Town that time forgot looks to the future by embracing its past
SAN AUGUSTINE — Motorists headed south on U.S. Highway 96 out of Center some years back likely noticed a rough, oblong-shaped rock propped up beside the road with a message printed in what appeared to be white paint: San Augustine 10 miles ahead 100 years behind Newspaperman Gary Borders took a photo of the rock and ran it on the front page of the San Augustine Rambler back in 1982. The very next day a Texas Department of Transportation crew drove out and rolled the rock over, message-side down. Borders told me earlier this week that he looked for it driving into San Augustine on Wednesday morning from his home in Longview but didn’t see it. “Probably buried under 18 inches of red dirt by now,” he said.
The boulder billboard has been gone for years, but the sentiment lingers. This old town behind the Pine Curtain, its heyday during the brief era of the Texas Republic nearly two centuries ago, seems to be a town that time forgot.
The reality, though, is something else. Residents I talked to this week are working hard to keep their little town alive and prospering — in large part by embracing San Augustine’s colorful past. As with most small towns, historic and otherwise, it’s not an easy task.
Unless you’re headed to nearby national forests or two huge reservoirs (Sam Rayburn and Toledo Bend), the old town on Ayish Bayou, population about 2,100, is on the road to nowhere, but there was a time when it was, arguably, the most important town in Texas. The Spanish settled San Augustine in 1717 among the Ayis Indians. It was the eastern link on the chain of Texas missions along El Camino Real, the historic King’s Highway that ran from Mexico City, through San Antonio and Nacogdoches and on to Nachitoches. La.
For a hundred years San Augustine was the main border town, first between New Spain and the French-held Louisiana territory, then between the United States and Mexico. In the early days of the Texas Republic, thousands of new
settlers crossed the Sabine and streamed into San Augustine, 15 miles west of the river.
Davy Crockett passed this way. On Jan. 9, 1836, he wrote a final letter to his wife and daughter in Tennessee. “The cannon was fired here on my arrival,” he wrote, “and I must say as to what I have seen of Texas its the garden spot of the world.”
Sam Houston came and stayed a while. He built a house, divorced his wife and opened a law office. He also recovered from the wound he suffered at San Jacinto in the home of a San Augustine friend and represented the area in Congress between his two presidential terms.
Frederick Law Olmsted, designer in later years of New York City’s Central Park, visited San Augustine in 1853 and found a town of perhaps 50 or 60 houses and half a dozen shops facing a muddy town square. “As to the people,” he wrote in “A Journey Through Texas,” “a resident told us there was but one man in the town that was not in the constant habit of getting drunk, and that this gentleman relaxed his Puritan severity during our stay in view of the fact that Christmas came but once that year.”
Cradle of Texas After annexation, San Augustine lost its bordertown prominence, and the self-proclaimed “cradle of Texas” slowly ceased rocking. In the latter decades of the 19th century, nearby Lufkin grew and prospered, while San Augustine settled into the somnolence of a small town — a small Southern town, that is, with its Faulknerian burden of slavery and segregation, ancient feuds and deeply engrained poverty.
Cotton was the money crop into the early decades of the 20th century, then cattle and always timber. These days timber and poultry are San Augustine’s livelihood, although Willie Crain will tell you the timber jobs are not what they used to be.
I met Crain, a retired logger, hanging out with buddies beneath a tall cedar tree behind the Jerusalem Memorial Colored (later Christian) Methodist Episcopal Church. Established in 1845, it was the first African-American church of record in Texas. Crain and the guys regularly get together under “The Tree” to solve the world’s problems, including, on Wednesday, whether the Texans’ Deshaun Watson was a better quarterback than the Cowboys’ Dak Prescott.
“I cut logs for 30 years,” Crain told me. “When I was coming up, there was work to be had. Not anymore.”
Pride in pines, pecans San Augustine County remains, as it has for years, one of the poorest counties in the state, with a poverty rate of 24 percent. Unemployment is close to 10 percent, double the state average.
“Nobody really wanted to leave here, but there was no work here,” San Augustine native Betty Oglesbee told me.
Co-author with her late husband John of four books of regional history, Oglesbee loves the town and has been involved in historic preservation and economic development efforts for years. She takes pride in the gracious, old homes shaded by towering pines and venerable pecan trees and the historic downtown buildings, including an old jail she helped transform into a
handsome law-enforcement museum. She’s excited about a $1.5 million grant from the state to reconstruct the Mission Dolores site on the edge of town.
“We’re off the beaten path in a lot of respects, and yet I think our business is picking up here,” Oglesbee said. The city’s Main Street Program, a state program that funds adaptive reuse of downtown historic buildings, has contributed to the upturn, she added.
A hidden treasure
People like Imogene Newman are moving in, coming back. She and her husband ran a couple of motels and restaurants in Wisconsin until 2010, when he became disabled and they decided to move back to San Augustine, where he had grown up. She opened Imogene’s, a downtown café in a historic building where everything is homemade, including the pies and bread. “We bread our own chicken-fried to order and don’t buy anything frozen or processed,” she said. “It’s just home-type food.”
At 65, she works 80 hours a week, with help from her granddaughter, brother-in-law and grandson.
“What we need is economic development,” she said. “You can fill all these historic buildings up, but if there’s no money, they’re not going to make it.”
Tracy Cox, director of the city’s Main Street Program, is hoping that newcomers — with money to spend — will discover what she and her husband discovered when they moved here eight years ago. “The reason we stayed was, this is like a resort,” she said. “This town has clean air, peace and quiet. We have wildlife, we have fishing. It’s kind of a hidden treasure. And the people are nice.”