Sutherland Springs residents hope tragedy doesn’t define town
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS — Like most Texans who don’t live in Wilson County, I had never heard of this little town east of San Antonio until horrific tragedy struck Sunday morning a week ago. Finishing up at the Texas Book Festival in Austin that afternoon, an old reporter’s instinct diverted me south on Interstate 35 instead of heading home to Houston.
It was dark when I arrived. Knots of people loomed out of the darkness. Huge satellite trucks and police vehicles lined the highway. Rubberneckers clogged the intersection of Highway 87 and FM 539, where the town’s one blinking yellow light is supposed to slow traffic. The small whitewashed Baptist church, the site a few hours earlier of the worst mass shooting in Texas history, was bathed in lights brighter than day.
In a vacant lot across the street from the church, I encountered a prayer vigil conducted by a middle-aged Hispanic man dressed in black. He was surrounded by dozens of men, women and children holding candles and by an outer ring of reporters, most with cameras protruding into the circle. Angling for a better view, I was careful not to step in front of a gray-haired man in a blue polo shirt and khakis sitting in a wheelchair beside me, his candle lifted high. It took me a second to realize I was standing beside Gov. Greg Abbott.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I instinctively stepped aside, thinking it was a cameraman angling for a better view of the governor. It turned out to be my son Pete, a reporter for the Washington Post. In Texas for the weekend to attend a family reunion in Kerrville, he had been at the family gathering for all of 10 minutes when he got the call from the Post to head to a place called Sutherland Springs.
Thus did Pete and I, along with hundreds of journalists from around the world, descend on this unassuming little town at a time when residents were trying to cope with almost unimaginable horror in their midst. I’d been in similar situations — covering a mass shooting in a Fort Worth church 20 years ago, in West after the 2013
fertilizer-plant explosion — but to intrude on people’s grief and sorrow in an effort to tell their story never gets easy.
I went back a few days ago to find out more about the little town smack in the middle of what one CNN reporter described as “Texas fly-over country.” What I discovered was a semirural village with a colorful past and perhaps, as residents sought to assure me, a resilient future.
“It’s always been the water,” Tambria Read told me as we sat with several of her neighbors inside the former auto-repair shop that’s now the Sutherland Springs Historical Museum. Read, a visual fine arts teacher at nearby Floresville High School and a Sutherland Springs native, was referring to various Native American tribes who, since before recorded history, relied on the bountiful springs that feed nearby Cibolo Creek.
Kept finding water
She could have been referring to her own family. Her great-grandfather was Pattillo “Bud” Higgins, the Beaumont eccentric who believed the oil beneath Spindletop would transform Texas, if not the world; her grandfather, Pattillo “Pat” Higgins, Jr., was a would-be oilman who kept finding water every time he drilled in Wilson County. Water and good soil made the younger Higgins the selfproclaimed “grass king of the Southwest,” the developer of a variety of forage grass favored by the King Ranch that was called Higgins Blue Buffel.
Centuries earlier, Cibolo Valley attracted Canary Island immigrants from San Antonio. Among the first Anglo settlers was Joseph Henry Polley, who came to Texas with Moses Austin in 1820 and whose cattle herds eventually would be among the largest in the state. Whitehall, the handsome two-story house he and his wife Mary built out of native sandstone in 1848, still stands just north of town.
Polley participated in the Texas Revolution, as did Dr. John Sutherland Jr., who in December 1835 signed on to tend to Texian medical needs inside the Alamo garrison. Injured when he fell off his horse, he was in no condition to fight Gen. Santa Anna’s minions, so Col. William Barret Travis sent him to seek help from Gonzales. He returned with a contingent of men only to see smoke from funeral pyres rising over San Antonio.
After the war, Sutherland settled along Cibolo Creek and established a stage line from Indianola and Victoria and on to Chihuahua, Mexico. His house, a regular stop on the line, came to be called Sutherland Springs.
Sutherland also boarded patients who came to “take the waters” and gained a reputation for curing cholera and other maladies with a regimen of plants, herbs and steam. The, shall we say, distinctive odor of the sulfur water still pervades Sutherland Springs kitchens and bathrooms, although retired postmistress Beulah Wilson, 88, told me she’s convinced from personal experience that the odiferous water combats cancer — and mosquitoes.
“From the beginning their idea was to make a resort,” Fred Anderson told me. A Sutherland Springs native who became an executive with 7-Eleven and U-Tote-Em in Houston, Anderson helped clear up my confusion about Old and New Sutherland Springs. Old Town, as residents call it, is west of Cibolo Creek and looks relatively new; the Valero gas station, the Baptist church, a Dollar General store and a residential area are in Old Town.
New Town, as I learned on a driving tour with Anderson and other history-minded residents, was an ambitious project of the Sutherland Springs Development Corporation more than a century ago. The idea was to create on the east side of the creek the “Saratoga of the South.” In 1910, the 52-room luxury Hotel Sutherland opened, along with a sanitarium, a movie theater, a boarding house, a spacious pool and a 100-acre park shaded by venerable live oaks. Wealthy tourists from up north took the train to San Antonio, switched to a Sutherland Springs trunk line and luxuriated in the healing waters.
The resort’s heyday was brief. A 1913 flood destroyed the pool and bathing pavilions, and the Hotel Sutherland closed in 1923, the sanitarium in the ’40s. Anderson, 81, remembers his grandfather’s grocery store and a handful of other New Town businesses, but most migrated back across the creek to Old Town. Except for a few residences, New Town today is No Town.
Temporary memorial
It was dark by the time we finished our history tour. Before heading home, I stepped inside the First Baptist Church, its sanctuary painted stark white as a temporary memorial. I simply could not comprehend what had happened in the horribly violated space.
“It will make us stronger,” Read had assured me earlier.
She and her neighbors will never forget those who lost their lives, she explained by phone Thursday evening, but she hopes the little town that nobody knew will someday be known for something more than tragedy. Water and a rich past, grace and charity in response to great pain, the comfort of a close-knit community — those are attributes worth commemorating too.