Great veterans in Paris created the American Legion. Great veterans in Somerset and Texas continue that original mission.
Yearly Archives: 2020
20 posts
There was growing amount of serious talk among both officers and enlisted that something needed doin'. Help in a variety of ways was due those individuals who served and survived this war. Even families, both of those buried in France and of those returning home, needed support. All needed help...now. But, what? And, by whom?
In the new century, 1900, Patrick Kenney’s coal (actually Lignite or “Brown Coal”) was still being hauled by mules and wagon from the Kenney mine at Bexar/La Colorada to Lytle. Here the International and Great Northern Rail Road (I&GN, pronounced by many — even when I was a kid — as the “Eye-n Gin”…say it real fast) picked up the wagon loads of coal for delivery to and sale in San Antonio where homes and businesses were heated or powered. (Kenney coal powered the Alamo Iron Works into the 1930s when a new, cleaner power source became available.) But I’m getting way to far ahead…, back in 1908, folks of the old, greater Von Ormy area (that included modern Somerset) or the original Old […]
Mom had difficult time understanding me as I explained just how perfect her sterling silver dinner knives were for digging perfect holes in the dirt, digging up the garden's carrots and radishes and replanting them after finding they were not ready for harvest, following a ground squirrel hole or two deeper to see if the squirrel was home, but not much else. That all changed when Dad brought home some real digging implements: Captain Matheny's collection.
AROUND SOMERSET Elm Creek, just a couple of miles north to northwest of Somerset, this often dry creek, has in the last century, given residents living near it’s banks floods that have wiped buildings, topsoil, crops, livestock, fences, bridges, and the lives of several people. Our other river-neighbor, the Medina, flooded in 1919 from a hurricane that unexpectedly came through Port Aransas (wiping it out), Rockport, and Corpus Christi. This Medina River flood wiped out our area’s Santissima Trinidad Catholic Church (established in the mid 1800s) and cemetery. A “DAD STORY” ABOUT HIS FIRST FLOOD Another regional river, the Frio River, flooded end of May-June 1935, nearly took this author’s Dad (Jesse Columbus James, aged 12 years old at the time) with is as it […]
"There between the clouds of dust come the soldiers of Joaquin de Arredondo. This is the frontier of Terror." 1867 poem by G. Prieto