Lone Stars: Chappell Hill, Texas

Old Town Chappell Hill today
(photo by S. Braswell of Spring, Texas)

Located roughly halfway between Austin and Houston, Chappell Hill was founded in 1847 on 100 acres owned by a woman. (Texas granted women extraordinary rights for the time.) Mary Haller and her husband Jacob built a stagecoach inn on the site -- at the junction of two major stagecoach lines -- and soon other folks from the Deep South migrated to the area and planted cotton, for which the climate and soil were perfectly suited.

By 1856, the population had risen to 3,000 people and the town included a sawmill, five churches, and a Masonic Lodge, in addition to two of the first colleges in the state -- one for men and another for women. A railroad line followed soon after.

During the War of Northern Aggression (otherwise known as the American Civil War), the men of Chappell Hill served in both Hood's Texas Brigade (infantry) and Terry's Texas Rangers (cavalry). Two years after the war ended, in 1867, many of the Chappell Hill men who survived the war perished in a yellow fever epidemic that decimated the town and the rest of the area around the Brazos River.

Longhorn relaxing in the bluebonnets near Chappell Hill

Chappell Hill never recovered, plunging from one of the largest, most vibrant communities in the state to little more than a memory.

Today, Chappell Hill is one of the best historically preserved towns in Texas. Main Street is listed as a National Register Historic District by the National Register of Historic Places; restored homes, churches, businesses and the Stagecoach Inn offer tours to tourists. If you're ever in the area, it's worth a visit.

Famous Last Words: Black Jack Ketchum

Black Jack Ketchum

(An updated and expanded version of this post may be read at Sweethearts of the West, where I blog on the 12th of each month.)

"Can't you hurry this up a bit? I hear they eat dinner in Hades at twelve sharp, and I don't aim to be late."

Whether or not he aimed to be late, Thomas Edward "Black Jack" Ketchum missed the dinner bell by more than an hour on April 26, 1901. In fact, his hanging was delayed by more than four hours while authorities tried to ensure his execution was both humane and permanent.

Black Jack, a native of San Saba County, Texas, also was known as "the handsome train robber." Between 1892 and 1899, he and his older brother Sam, along with a gang of other young men -- all of whom were described as well-mannered and well-dressed, riding good horses and flashing plenty of money -- "liberated" payrolls and other large sums of cash from trains passing through the Four Corners area of the Southwest. Their largest take, in September 1897, totalled about $60,000 in gold and silver.

Sam died in jail in July 1899 as a result of wounds he received during a shootout with a posse near Santa Fe, New Mexico. One month later, Black Jack was shot by the conductor of a train he was robbing alone. He didn't resist when either a posse or a railroad crew (there's a dispute) found him the next morning.

After he was sentenced to hang, the date of the execution was delayed several times by arguments about where final justice should take place, since several towns wanted the honor. Finally, reacting to a rumor that the old gang planned to break Black Jack out of jail, the hanging became the center of a carnival in Clayton, New Mexico. Despite an extended debate about the length and strength of the rope necessary for the deed, something went wrong. Shortly after 1 p.m., Ketchum was decapitated as his body plunged through the scaffold's trapdoor. He was 37 years old.

Black Jack Ketchum bears the dubious distinction of being the only man sentenced to die in New Mexico for "felonious assault upon a railway train." Apparently his botched execution set the residents of Union County back a mite, because Black Jack also was the only man ever hanged in Union County. Until Eva Dugan suffered the same fate at the Pinal County, Arizona, prison in 1930, Black Jack Ketchum was the only person in the U.S. who literally lost his head to a hangman's noose ordered by a court.