A Town on the Verge: Flatonia, Texas

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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A Town on the Verge: Flatonia, Texas

Part of the charm of Texas is her small, frontier towns. Why, do you suppose, so many westerns are set in Texas? Flatonia, Texas fits the bill perfectly. As Texas dramatically won independence from a neglectful Mexico in 1836, Anglo settlements exploded along trading routes and rivers. In addition, central Texas found itself an ideal location for growing cotton. Following the Civil War, small communities competed to have major roads and rail pass through them. German and Czech immigrants who settled in Fayette County, and led by the new town’s namesake F.W. Flato, leaned into the future.

Cotton

In fertile land between the Brazos and Colorado Rivers, new European settlers found success growing cotton. But getting cotton and produce to mills and markets was nearly impossible on Texas’s network of muddy roads. Businessmen found a solution for the young state: rail.

Rail

In 1874, so excited for the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Antonio Railway to be building its line nearby, Flatonia moved itself the 2 miles just to be in its path. That shrewd decision allowed for local farmers to get their crop to market in Houston and Galveston. Both freight and passenger depots served the growing Flatonia; and, by 1887, a new north-south railway intersected the existing east-west one. 

Commerce

Seeking to take advantage of the 2 railways that intersected in Flatonia, business leaders encouraged industry to relocate to the bustling Texas town. Flatonia became the central shipping point for neighboring Lavaca and Gonzales Counties and the quiet county seat La Grange. Mills, factories, hotels, churches, schools, and banks ensured Flatonia would thrive as a local industrial hub well into the 20th century. In the 1930s, the Chamber of Commerce successfully lobbied to have the new US Highway 90 pass straight through the business district.

Landmarks

While Flatonia’s fortunes waned as the 20th century progressed, the population has not changed much from the 1950s. Fortunately, several early Flatonia buildings still stand, providing the town with a charming historical feeling. These include the railroad crossing switch tower, the 1886 Arnim & Lane Building, the Central Texas Rail History Center, and the Lyric Theater. In the 1970s, Interstate 10, connecting San Antonio to Houston, bypassed historic Flatonia, so curious Texans must now make a point to find the old town when speeding down the highway.

Evansville in World War II

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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Evansville in World War II

This article was adapted from Evansville in World War II By James Lachlan MacLeod (The History Press)

Before the start of World War II, Evansville, Indiana, was a relatively sleepy Ohio River city, badly hurt by the Great Depression and with only a couple companies working on military contracts. 

And yet, by the end of the war, the city had been transformed into a uniquely productive center of manufacturing. Tens of thousands of new workers flooded into Evansville, to work at Republic Aviation or the Evansville Shipyard. The landing ship tank or “LST” that was built at the shipyard made an especially large impact—not just on the Evansville economy but on the fate of the war itself.

Citizen Resilience

In the early months of 1941, Evansville’s most prominent companies and citizens were worried the coming war would hurt their modest Midwestern city. As a member of the chamber of commerce admitted, “It looks like Evansville is the forgotten country, or no-man’s land. . . . We do not seem to be able to interest any one in Washington in this part of the state.” But those companies and citizens didn’t give up. They formed the Manufacturers Association Defense Committee, which conducted “a survey of all available machine and personnel facilities within 50 miles of Evansville to make it possible to pool resources.” Thanks to their hard work, the federal government didn’t forget Evansville—it decided to construct new facilities there.

Overview of the Evansville shipyard in the spring of 1942. Courtesy of Evansville Museum/Evansville Vanderburgh
Public Library (EVPL via Evansville in World War II By James Lachlan MacLeod (The History Press, 2015 $21.99)

On February 14, 1942, the Evansville Courier revealed that a shipyard was coming and that it was to be located on some forty-five acres of mostly derelict land along the Ohio River between the Mead Johnson Terminal and the Southern Indiana Gas and Electric Company Power Station. Hundreds of people started showing up to pick up applications. The navy kept a close eye on the construction. Commander F.M. McWhirter, the navy’s district security officer, wrote to the yard’s manager: “The danger of espionage and sabotage to all facilities producing war material is ever-present. Your shipyard is vital to the success of the whole war effort.”

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Enemies Among Them?

Worries over espionage and sabotage nearly shut down one of Evansville’s most beloved landmarks—Reitz Hill, which still dominates the West Side of Evansville and offers a commanding and spectacular view of the downtown and the Ohio River. The navy considered closing Reitz Hill to all traffic because it looked down on the new shipyard, and the navy’s lawyer argued that closing it was essential for “protection against sabotage and espionage.” The authorities felt that they had to go further and completely close Lemcke Avenue for fear of photographs being taken from a moving vehicle. 

