Burnt Deeds and Bar Fights
Working in the Title business you quickly learn that buildings aren’t just structures for habitation or commerce. Lurking within the paper trail of title deeds passed through generations lie hidden the very history of a town. Old structures get knocked down and new buildings erected in their place, but the very foundations whisper stories of bygone eras when horses carried the mail and Comanche warriors roamed the Texas hill country. Driving down the main street of any town it’s difficult to tell the tumult and chaos in which towns were often born. Modernization has given a homogenized look to many main streets in America, making a place look like anywhere rather than somewhere. No one remembers anymore that the building where your mother goes for pilates was at one point a "house of ill repute" or that the land where the Chick-Fil-A now sits was once saloon where Jesse James drank rye and played cards, which was in turn used as a cache for moonshine during Prohibition.
Luckily, the collective consciousness of Fredericksburg Texans seems to have a firmer footing in the past. Maybe it’s harder to forget when the fachwerk architecture of the Sunday Houses of German settlers still line the streets and buildings like the Nimitz hotel and The Priess Building/Keidel Memorial Hospital still stand as monuments of the past. Each building is a small part of Fredericksburg’s history, some with title deeds stretching back almost as far as the founding of the town when John O. Meusebach first settled with 120 German pioneers May 8th, 1846.
Burnt Deeds and Bar Fights
John Hunter - Sometimes town clerk, bar tender, fighter.
You may not know it looking at the Gillespie County Court House, but the origins of our esteemed hall of justice originated in a seedy past. Before the Gillespie County Courthouse was built, justice was doled out in the Pioneer Memorial Library. Before that, there was a temporary courthouse at county clerk/local hot head John M. Hunter’s store. John Hunter may never be mentioned in high school history books, but his mark has forever been made on the annals of Fredericksburg history…but not for anything admirable.
Fighting loomed large in the legend of ill-tempered John Hunter. From what can be gleaned about his personality from scant historical records, it seems that he was known for resorting to violence in confrontations. From all appearances, it seems as though a disproportionate amount of Hunter’s clientele were drunk soldiers; considering Hunter’s waspish disposition, this proved to be a recipe for perennial barroom brawls. As he was the county’s first clerk and his building held all the town records, he seems to have been tolerated and his tantrums were excused. However, as is usually the case when tempers remain untempered, Hunter’s anger led to some unfortunate consequences. It all began when Hunter got in a fight with a local militia member whom he refused to serve a snort of whiskey. Hunter thought the soldier had had enough to drink, the soldier disagreed– a fight ensued. This time instead of bludgeoning his patron with a blunt object (ax handles seemed to be his favorite instrument of destruction), he knifed said soldier, killing him in the brawl. Mayhem ensued: fifty angry soldiers mobbed the street looking for blood, but Hunter had fled the scene. To satiate their blood lust, and seek reparations for their fallen comrade, the soldiers merrily burned Hunter’s store to the ground along with the towns earliest records, none of which were recovered.
Quirky history, but it's ours.
The non-native may scoff, thinking local history as hokey and pathetic as Lesley Knope writing a biblically-thick book on the history of Pawnee Indiana. Afterall, this isn’t Thermopile, Rome, or even Boston—It’s Fredericksburg, Texas. No significant battles were fought here, nor were there any important documents signed that anyone outside of Fredericksburg would remember. For just a moment I would ask the reader to zoom out for a moment and consider the question: what makes a town what it is? Writer, agrarian, and "place" lover, Wendell Berry, points us in the right direction when he says: “I like the way that the history of the tree shapes the tree. There’s no distinction between the tree and its history.” Now substitute the word ‘tree’ for ‘town.’ Our history is what makes our town itself—that applies as much here as it does to Modesto California, Grandville Michigan, or any other number of towns across America whose history seems of little consequence to those who don’t live there. Local lore and traditions will always be silly to the outsider or the citizen with no roots, but the very same silly traditions and lore we hold onto is the very stuff that makes a town what it is.
We have a tendency to bury the past under the dirt of ugly concrete monoliths that litter every town and city across America. Rather than maintaining individual identities, sadly, every town starts to look alarmingly the same. When you drive through and see the concrete temples of Walmart, PetSmart, or Kmart, you get the feeling that you’ve been there before, but it's nowhere specific you can recall. Every town starts to look familiar but alien; familiar because of the same brands offered to you in similar layouts, alien because it’s a town that no longer belongs to the people but to glutted corporations whose sole aim is conformity. As conformity takes root, a town loses its memory of itself.
Drive it on Home
Our December blog was about keeping Fredericksburg a place people want to call home, to raise their families and invest their talents in— but no one will care for, or invest in a place they don’t know, nor will they be able to call it home. To love a place is to know it. That kind of knowing is what motivates folks to preserve what is good and change what isn’t. That only comes from a rootedness in a place, knowing the obscure history that gives it all its little knots and gnarly branches.