Abilene History in Plain Sight

A GRASSY PLAIN

SPRINGS TO LIFE

Abilene instantly sprouted into existence at ten o’clock on the morning of March 15, 1881, as the Texas and Pacific Railway Company staged a land auction which would turn 1,600 acres of west Texas grassland into a brand new town.

The T&P, chartered to build a rail line from Marshall, Texas, to the Pacific coast, never even reached the border of New Mexico, as the T&P joined her rails to those of the Southern Pacific line at Sierra Blanca, ninety miles east of El Paso.

On their march west, Texas & Pacific track laying crews reached Baird before Christmas of 1880 and pushed through the tall grasses of northern Taylor County in January of 1881. By the time the Abilene town lot sale was staged in mid-March, the T&P crews had already laid rails as far west as Sweetwater and would reach the Big Spring watering hole by the end of May.

The T&P had earlier joined with local cattlemen in an agreement to survey and stake out streets and lots at the site which they had chosen for Abilene. The exact spot was centered on milepost 407, which had the advantage of being near the confluence of Lytle and Cedar Creeks and just over a mile east of Catclaw Creek.

The railroad established towns all along the line but saved its biggest promotion for Abilene. Advertisements were taken out in newspapers, and reporters were encouraged to come see the possibilities of this newly tamed land billed as the Future Great City of West Texas.

Credited with laying out the streets was an agent for the railroad, Josiah Stoddard Johnston of Kentucky, who arrived in late 1880. The T&P deeded its lands to Johnston who, in turn, would deed them to the winning bidders come auction day. Johnston devised the street numbering system and chose to name the streets running perpendicular to the tracks for trees, although he did throw in some catch-all vegetation when he opted to name a southside street simply, Vine. Some of the tree streets, such as Apple and Sassafras, never materialized.

The day prior to the sale brought sleet, and although the sale day dawned bright and clear, the slush remained as a crowd estimated to be around two thousand tromped about. Whiskey sold from a barrel seemed to be the preferred method of regaining one’s interior warmth.

At South First and Chestnut an auctioneer’s platform was assembled from railroad ties (the same location which, for decades, hosted a New Year tradition of gunfire to mark the stroke of January 1) and a large plat of the town site was tacked up for bidders to see which lots were sold. Special trains brought potential buyers from back east including a fair number of speculators who hoped their gamble on infant Abilene would pay a handsome return as the town grew.

At ten o’clock the auctioneer began the bidding and Abilene was born. Belle Plains storekeeper Captain Johnathan Taylor Berry made the first bid as he bought two adjacent lots at the northwest corner of North Second and Pine, paying $355 for each fifty foot wide parcel. (The two lots are still joined as one and occupied by a single building erected in 1954.)

By day’s end, 139 lots had been sold for a total of $23,810. The bidding continued the following day with $27,550 earned from the sale of 178 more of the staked, grassy rectangles along the tracks.

ABILENE’S

OLDEST CHURCH

When Abilene was born on March 15, 1881, a church had already been established. And by the time the town was twenty-five years old in 1906, there were sixteen. That number had increased to twenty-six by 1921. And twenty-five years after that—just after World War II—there were more than twice that many, with twenty Baptist congregations, eleven Churches of Christ, and eight Methodist churches. In 2014, it is difficult to get an accurate count of Abilene churches, but it is near one hundred, according to Taylor County records.

When a group of Presbyterians gathered for worship near the temporary Texas and Pacific depot on Sunday, February 27, 1881, the town lot sale that would create Abilene was still two weeks away. The Buffalo Gap family of William Adolphus Minter saw the promise of Abilene and moved to the Texas and Pacific tracks in anticipation of Abilene coming into existence. The Minter family and a handful of others met at the spot along the rails and organized Abilene’s most senior institution—the First Presbyterian Church. A plaque commemorating their historic gathering is located in Everman Park.

Initially, the young congregation met at the frame schoolhouse located at North Third and Cedar before moving into its own building in 1884. The 1920s were a period of growth in Abilene and that population spurt resulted in a new sanctuary for First Presbyterian that opened for worship on April 6, 1924, and which still stands at the corner of Orange and North Fourth Street.