Reitz Hill was a popular spot for local couples, and the Evansville Press’s “Home Front” column thought that the measure was excessive, joking that the navy was “afraid of peekers not petters.” Eventually the authorities decided that closing the street was not essential, and Lemcke, along with Reitz Hill, remained open for the duration of the war, although it was kept under surveillance by shipyard security guards using telescopes.

In June 1942, the first keel was laid at the Evansville Shipyard—even as construction of the yard itself was clearly going on around it. Courtesy Evansville Museum/EVPL via Evansville in World War II By James Lachlan MacLeod (The History Press, 2015 $21.99)

Once that shipyard was operational, it specialized in building LSTs. An LST was designed to sail right up onto a beach and then open its huge bow doors to disembark its cargo of tanks and other vehicles directly onto the beach. The Evansville Shipyard made more than 150 LSTs. With a peak employment of just under 20,000 workers, it became the largest inland facility that manufactured LSTs in the world. 

“the destinies of two great empires . . . seem to be tied up in some God-damned things called LSTs.”

– Winston Churchill

The LSTs were a crucial piece of technology during the war—not glamorous, but important, reliable, and easy to overlook, just like the city that made them. No less an authority than British prime minister Winston Churchill remarked that “the destinies of two great empires . . . seem to be tied up in some God-damned things called LSTs.” 

But emperors didn’t make those ships. Evansville did.

This article was adapted from Evansville in World War II By James Lachlan MacLeod (The History Press, 2015 $21.99)

Alamo City Ghosts

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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Alamo City Ghosts

The Haunts of San Antonio

If San Antonio is the most historic city in Texas, then you know it must have its share of ghosts! Founded as a far-flung mission by Spain in the 1700s, San Antonio served as a regional nexus for culture, religion, trade, colonization, and politics. When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, San Antonio began to suffer from neglect. But as Anglo settlers arrived, the city grew in importance to the new Texans. Even though the Mexican Army later mercilessly reclaimed the San Antonio mission-turned-garrison Alamo, sparing only a few defenders, Texas would win its own independence a few weeks later at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. Today, San Antonio works hard to preserve its storied historic sites, where hundreds of years of ghosts continue to haunt its landmarks.

Menger Hotel

If only by virtue of being next door to the hallowed Alamo, the Menger Hotel might be the most haunted building in Texas. German immigrant William Menger and his wife Mary merged his brewery with her boarding house to form the Menger Hotel in 1859. Due to their posh designs, and San Antonio being on the road to virtually anywhere in Texas, their hotel was a hit. Teddy Roosevelt famously stayed their multiple times, and employees swear they’ve seen the famous cowboy president at the hotel bar.

Castle tower built by Edward H. Coppock located on top of Comanche Lookout Hill. via Haunted History of Old San Antonio By Lauren M. Swartz and James A. Swartz

Comanche Lookout Hill

Before Europeans colonized the area, the Apache and Commanche roamed the desolate central Texas landscape. San Antonio sits just south the Texas Hill Country, where the highest, local geographical point is Commanche Lookout Hill. Recognizing the commanding view of the entire area, the Commanche used the hill to their advantage in bloody raids on colonists. Centuries later, Army colonel Edward Coppock saw the obvious benefits of the site, and began construction of a castle tower, which only added to the spookiness of the hill (he is said to wander his unfinished project). Both Native and European spirits have been observed on the park’s trails today, and spooky screams and unexplained cries remind visitors of the site’s legacy.

Image from pg.54

to of Victoria’s Black Swan Inn. via Haunted History of Old San Antonio By Lauren M. Swartz and James A. Swartz

Black Swan Inn

What is it with haunted hotels? Why are ghosts so inclined to check in, even after they “check out?” Victoria’s Black Swan Inn conjures spirits from even before the romantic plantation mansion was built. In one of Mexico’s final attempts to recapture Texas, the doomed army suffered over 60 casualties at the Battle of Salado Creek. Nearly 40 years later, a prominent family erected a house nearby. In the 1950s, a socialite couple hosted celebrities there, but the husband committed suicide following his young wife’s death. Today, staff members report seeing the glamorous couple wandering the grounds separately.

The Holiday Inn Express and former Bexar County jail. via Haunted History of Old San Antonio By Lauren M. Swartz and James A. Swartz

The Old Bexar County Jail

In 1879, booming San Antonio opened its new jail. Growing as fast as the city itself, the jail included gallows inside its walls, in lieu of typically outside. Although host to countless hangings, the final one stands apart from the others. In 1923, when Clemente Apolinar was hanged for a grisly murder he committed on Salado Creek, he was unintentionally decapitated. The jail was closed in 1962,  and is now a Holiday Inn Express, but hotel guests complain about unnaturally cold rooms and whispered voices. Could some former hanged convicts be mingling with hotel guests?

The Burger Chef Murders of Indianapolis: What really happened?

