Pun times, academy gave way to disease in Pontotoc
PONTOTOC — Had we lived in this little Mason County settlement in the 1880s, we would have been acquainted with — and no doubt had to put up with — the notorious Pontotoc Punster. Will Davis was his name, and as Brady resident H.C. Byler Jr. tells the tale in “Bluebonnets and Rattlesnakes,” his self-published history of Pontotoc, Davis was particularly adept at punning off people’s names.
On one occasion, he was helping register attendees at a church meeting when two men from San Saba walked up to the registrar’s table. The first announced that his name was Armentrout. Davis promptly dubbed him “Mr. Limbfish.”
Apparently “Mr. Limbfish” had heard about Davis’ punning propensity and didn’t think much of it. “I have heard that you think you are a wit,” the man said, “and I concede that you are half right.”
Folks gathered around the registration table laughed and laughed at the clever put-down, but Davis wasn’t deterred. When the second San Saba man stepped up to the table and said his name was Horace Lookingbill, the punster christened him “Mr. Peeping Beak.”
Lookingbill was not amused. He leaned over and slapped Davis in the face. A fist fight erupted, and the church meeting had to be delayed until the participants could again get right with God.
More than a hundred years later, Mason County is home to one incorporated community — Mason, the county seat, population about 2,100 — and a handful of unincorporated villages, including Art, Fredonia, Grit
and Pontotoc, population maybe 30 or so. There was a time, back when Davis was the punniest man in town, that Pontotoc, about an hour’s drive north of Fredericksburg, was a thriving community with plans for a bright future. Alas, fate had other ideas. The question these days is whether the little ghost town might again be, as Davis might say, a “goes” town.
Settlers began moving into the area in the late 1850s, and a decade later, 21 families were living in or near Pontotoc. The name is said to have originated with Major Robert Kidd, proprietor of the community’s first general store and originally from Pontotoc, Miss. A Chickasaw word meaning “Land of Hanging Grapes,” locals pronounce it “Ponty-toc.”
By 1880, skirmishes with the Comanche had pretty much ended, and Pontotoc, on the road between Mason and San Saba, boasted three blacksmith shops, two grocery stores, a saddle shop, two doctors, a cotton mill, a barber shop, a grist mill, a post office, three churches and a two-story hotel. As in Mason, many of the homes and buildings were constructed of handsome native sandstone.
Violence was common
It was still the wild frontier, even with the Comanche subdued. Byler quotes a woman named Emma Josephine Haynes, born in 1876, who recalled witnessing a killing at a Christmas party when she was a child. She crouched behind a rock while bullets flew, one of which grazed her sister’s cheek. Since no witnesses to the killing were willing to come forward, the suspect got off. In later years, though, he said that every time he rode out at night, the man he had killed would come up out of the darkness, take hold of the bridle reins and walk along with him a ways.
In 1882, residents resolved to put Pontotoc on the map with a grand sandstone structure in the heart of town, not for a courthouse or city hall but for a school, the San Fernando Academy. The Mason News called it the “pride of Pontotoc.”
The first session of the academy convened in 1883, with a hundred students, 30 girls and 70 boys. Tuition was between $1.50 and $2.50 a month, depending on the subjects taken; board was between $7 and $10 a month. Enrollment soon doubled, and the number of stores in Pontotoc increased from four in 1866 to 20.
A devastating disease
But then tragedy struck, and the town never recovered. In 1887, typhoid fever began spreading from house to house; scores died. The local cemetery filled up, and a second one had to be created.
Byler, 86, is a retired professional poker player, so he knows a thing or two about the odds and playing the hand fate deals you. In a phone conversation earlier this week, he mentioned two young uncles who went swimming in a stagnant pool of the San Saba River in the 1920s and came down with typhoid. They infected the whole family. One of the boys died; the other didn’t. The father died; the mother survived.
In a fascinating book called “Rough Country: How Texas Became America’s Most Powerful Bible-Belt State,” Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow recounts numerous epidemics and unchecked communicable diseases that ravaged this state in the mid-1800s: 1,100 dead of yellow fever in Galveston in 1867, for example, as many as 20 percent of the population killed in Navasota and La Grange as the epidemic spread inland. Wuthnow contends that the violence, disease and daily hardship that afflicted this “rough country” gave rise to early civilizing influences, including churches and schools.
In Pontotoc, civilization surrendered. The academy closed its doors in 1889, and the grand building was sold to the Pontotoc public school system, which used it until 1927. It sat abandoned for years, its bell rescued by a church in Eldorado. Just the other day, a phantom wind flattened the remaining three walls.
Like many a small Texas town, Pontotoc itself began to dwindle in the 1950s, withering away in the years-long drought.
“Peanuts come along; they kept things going for a while,” recalled Pontotoc native T.J. Watkins, a local rancher. “Then they lost their subsidy. After that, we raised turkeys for a while, but they moved on to where the grain is.”
Watkins, 71, remembers a barber shop, a saddle shop, a post office, a grocery store and a movie theater in Pontotoc. “It cost you a dime on Friday night and a nickel on Saturday night to see the same show,” he recalled.
Returning to grapes
True to the town’s name, a few grape growers are trying to make a go of it in the area’s red dirt, including Alphonse Dotson, the wine-maker and vineyard owner I wrote about last week. The Houston native’s tasting room is in an old sandstone building in “downtown” Pontotoc.
“We want this little place to be the best-kept secret that’s no longer a secret,” he told me a few days ago. “We do get traffic, but it’s traffic from individuals who are not in a hurry.”
Watkins told me he likes Dotson and his wife, Martha Cervantes, and wishes them well, but he’s not particularly eager to see a Pontotoc revival.
“I’m just tickled to death the way things are,” he said. “I was born and raised here, and I’m just as happy as a lark” — or, as Will Davis might have put it, “He’s a regular Mr. Gleefowl.”