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| KMOO of Mineola
may have the most memorable radio station call letters in East
Texas. People keep asking me if Mineola
is a dairy community with a lot of cows, but I don’t know. Perhaps someone from
Mineola will enlighten me. |
"Hello from MINEOLA, TEXAS"
Postcard courtesy www.rootsweb.com/ %7Etxpstcrd/ |
Something else
I’m not sure about is how
St. Joe in Montague County got its name. The town was founded in 1849 by Ithane
and Prince Singletary, who came there looking for a buried treasure, When they
failed to find it, they moved to Whitesboro.
But the Singletarys moved back to
St. Joe , this time calling it Head of Elm, after its location on the Elm
Fork of the Trinity River. But the name St. Joe surfaced again around 1873, likely
as a name for a pious resident, Joe Howell. Carl
Alsobrook of Poyner writes the shortest newspaper column in East
Texas. Entitled “Poyner: Commonsense and Humor,” it simply offers a one-line
piece of philosophy each week, such as “Anger can erupt into what is called road
rage and terrible consequences.” His column appears in the Frankston
newspaper.Someone
in the oil business called me about a “yellow dog.” He wasn’t talking about a
mutt, but a double-wicked lamp used on oilfield derricks. The lamps were so named
because their two burning wicks looked like a dog’s glowing eyes at night. Others
say the lamp cast a dog’s head shadow on the derrick floor. Another
Bigfoot sighting comes from
Joe Pagitt of Palestine,
who said he sighted one of the creatures carrying a deer’s carcass around 4 a.m.
on a lonely highway near Tennessee
Colony about 14 or 15 years ago. The creature leaped over a fence and melted
into the woods.Cowboys
and cattlemen are well-known professions in Texas,
but there was a time in the 1850 when they were known as “cattle keepers.” The
1850 census of Angelina County listed the occupation of several men as “cattle
keepers.” Founded
in 1926 at Longview, the East
Texas Chamber of Commerce was once one of the most influential business organizations
in East Texas, but in 1988 the Chamber
merged with the Texas Chamber of Commerce and a further merger in 1995 created
the Texas Association of Business and Chambers of Commerce.
Bob
Bowman's East Texas
April 25, 2011 Column.
A weekly column syndicated in 109 East Texas newspapers
Related
Topics: Texas Towns
Stories
From Texas' Past | Texas | |
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