A second Presbyterian congregation was organized in 1885. Known as Central Presbyterian, it met at Beech and North Second, only blocks away from its Presbyterian brethren. In a congregational meeting held in December of 1948, this group authorized the purchase of a new location at North Fifth and Grape and drew up plans for a new building. The traditional, colonially inspired design presented West Texans much to talk about. Despite architectural arguments, the group pressed ahead and the 445-seat New England-style church went up along Grape, with the first services being held on October 1, 1950. The Abilene Reporter-News touted the fact that the pews were cushioned with foam rubber.

In 1970, the congregation of Central Presbyterian united with its kin at First Presbyterian, resulting in Abilene’s oldest church taking on the unified name of First Central Presbyterian. Both church buildings were marketed for sale and whichever sold first would then move in with the other congregation. Central found a buyer for its Grape Street property and so they made the move a few blocks east to join First Presbyterian. .

Founder William Adolphus Minter died in 1908. What was described as the longest funeral procession in Abilene ended with Will Minter’s Christmas Eve funeral held in the church he established. Descendants of the Minter family remain members of the First Central Presbyterian congregation more than 130 years later.

Yesterday, Abilene proved the possession of an unusually high moral

standard by more than one-third of her population being present at the

Sunday Schools of the several churches of the city.

—Abilene Daily Reporter, May 24, 1909

THE BELL

TOLLS FOR US

It was a series of C-sharps that first called Abilene to worship in 1883. The tone rang forth from the belfry atop the small Methodist church located at South Second and Butternut. That same note, from that same bell, continues to sound each Sunday as one of Abilene’s oldest congregations gathers for worship.

Just weeks after the founding of Abilene, local Methodists organized into a congregation in 1881. They would be the first group to construct a place of worship, with a building going up at South Second and Butternut beginning in 1882. The small frame church cost $2,000 to build and it stood ready for worship, weddings, and funerals by the summer of 1883.

The white, clapboard church design was quite simple. Evenly spaced along both the north and south walls were three arched windows. The east-facing double front door was topped with a Gothic-style fanlight and framed by windows on either side. Perched on the roof was a small spire reportedly constructed by an itinerant carpenter named John Hancock from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who specialized in steeples. Legend has it that while working on the steeple, Mr. Hancock was overcome with a a premonition so dire that he simply put down his tools, walked to the Abilene train depot, and caught the next passenger train east.

The small spire housed a copper bell, cast in 1883 by the Henry McShane foundry of Baltimore and shipped to Abilene on the Texas and Pacific that same year. The original building would serve the congregants until it was replaced in 1890 with a larger building and the three-hundred-pound bell was re-hung in a taller spire. A third sanctuary was built in 1925 and, once more, the bell was hoisted into the belfry. A fourth building was ready to receive worshippers on January 2, 1966 but, because the 1925 sanctuary was not razed, the forgotten bell remained in place until 2008 when the old red-brick building was finally demolished.

The long-silent bell was removed and polished and a custom frame was built so that this bit of Abilene history in plain sight could be prominently displayed in the church foyer. Each Sunday that original bell still sounds out the deep C-sharp that has called Abilene to church from her earliest days.

THE ORIGINAL

WINDSOR HOTEL

The ten-story, 260-room Windsor Hotel erected in 1927 and still occupying a corner of Pine and North Fourth is not the original Windsor Hotel of Abilene. Two blocks south and standing on the corner of Cypress and North Second is the first Windsor Hotel. Perhaps Abilene’s oldest commercial building, it was the largest hotel in town, boasting forty-three rooms, when it opened in the ten-year-old town of Abilene. The hotel borrowed its name from the Grand Windsor Hotel in Dallas which was considered the finest in that city. Newspaper ads at the time showed the hotel with trolley cars plying along Cypress and North Second, though there was no such luxury at the time. Today the three-story Windsor—at least on the outside—looks much as it did in those early ads and when guests first passed inside in 1891, complete with a twelve-foot-wide veranda on the second story

The Windsor touted a kitchen, dining room, reading room, and elegant bath rooms, with all the guest rooms connected to the office by an electric bell system. The $30,000 building also provided guests with a fire-proof safe to deposit their valuables. Furnishings were of antique oak and the woodwork, doors, and casings were finished in a dark oil stain, with the walls delicately tinted in an early version of sheetrock known as alabastine.