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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The Burger Chef Murders of Indianapolis: What really happened?

That Friday night in 1978 should have been like any other for the four crew members closing down the Burger Chef in Speedway, Indiana. After serving customers and locking the doors, they began their regular cleanup to prepare for the following day. 

Then something went horribly wrong.

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News of the abductions—of Daniel Davis, Jayne Friedt, Mark Flemmonds, and Ruth Ellen Shelton—had yet to hit the media when Burger Chef crew members arrived on Saturday to start their shift. Officers at the scene told them there had been a burglary at the restaurant overnight but little else about what may have occurred. Investigators were still unsure as to what exactly happened.

“We screwed it up from the beginning”

So they permitted the employees to finish cleaning the store so that they could open for business as usual. In the process of readying the restaurant for the lunch rush, every surface was wiped down and the remaining garbage was removed. There were no photos taken of the original crime scene, and the store was never dusted for fingerprints. Detectives realized their mistake and returned to the store later in the day to reconstruct the scene from memory, but it was too late. The best chance of finding any forensic evidence had passed. 

“We screwed it up from the beginning,” said retired Speedway police officer Buddy Ellwanger. 

This illustration from a Burger Chef employee manual showed one style of their 1970s uniforms

The wait–and the hunt–begins

John and Rachel, the parents of Ruth Ellen, received a call to alert them of their daughter’s disappearance. Their other two children were asleep, and the couple didn’t have the heart to wake them with the awful news. As they sat by the phone waiting for the police to call with more information, Rachel reached for her Bible and began to pray for her daughter’s safety.

“I found a number of scriptures to stand on. I read a while and I prayed a while. . . I asked the Lord to put His arms around her. I said, ‘God is still in control,’” Rachel wrote in her diary. Time passed as Rachel sat alone, and at one point, John took her hand and reminded her that Ruth Ellen was their spunky girl who would break away and call home if it were at all possible for her to do so. 

But that call never came.

By Saturday afternoon, Ruth Ellen and the others were still missing, and the Sheltons knew it was only a matter of time before the newspapers, television and radio stations picked up the story. They knew they had to call family and friends to tell them what had happened before they heard about it on the evening news. Loved ones, shocked by the turn of events, gathered at John and Rachel’s home to sit with them and pray for Ruth Ellen’s safe return. Saturday night segued into Sunday morning.

“We got very little sleep,” Rachel wrote in her diary.

None of the families were sleeping very well. As Robert Flemmonds awaited word about his son, he was haunted by a conversation he had with Mark while watching television one night.

The program featured a kidnap scene, which prompted Mark to tell his father that if he were ever captured, he’d find a way to escape.

“I wouldn’t lay still and die,” Mark said. 

He said he would break away, bobbing and weaving as he ran in order to be a harder target to hit. It was the kind of statement that gave Robert hope that he would see his child again and buoyed his spirits when he was tired.

If the families of the four crew members were exhausted by then, so, too, were the officers searching high and low for the kids. The case was their top priority, and as the first reports of the kidnapping appeared in the Indianapolis News and on WIBC 1070, authorities encouraged anyone with information pertaining to the incident to come forward.

It was a plea that would garner their first solid lead in the case. 

For more on the Burger Chef murders, check out Julie Young’s new book, The Burger Chef Murders in Indiana.

Today, the former Burger Chef on Crawfordsville Road in Speedway is an empty storefront, but over the years, it has been an auto parts store and a Cash$Land store

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Three Texas Heroes, and One Villain

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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Three Texas Heroes, and One Villain

Adapted from Historic Tales from the Texas Republic: A Glimpse of Texas Past By the late Jeffery Robenalt

Texas history is busting with heroes and villains. In fact, many of the colorful characters of Texas defied myth-making with their own larger-than-life actions, opinions, and influence.

The Father of Texas

In 1823, land developer and entrepreneur Stephen F. Austin received a land grant from the Mexican government to settle its northernmost state, Coahuila y Tejas, and led the first legal colonization of Mexican Texas with three hundred families, or the Old Three Hundred. Austin later subdivided and sold the lands along the fertile Brazos River. His diplomatic skills were put into practice when Republic of Texas president Sam Houston appointed the Spanish-speaker as his Secretary of State. After the state capitol was moved to Waterloo, the small town was reamed for him.

The Hero of San Jacinto

Sam Houston as found in Historic Tales from the Texas Republic: A Glimpse of Texas Past By the late Jeffery Robenalt

The most important political and military leader in all of Texas’s history was Sam Houston. He was a shrewd yet emotional leader of the Texian Army and led them to victory at the Battle of San Jacinto, where he spared the Mexican army general Santa Anna’s life in return for Mexico retreating to the Rio Grande. Houston was the first elected president of the Republic of Texas, held nuanced opinions about slavery, and fought to preserve the Union. Following U.S. annexation, Sam Houston was the first governor of the state of Texas, but was thrown out of office for refusing to pledge allegiance to the Confederacy.

