Sheriff’s badges back in town
Early female law official’s items to go on display
The petite homemaker kept a small pistol strapped in a holster on one hip and a large pearl-handled chrome revolver in her skirt waistband. But her real weapon of choice was an axe handle.
Fannie Pearl Surratt — Montgomery County’s only female sheriff and also among the first Texas women to ever serve in this male-dominated role — liked using an axe to destroy gambling machines in 1949 in the same way Carry Nation used a hatchet to demolish barrooms during the Temperance Movement, records show.
Montgomery County Detective Fadi Rizk recently tracked down Surratt’s grandchildren in Houston and was excited to learn that they still had some of Surratt’s memorabilia for him to display. While Surratt’s axe handle disappeared years ago, her signature cowboy hat and badges, including one with a diamond in the middle of
the star, are among some items that her family has preserved.
These will be exhibited along with other law enforcement memorabilia in a new display planned for at the criminal justice building to document the rich, long history of the Montgomery County sheriff’s department. Republic of Texas’ President Sam Houston created this department, the third oldest in the state, when he carved out some territory that became Montgomery County in 1837, Rizk said.
So far authorities have identified only two other Texas women who served as sheriffs before Surratt: Emma Daughtery Banister in Coleman County in 1918 and Edna Reed Dewees in Loving County in 1945.
While Surratt’s tenure as sheriff lasted only two years, her vigorous crusade to purge the area of “marble tables, pinball machines and everything else” used in gambling was included in a recent book on early Texas sheriffs written by oral historian Thad Sitton.
Surratt was appointed in 1949 to complete her husband Hershel’s second term as sheriff, after he collapsed and died from a heart attack. ‘Original church lady’
Fannie Surratt was known as being a “good shot” with a gun, her grandchildren said, but until her husband died she had devoted herself to raising their only child, Gloria.
The 47-year-old mother never hesitated when commissioners asked her to pin that badge on her chest. Her 19-year-old daughter had married shortly before she lost her husband and she saw nothing to hold her back, the grandchildren said.
Today, her grandson, Kirby Van Burch, remembers his grandmother as “the original church lady” who was taken to court and “got into a little trouble” for using her axe handle to destroy so much gambling equipment. “She was told that she should only confiscate it,” he said. “But sometimes she couldn’t help herself and destroyed it any way.”
She was determined to enforce the gambling and prostitution rules that her late husband and others had ignored, he said.
“Nobody back then liked working with a woman sheriff,” he said. “But she was fearless. She told me that she would not accept bribes like some of the other public officials did.”
The Surratt grandchildren also have other artifacts that could be displayed such as a blood-stained oak chair that came from a sensational murder trial held at the Montgomery County courthouse in 1941.
It’s a case that involved a black man who worked in the cotton fields named Bob White, who was charged in 1937 with the rape of Ruby Cochran, the wife of a white landowner in Polk County. Numerous civil rights violations were documented during the multiple appeals and retrials, according to the Northeastern University Law School’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project in Boston.
In the middle of White’s third retrial on the rape charge that was transferred to Montgomery County, Cochran’s husband, W.S. ”Dude” Cochran, fatally shot White in the head, staining the chair in the courtroom where he sat.
This occurred in 1941, the year before Hershel Surratt was elected sheriff. He worked then as a deputy sheriff who aided in the arrest and charging of W.S. Cochran with White’s murder. However, a jury later deliberated only a few minutes before acquitting Cochran and setting him free, the Northeastern University project said.
Surratt’s grandson, Van Burch, is quick to stress how his grandmother fought for equal and fair treatment for minorities.
He recalled her having “secret meetings” in which she helped minorities successfully navigate the legal system and fought housing discrimination when she went in to real estate after retiring from the sheriff’s department. ‘No loafing’
While excited to find the Surratt artifacts, Rizk is also searching for any memorabilia from Sheriff Samuel Grimmett. He was ambushed and fatally shot in 1847, which according to records, makes him the third Texas sheriff ever to be killed in the line of duty.
Grimmett’s suspected killer was caught, but an angry mob later took the suspect from his cell and lynched him, records show.
The only other Montgomery sheriff’s officer killed in the line of duty was Deputy Abner Womack Jr. in 1876. He was riding his horse while collecting taxes, which was part of a deputy’s constitutional duties in rural counties back then, when he encountered a suspected horse thief, records show. Womack attempted to arrest him, but the suspect shot Womack and then escaped on deputy’s horse.
“We don’t have anything yet belonging to these fallen officers, not even photos,” said Rizk.
However, he has unearthed other interesting memorabilia such as a mug shot taken at the Montgomery County jail of the notorious serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas, as well as a placard that Sheriff Mabin Anderson once posted around the county during World War I that said: “No loafing. Go to work, go to war or go to jail.”
Rizk has also collected multiple uniforms worn by deputies before those uniforms were finally standardized in 1976 by the county’s longest serving sheriff, Gene Reaves, who held the office from 1960-1981.
Rizk, who likes to collect deputy patches like others do baseball cards, volunteered to head the four-member team working on the museum project because he wants to see the department’s history preserved.
“Weurge anyone who can help with this project to contact us,” said Rizk. He can be reached by calling (936) 777-3293.
cindy.horswell@chron.com