Ancestry Magazine

How one small town safeguards its history.

Family historians with a desire to preserve historic towns could model themselves after the residents of Calvert, Texas, a town that celebrates its past by developing profitable historic programs that boost its economy.

The Calvert Chamber of Commerce and Robertson County Historical Commission advertise annual events to attract visitors from the region who participate in a variety of activities. Aside from the economic benefits—sales of gifts, souvenirs, and antiques, as well as restaurant, ticketed event, and concession business-historic programs promote a strong sense of fellowship and pride among the community’s residents.

King Cotton
Calvert’s multifaceted past provides a great deal of raw material for creating these intriguing historic programs. In the midst of the nineteenth-century Old West, Calvert-assaulted by the sounds of gunfire and cotton gins-began as a collection of saloons, outlaw hangouts, farms, plantations, and homesteads scattered among 156,000 acres of some of Texas’s most productive cotton fields. Before the Civil War, plantations of the fluffy white commodity, produced by slaves and poor white laborers, supported the economy of the entire area.

Cotton production was still so important to the area after the Civil War that early in the 1870s, the Gibsons of Galveston transported a story-and-a-half European flywheel on a twenty-oxen cart to Calvert. After a trip that took several months, the Gibsons built the world’s largest cotton gin in the town. Until fire destroyed the structure in 1965, Calvert residents lived, worked, ate, and slept to the slow, churning rhythm of steam (and, later, diesel) engines turning the flywheel.

The Railroad Arrives
The cotton economy in Calvert was still king when rails began crawling across the Texas plains. (Eager to connect its interior territories, the United States began building railroads through old Native American hunting grounds in the mid-1800s, using the cheap labor of former bondsmen and imported foreign workers.) By 1869, the railroad had arrived in Calvert. The first train blew into town in June carrying passengers, supplies, farm equipment, building materials, and luxuries for new homes. In the hot Texas sun, hundreds of wagons awaited the train, loaded with equal amounts of raw materials to be shipped back to Houston factories. In the months that followed, some 30,000 Civil War refugees found their way to Calvert looking for work—low-paying work in the cotton fields and cotton service industries, or slightly better-paying railroad work.

The two-hundred-mile stretch of track from Houston eventually made Calvert the railhead from the Texas Gulf Coast. When people had first learned of the planned railroad to Calvert, they had eagerly bought land in the vicinity to develop and sell. Once the railroad arrived, adventurous and ambitious settlers and merchants flocked to the flat Texas wilderness behind the Houston and Texas Central Railroad to build homes, start families, and open businesses. These settlers constructed churches, schools, opera houses, ladies’ auxiliary groups, men’s fraternities, Bible clubs, parks, and theatres. Soon Calvert’s exploding economy supported a shift from frame buildings to permanent masonry structures.

Arrival of the railroad in Calvert caused a number of social and economic changes. One development was the seedy characters that followed the railroad tracks to town. Shoot-outs along muddy Main and Railroad streets often interrupted family dinners in nearby homes. In mid-chew, the frightened people of Calvert abandoned their exquisite meals on fine porcelain china, crystal stemware, and silver services to scramble beneath expensive furniture or take cover behind imported lace curtains that had been mail-ordered and special-delivered by rail.

Banks and Saloons
French immigrants Bertrand and Jacques Adoue were the town’s first bankers. These financiers built Texas’s first power and ice plant in Calvert. Adolph Busch of St. Louis warehoused his beer at the Calvert Ice, Water, and Electric Company. (Unfortunately, in 1975, two weeks after the National Historic Registry recognized the building that held the ice house, the building was destroyed by a tornado.)

Rowdy saloons lined each side of the sixty-four-foot Main Street, which was wide enough to allow wagons and mule teams to turn around and for horses to be hitched on either side. (Muddy Main Street was eventually improved with concrete and a layer of bricks. Iron stop markers lay embedded in the brick intersections until road construction eliminated the artifacts in the late 1980s.) Main Street’s most notorious saloon, because of the number of killings there, was Jake’s Place. Downstairs Jake sold a mug of beer and a slice of ham on rye for five cents, and regular customers hung their personal mugs by the bar. The gambling rooms were located upstairs.

Bandits and Outlaws
Railroad and stagecoach prosperity-and local watering holes such as Jake’s Place-invited such outlaws as Belle Starr, John Wesley Hardin, Sam Bass, and others who terrorized train and stagecoach passengers, robbed banks, and stole horses. Texas Ranger Leland McNelly chased these and other bandits from Burton through Calvert to the wooded area called Robber’s Roost, a few miles north of Calvert near Bremond.