Local businessman Mr. E. Andrews was hired as the hotelier and caterer charged with running the town’s finest hotel. It had the added benefit of being located on what many thought to be the best corner in Abilene—Second and Cypress—which was in the heart of the business district. With the hotel’s front door being 150 yards north of the noisy arrivals and departures of the T&P steam locomotives, guests were assured a good night’s rest.

The doors to the Windsor were thrown open for a New Year’s Eve grand celebration in 1890 so that all of Abilene could ring in 1891. Guests began arriving at eight in the evening, and it was reported that by ten all three floors were full and the dining room was at capacity as Professor Lucas’ quadrille band struck up a march. Music, laughter, and the melodic voices of Abilene conversation floated out into the street as the new epicenter of the town’s social life hosted its premier event.

Abilene was already home to smaller hotels such as the Foley on Oak Street, the Adams House, and the Palace Hotel at Chestnut and South Third. So fierce was the competition for disembarking passenger train business that the city aldermen passed an ordinance in 1908 outlawing the use of megaphones on city streets. (It was their aim to stop the raucous solicitation of potential hotel guests which had erupted between the Windsor and the Palace Hotel along the train platform.)

In 1927 the Windsor was renamed the Palm Hotel and operated by Mrs. Alpha Allen. Fifteen years later she sold the property to a Brownwood businessman. Ownership changed again in 1946 when Abilene merchant T. C. Campbell and his son bought the building.

After serving as a hotel for sixty-one years, the thirty-eight rooms were emptied in 1952 and the furniture auctioned off; the top two floors were remodeled into office space and the first floor offered for retail shops. The exterior brick was covered with aluminum siding, the old paned windows were refitted with black glass windows, and an elevator was added. Thornton’s Shoe store occupied half of the ground floor with the rest taken by Zick’s News Stand and Leddy’s Boot Shop. The Campbells dubbed the made-over hotel The Commerce Building. It again took on a new name in the 1970s, becoming The Cypress Building.

In the 1990s the venerable old hotel was once again brought to light with an extensive refurbishment that removed the siding and replacement windows. The renovation was completed with the original name and date set along the top of the building.

THE LINGERING YOUTH

OF AN OLD HIGH SCHOOL

Looming large at the southern terminus of Grape Street stands a memory, an epic Abilene memory. Occupying a city block is a brick school which for many is the alma mater of their adolescence. The property along South First Street has been the site of an Abilene school since 1889 and, for over sixty years, the city’s educational epicenter and focus of local pride. It was home to Abilene High School.

The property is still home to a school, though now in name only. The vacant three-story structure (four if you consider the basement) was known to some generations as Lincoln Middle School, just as the silver letters still spell out on the northeast corner wall. That is how my oldest daughter remembers it as a proud member of the final class to attend school there in 2007. Still others walked the halls when the building was branded Lincoln Junior High and they remember it by that name. (When the old high school became a junior high in 1955, the honor afforded Abraham Lincoln was a hotly debated topic as many Confederate Abilene children and grandchildren held long memories of that Southern cause.) Yet, for many of Abilene’s oldest generation there is not a junior or middle school which they see at the end of Grape; instead, resting in their memory is their high school.

High above the front door over the top windows perches an owl with spread wings over an open book and higher up on the roof, guarding this symbol of wisdom on both sides, sit two concrete, canine-like gargoyles resting on hind legs, holding shields. On a summer day not many years back, I stopped by the school as principal Kay Taylor’s car was the only one out front. She graciously let me poke around, even taking me to the basement to see the sub-surface stream which trickles right through it. Then we climbed the well-worn stairs to the top floor and she pointed the way to the