GRAPELAND
-- When the Houston & Great Northern
Railroad was built through this area
in 1872, the builders had to cut
their way through, grapevines. The
railroad first named this place
"Grapevine."
The town site, 640 acres in
the John Erwin survey, was acquired
by the railroad, which turned it for
development to the New York & Texas
Land Company. That firm laid out
town lots and sold them for $75 and
$100 each.
The first lot was sold to
T. T. Beazley
and J. H.
Wooters in November, 1872.
Tom and Jim Beazley had the first
general store and T. S. Cook the
first saloon. When
R. M. Garrett
petitioned for a Grapevine post
office, he was told there already
was a Grapevine post office, so the
name was changed to Grapeland.
T. T. Beazley
became the first postmaster, May 26,
1873, succeeded in 1881 by
Napoleon G.
Bontaparte Frazier.
Grapeland's oldest house, the
home of Mrs.
Anna Lois Lyles, originally
was the T. T.
Beazley home.
Grapeland was incorporated in
1899 with Dr.
H. S. Robertson as the
elected mayor. The first ordinance
required rubbish around business
houses to be cleaned up and disposed
of. The second ordinance prohibited
the railroad from obstructing public
crossings for more than five
minutes, and passengers were
forbidden to board or leave a moving
train.
W. W.
Lively had the first buggy,
used to haul passengers to Augusta.
The first cotton gin was owned by
Bill Lively.
By 1901, Grapeland was called
"The Queen City of the Sand Flats."
By 1906 Grapeland had a telephone
system.
The vault of the Farmers and
Merchants State Bank was looted of
$10,000 by dynamiters around 1 a.m.
Monday, Nov. 3, 1910.
On Tuesday, March 5, 1913, at
11 p.m., fire broke out in the
Palace of Sweets in the middle of a
Front Street block and destroyed 15
business houses and the Goodson
Hotel. Mrs.
Laura Goodson was the
respected owner of the hotel, where
sumptuous meals were served family
style.
Phil H.
Blalock was editor of the
first newspaper published in 1897.
Later that year R was sold to
D. McNaughton
of Palestine and
Riley T.
Runyan became the editor. In
1899, the newspaper was sled to
George E.
Darsey, Sr., W.B. Johnson, Mose
Spence and Dr. H. S. Robertson
and the name was changed to The
Grapeland Messenger with
Dr. Robertson
as editor.
In 1904-05,
Lee
Satterwhite operated the
paper, which he sold to
George E.
Darsey, Jr., and
A. H. Luker
became the editor. Members of the
Luker family continued as publishers
until 1968, when
Weldon Kirby,
the present owner, bought The
Messenger.
George
E. Darsey Sr., was bern in
Georgia. He came to Grapeland in
1883 and entered business with
John R. Foster
in a frame building. Darsey bought
Foster's interest in 1886. Darsey
built the first brick building in
Grapeland in 1898, later adding two
other adjoining brick structures.
They were razed by the 1913 fire,
after which the present building was
erected.
Charley
Darsey, president of the
Grapeland Community Council, is the
third-generation Darsey
owner-manager of the Darsey store.
C. W.
and J. C. Kennedy were early
merchants in Augusta who established
Kennedy Brothers in Grapeland in
1909. They helped organize a
Grapeland bank of which
Charles
Kennedy was president many
years. Chester
Kennedy served Grapeland as
mayor 1930-1944.
The Kennedys are descendants
of Daniel
McLean, Houston County's
first white settler, who came to the
county in 1812 with the
Guiterrez-
Magee Expedition and in 1837
was slain by Indians.
In the first decades of this
century, A. B.
Guice's Grapeland Blacksmith
Shop was a mecca for farmers of a
wide area. Guice not only shod
horses and sold buggies but made and
sold the Guice Harrow, a
spring-tooth cultivator in wide
demand. Dave
Walling operated a brick
factory as far back as 1906. The
Kennedy Brothers store built in 1909
is of bricks made in Walling's
plant.
First graduate of Grapeland
High School -- and the only one for
the 1904-05 term-- was
Cleo Murchison.
Graduates the following year were
Robert Lee
Eaves, Marion Stokes Pelham, Clauce
C. Leaverton, Zuma Wilson Anthony,
Annie Mae Scarhrough, Ida Coleman
Lively, Cora Ella Woodard and Hood
Murchison.
Grapeland is surrounded by
fine recreational lakes. Impoundment
of the Houston County Lake on Little
Elkhart Creek has provided Grapeland
with a limitless pure water supply
and facilities for fishing and
outing. The city also has an
alternate water supply from its own
deep well.
Replacement of cotton as king
by peanuts resulted in Grapeland
becoming the peanut center of its
area.
The Grapeland Peanut Festival,
first called the annual "Goober
Carnival," was inaugurated Sept. 27,
1945. Frankie
Lois Richardson of Percilla,
now Mrs. R. C.
Pennington, was elected first
Carnival Queen. The famous
Stamps Quartet
from Dallas entertained and
Victor H.
Schoffelmayer of the Dallas
News was the principal speaker. King
Peanut was Sam Hill.
The festival over the years
has grown into a major harvest time
production. In 1951, the name was
changed to Peanut Festival.
Grapeland previously had been
the site of notable Possum Walks and
Turkey Trots.
Sharing fame with the
championship Grapeland Sandies are
the high school's drama casts led
and inspired many years by
Mrs. J. C.
Shoultz, who taught English,
Social Science and Speech for 28
years (1944-72). For 18 years she
was Senior Class sponsor. She
organized and sponsored the Thespian
Troupe. Mrs. Shoultz was named
"Outstanding Senior Citizen of
Houston County" in 1967. The
Grapeland High School Auditorium
bears her name.
Grapeland's largest industry
is the sprawling Vulcraft Divison
Grapeland plant of Nucor
Corporation, a major industry based
in Charlotte, N. C.
The Grapeland plant fabricates
steel joists for industrial,
institutional, commercial and other
buildings. The plant's products are
shipped and used throughout Texas
and in Louisiana, Arkansas,
Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona and
Hawaii.
Exclusive of its
air-conditioned office building, the
vast plant -- which from above
resembles a giant aircraft with its
T-shape -- covers 240,000 square
feet of floor space on a 120-acre
site with an annual production of
capacity of 100,000 tons of steel
joists.
The Vulcraft plant now employs
300 workers and has been a steady
source of jobs and community growth
since it was built in 1968.
The plant now receives about
95 per cent of its steel from the
new Nucor Steel Division steel-
making plant at Jewett, which came
into production last year.
The Grapeland Messenger of
April 4, 1901, Vol. 3, No. 4,
boasted of improved lands within
three miles of town for sale at $5
to $50 per acre; unimproved lands,
$2 to $10 per acre.
Blount & Guice Cultivator
Works were making the side and V
harrow- "the most perfect cultivator
made" for which patent had been
issued two years earlier, "and from
the modest beginning of 200
cultivators per annum, they are now
being shipped out by the carload."
The Dunnam Broom Factory was a
"paying investment" to the
proprietors and farmers as well,
"broom corn being no small item of
production in the Grapeland
country."
Other industries were the
Hollingsworth
& Davis Lumber Mill in town,
and nearby mills of
J. J. Brooks,
J. N. Tyer
and B. C.
Williams.
"Here are lands as productive
as the Valley of the Nile and
adapted to the growth of all
marketable vegetation," the article
of 1901 continued.
A four-lane highway now is
being completed from Grapeland north
to the Anderson County line. New
homes and housing developments are
being added to Grapeland and its
vicinity.
A large increase in population
will be reflected in the next
federal census for Grapeland.
Source:
Anderson County Bicentennial