The Father of Texas Education

Mirabeau B. Lamar was a legendary Texan, best known for his famous rivalry with Sam Houston. Lamar succeeded Houston after his first term as President of the Republic of Texas, even though he wasn’t Houston’s candidate. In 1839, President Lamar got his wish to move the Republic of Texas capital from the Town of Houston to what is now Austin. Sam Houston would never forgive his political rival. Lamar was also an aggressive proponent of public education, convincing the legislature to set aside 18,000 acres per county for public schools, and 22,000 acres for two universities.

Daguerreotype of Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, circa 1853, as found in Historic Tales from the Texas Republic: A Glimpse of Texas Past By the late Jeffery Robenalt

Napoleon of the West

In the months leading up to the Battle of the Alamo, Texian settlers forced out the Mexican government from Texas in a bid for political independence. When President Santa Anna and the Mexican army returned to retake San Antonio and restore order, a group stayed to defend their claim. His victims inspired the remaining Texian Army, led by Sam Houston, to rally and win their independence in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. Santa Anna would eventually be captured and brought to a wounded Sam Houston on the battlefield. Ignoring the public’s cries for the Mexican leader’s execution, Sam Houston shrewdly allowed Santa Anna to stay alive to ensure Mexico’s recognition of the new Republic of Texas and their retreat to the Rio Grande.

The Hoosier Teacher who Educated Thousands of Underprivileged Kids

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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The Hoosier Teacher who Educated Thousands of Underprivileged Kids

Over the last few years, Indiana politicians and educators have spent a lot of time debating pre-K—namely how to stop Hoosier kids from falling further behind and how to pay for the new programs. 

But as another school year starts up, it’s worth remembering that Indiana once led the way in terms of kindergarten education—thanks to a woman named Eliza Blaker.

Blaker was born in Philadelphia in 1854, and she grew up as a smart and active youth. One day, in her twenties, she went to the city’s Centennial Exposition, where she saw a demonstration of a new kind of teaching: kindergarten. “There I found what I had been groping for,” Eliza later said. 

After training under the woman who had performed that demonstration, Eliza found a job at Philadelphia’s Vine Street Kindergarten. She also married a man named Louis J. Blaker, and in 1877 he became the new minister at the Plymouth Church in Indianapolis. Eliza moved with him and got a job at a private school, but she soon left to work at the Indianapolis Free Kindergarten and Children’s Aid Society.

The Indianapolis Benevolent Society had been working to revitalize the city’s charity work, and one idea had centered on a trial free kindergarten program to assist underprivileged youngsters in the corridor of School No. 12 at West and McCarty Streets. It went so well that the philanthropists founded the Indianapolis Free Kindergarten and Children’s Aid Society to spread the idea. 

The accomplishments of the Indianapolis free kindergartens, which became a model for the rest of the country, were achieved through the untiring efforts of Eliza Blaker. She became the superintendent for the free kindergartens and trained numerous teachers by starting the Kindergarten Normal Training School, known to those in the community as “Mrs. Blaker’s College.” 

Seeing the “sad and old faces” and “vacant, far away expressions” of the countless underprivileged youths who flocked to the free kindergartens inspired Blaker to provide for them a “miniature world in which the little one is happy, is harmoniously developed and learns to think and act as a reasonable being endowed with a high destiny.” 

Then, like now, money was a constant worry. When teachers could not find enough paper for students, Blaker sent them out to seek donations of materials from Washington Street merchants. Some kindergartens served breakfast to their charges, and all offered free lunches. In spite of early hardships, Blaker had faith in the school. “There have been times when I knew not where the money was to come from, but it came, because by the middle of the month I began to ‘dig in’ and work to get it,” she said. 

“Mrs. Blaker’s School” continued to produce teachers until 1930, when control passed to Butler University. The free kindergartens had a longer life, continuing to ease the way for Indianapolis youngsters until 1952, when they were incorporated into the Indianapolis school system. 

During her forty-four years in the capital city, Blaker oversaw the education of thousands of youngsters and provided training for thousands of preschool teachers. Even after her death, in 1926, Blaker continued to be honored for her work, with the Eliza Blaker Club, members of whom were all graduates of her school, establishing a room in her honor at Butler University in 1943 and the Indianapolis school system naming a school for Blaker in 1958. 

Blaker, however, always refused to let such tributes go to her head. “The cause,” she said, “is greater than the individual.” 

Indiana Originals
This article was adapted from Indiana Originals: Hoosier Heroes & Heroines Ray E. Boomhower (History Press, 2018. $21.99)
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