One of the most notorious of these outlaws was Belle Starr (born Myra Bell Shirley), who was believed to be a Confederate spy. Myra came with her family to Calvert from Missouri during the Civil War. Soon after the Shirleys had opened a livery business, young Myra took up with Frank and Jesse James. Then she joined the Younger brothers and bore Cole Younger’s daughter, Pearl. Afterwards, Myra joined the Reed gang and had Jim Reed’s son. When Reed was killed, she rode with thieves to Cherokee Territory, where she married Sam Starr and received his name and Cherokee citizenship. When Sam Starr was killed, Belle married the Creek Jim July. After a violent quarrel with her new husband, the bandit queen was hunted and killed by a hired gun.

Victorian Texas
As unlikely as it may seem, amidst what appeared to be complete chaos, many of Calvert’s wealthier residents hired the best architects from around the world to design and build grand houses and public buildings. These residents, striving for refined lives, acquired possessions that would become heirlooms, dating back to a time when Texas was a nation.

Because of its gracious style of living, Calvert acquired the nickname “Victorian Texas.” To complement the town’s regal lifestyle, Frenchman J. P. Cashimir designed and constructed the Calvert opera house, equipped with a large stage, several dressing rooms, and box seats. The theatre presented productions from Houston and Dallas and hosted Jewish worshippers who were without a synagogue. Some of these Jewish worshippers were merchants who operated stores and ran the Grand Hotel, which was torn down and sold for its lumber and bricks during the Second World War.

In the mid-1870s, when railroad construction continued north to Dallas, Calvert went from railhead to an insignificant whistle stop along the route between Houston and Dallas. The end of railroad prosperity, technological advances in the cotton industry, and the introduction of synthetics halted Calvert’s economic growth. Finally, a ghostly quiet covered Calvert when yellow fever hit the town in 1873. Three hundred people died and thousands fled. However, boom times had left their mark permanently on Calvert’s architecture and landscape.

Preserving a Heritage
Not much has been collected or written about Calvert, which, with a population of 15,000, was the fourth-largest city in Texas at the end of the last century. Even the Texas State Archives lack a single photograph of Calvert-historic or present. But the dwindling population of Calvert (about 1,500 people today) does not seem alarmed or anxious to parcel out the town’s history to the highest bidder and risk losing its identity. In fact, Calvert’s senior inhabitants have taken the responsibility of preserving local history and sharing it with one another and with visitors in a number of ways: through monthly meetings of historical groups, annual Christmas tours of historic homes, and pilgrimages to historic homes and buildings during the city’s Spring Festival.

Deeply rooted families such as the Anderson, Barton, Cain, Cochran, Conitz, and Wiese families are among the descendants of Calvert’s original settlers. “Little towns like ours must preserve and honor themselves,” says Pauline Burnett, former chairperson of the Robertson County Historical District. Burnett is a descendant of the town’s founder, Robert Calvert, who was a wealthy Robertson County landowner with enough influence within the circle of state, federal, and railroad officials to secure himself part of the contract for the Houston and Central Texas Railroad. Burnett recognized more than twenty years ago that the city’s future could be resurrected from its rich architectural past.

For several generations, Calvert families have kept heirlooms, ancestral photographs, period furniture, documents, and artifacts in the same arrangement their great-grandparents kept them more than one hundred years ago. This quietly preserved past is then transferred to the next generation. Even newcomers who purchase historic homes and buildings in Calvert eagerly maintain period standards in restoration and furnishings.

At the same time other towns its size have been leveling century-old shingles, bricks, and mortar to make room for pre-fab modulars, Calvert has been raising funds to restore and preserve original architecture that has not been destroyed by fire or storm. The town recently restored Virginia Field Memorial Park, deeded to the city by German immigrants in 1868. This monument to the memory of the woman who supported the park for many years contains a pavilion designed by a New York architect. At the turn of the twentieth century, the pavilion bounced with dancing to the music of the Calvert Coronet Band; teens carved their initials in the wood to declare eternal love; and, for years, local, state, and national candidates campaigned from that public forum.

A Historic Legacy
No other town in Robertson County—or other town of its size in Texas—can match the number of Calvert’s historic structures. Many houses, facilities, and public buildings constructed between 1870 and 1900 were officially declared historic in 1978 and are listed in the National Historic Register. “Calvert has fifty-nine homes still standing that are more than one hundred years old,” says LaVerne Smith, secretary of the Calvert Chamber of Commerce. These homes, she adds, are in addition to one-hundred-year-old churches, hotels, coach houses, the cotton weigh station, City Hall, pavilions, the cemetery, and storefront buildings that line Main Street. Calvert’s fire bell and antique fire engine and a relic of a water fountain, donated by the civic league in 1912, are examples of the artifacts Calvert maintains.

“We are as important to American history as any of the celebrated locations in the United States,” Pauline Burnett says. “And we have the proof.”

Sunny Nash, photojournalist and author of the family memoir Bigmama Didn’t Shop at Woolworth’s, consults with those who are compiling family histories, memoirs, heirloom photographs, and old documents for collection, reproduction, or publication.