Field notes
Longer pieces about the six towns and the two counties, written from the record.
Field Note 014 · Blooming Grove · October 2026City limitOne of the most-used old pictures in Blooming Grove shows a young woman pointing at the city-limit sign. Her name was Frances Butler Johnson.
Field Note 013 · Blooming Grove · October 2026The face at Fair ParkThe statue that has greeted visitors at Fair Park since 1936 has the face of a girl born on a farm at Blooming Grove.
Field Note 012 · Blooming Grove · October 2026Her name on the mapThe survey on Blooming Grove's northwest edge was laid out for a woman: very likely the New York writer who may have coined "manifest destiny."
Field Note 011 · Hubbard · September 2026Slap-out, and what came afterA governor's name, hot mineral water at three thousand feet, a Hall of Fame center fielder, and a Saturday morning in 1973.
Field Note 010 · Rice · October 2026Five hundred acres and a nameA flood emptied the river town, the railroad laid out a new one, and a Houston merchant gave it the ground and his name. Twelve years after he was murdered, his university opened, and the town voted itself a city.
Field Note 009 · Blooming Grove · October 2026KildeeHe shined shoes in the barber shop for forty-five years. In 1961 Blooming Grove buried him in the white cemetery, and the story went as far as Alabama.
Field Note 008 · Navarro County · October 2026The forks of the creekAfter freedom, Black families settled where three creeks met west of Dawson. The meeting place is under a lake now. Pelham is still there.
Field Note 007 · Dawson · October 2026The hunters asked them to leaveIn 1838 a surveying party camped beside a Kickapoo buffalo hunt west of present Dawson. The hunters asked them to go. Seven walked out.
A series in six parts · Navarro County · September 2026The MeltonsA quartermaster died at the Alamo in 1836 and left no children. His brother came to Texas to settle the estate, and stayed. This is what that errand left in Navarro County.
Field Note 006 · Blooming Grove · September 2026The bank on Fordyce StreetFour banks carried the town's name before 1933. The last one failed, and three years later the town went and got another.
Field Note 005 · Blooming Grove · September 2026The country boy who saw the rifle firstA Dallas homicide detective from Blooming Grove, the Kennedy assassination, and a wall on South Fordyce Street that says so.
Field Note 004 · Blooming Grove · September 2026The best, and my true friendA Blooming Grove grocer, two presidents, and the twenty-seven votes he was proudest of.
Field Note 003 · Blooming Grove · September 2026The teacher who kept the picturesThirty-eight years directing the school play, and a filing habit the town's own history book still runs on.
Field Note 002 · Frost · September 2026The vault heldA tornado took the whole business district on 6 May 1930 — the bank's steel vault, and the twelve men inside it, did not go with it.
Field Note 001 · Blooming Grove · September 2026A town that kept starting newspapersSix mastheads since 1888, and only the last one survives whole.