all the furniture from its larg­ est room out to the yard, and spread some cornmeal around the room to make dancers’ feet slide better. Fisher’s photos well capture the so­ cial energy and exuberance of Big Thicket “country dances.” Scattered through the Fisher Collection must be many images of the most common social amusement of Big Thicket people, the visit of one family (or one branch of the same family) to the home of another, of­ ten to stay for days at a time. Some of the “porch portraits” doubtless record such events. Visitors were a rare treat. Persons living in remote locations on bad roads often had to devise solitary amusements as best they could, as did the girl rolling the old tire.

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Country dance

Country dance (apparently in a rural store)

Girl rolling old tire

Lance Rosier and Family Lance Rosier’s people were Rosiers and Jordans, both pioneer families of the Big Thicket. Larry Fisher recorded family portraits of them that were entirely representative of other families of the settlement genera­ tions. Fisher became a good friend of Lance, who, beginning sometime in the late 1930s, took him on many excursions into the Thicket. Lance was a strange, shy, solitary person, a lifelong bachelor fascinated by the Big Thicket—but he and Larry Jene Fisher had important interests in common. For almost half a century, Lance played a role critical to the ultimate preservation of the Thicket. Whereas the Grand Teton loomed over Grand Teton National Park in plain sight, then as now the Big Thick­ et had a problem. “Where is the Big Thicket?” visitors asked, looking around. Lance knew where it was and indefatigably showed it to Fisher and all the rest. He knew where the rare orchids grew, where alliga­ tors had their dens, and where the last lost generation of Big Thicket bears had scratched beech trees. The Big Thicket was not a geologi­ cal spectacular like the Grand Teton, but an ecological one. He guided Fisher to its innermost secrets of baygalls and cypress swamps, giant hardwoods, wild orchids, and carnivorous plants. Lance could traverse hundreds of yards of trackless Thicket to locate a single plant noted years before. He once identified over eighty-four species of wildflowers growing at a single bend in a dirt road. Lance was a modest man who much disliked being photographed, even by his friend Larry Fisher. However, one photo by Fisher catches Rosier unaware in a perfect portrait, stooping to examine some flower that others might pass without noticing.

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Lance Rosier’s family

Lance’s father and mother, Cornelius Rosier and Lou Etta Jordan Rosier

Lance Rosier examines a flower.

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Notes

Chapter 1 1. Overstreet, “Chimney Dobbin in the Big Thicket,” 77–87. 2. O’Conner, Cryin’ for Daylight and Tales from the San-tone Bottom; Brown and Guest, Between the Creeks. 3. Sitton, Backwoodsmen, 233–235. 4. Caplen, “Camp Big Thicket,” 108–110. 5. Brown and Gust, Between the Creeks, 81. 6. Sitton, Backwoodsmen, 236. 7. Quoted in Loughmiller and Loughmiller, Big Thicket Legacy, 5–12. 8. Billington and Ridge, Westward Expansion, 50. 9. Ibid., 59. 10. Owens, “Big Thicket Balladry,” 203. 11. Frary and Owens, Impressions of the Big Thicket, 19. 12. Quoted in Loughmiller and Loughmiller, Big Thicket Legacy, 81. 13. Sitton and Conrad, Freedom Colonies, 22. 14. Quoted in Loughmiller and Loughmiller, Big Thicket Legacy, 16. 15. Sitton, Backwoodsmen, 194–232. 16. Quoted in Loughmiller and Loughmiller, Big Thicket Legacy, 31–32. 17. Sitton and Conrad, Nameless Towns, 25–33. 18. Gunter, The Big Thicket, 47. 19. Reich, “Searching for Lost Land,” 2. 20. Sitton, Backwoodsmen, 110–133. 21. Quoted in Loughmiller and Loughmiller, Big Thicket Legacy, 11. 22. Frary and Owens, Impressions of the Big Thicket, 25. 23. Sitton, Backwoodsmen, 70. 24. Frary and Owens, Impressions of the Big Thicket, 24. 25. Ibid., 31. 26. Owens, “Big Thicket Balladry,” 201. 27. Frary and Owens, Impressions of the Big Thicket,” 33. 28. Ibid., 37.

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Chapter 2 1. Lasswell, I’ll Take Texas, 255. See pages 228–299 for a colorful portrait of the Big Thicket as witnessed during the early 1950s. 2. “Local Theater Organist Ends Year On Job,” Beaumont Enterprise, March 27, 1932. 3. Photograph of Larry Jene Fisher’s birth certificate, Larry Jene Fisher Collection of the Mary and John Gray Library, Lamar University. 4. “Local Theater Organist Ends Year On Job,” Beaumont Enterprise, March 27, 1932. 5. “Statement From Mr. Fisher, Palace Organist,” Tyler Courier-Times, September 14, 1919. 6. Rev. Floyd E. Aten, letter to editor, Tyler Courier-Times (date unspeci­ fied) 1919. 7. “Texas Organist Is Versatile Chap,” Lorain Times-Herald, May 10, 1928. 8. Eva Fay to Mr. Carroll, May 12, 1928. 9. “Big Thicket Play Presented by Larry Fisher,” Beaumont Enterprise, November 10, 1940. 10. For an excellent account of the Kaiser Burnout and the related Battle at Bad Luck Creek, see Dean Tevis’s contribution to Tales of the Big Thicket, edited by Francis E. Abernethy. 11. B. Holton to Lois Parker, May 26, 1970. 12. “Photos of East Texas Given to Lamar,” Beaumont Enterprise, April 5, 1970.

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Bibliography

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