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The
serpentine Sabine River usually flows quite placidly from its source
near Greenville to
its delta island among the salt grass marshes surrounding Sabine Lake.
A few big alligators still haunt its confines, and here and there
a cypress tree still stands in snow-capped elegance beneath a colony
of downy egrets.
As far back as the Texas Revolution, the river's flatboatmen floated
their cotton cargoes to the river's
mouth at Pavell's Island. Because such boats lacked a tiller for steering
in Sabine Lake, the flatboats' sailors experienced long delays while
waiting for the New Orleans cotton schooners, which bought their cargoes.
However, in 1853 two German immigrants, Capt. Augustine and Sophie
Pavell, recognized that the island that still bears their name was
an excellent site for a cotton brokerage. They could buy the loads
of cotton that arrived there, and in turn sell to the flatboatmen
the merchandise that they needed to take home.
Gus and Sophie Pavell had been married for ten years when they first
sailed their schooner Sophia to New Orleans. Long a seafaring man,
Gus' intellect and instinct were attuned to every sail and spar, but
he treated his blonde Sophie with the gentleness of a tradewind.
A buxom female, Sophie responded in kind, catering to her husband's
every whim and fancy, but she adjudged herself as failing in one wifely
aspect. She had not presented Gus with a male heir, and as she approached
her thirty-fifth birthday, her hopes to do so grew ever more dismal.
Cotton Warehouse
Together
they built a large cotton warehouse on Pavell's Island, as well as
an adjoining grocery store. Gus also built an adjoining wharf, where
steamboats could dock, and he added a glassed-in alcove for Sophie's
flowers and pot plants.
Gus taught Sophie all the business savvy he had acquired. Thus she
soon mastered cotton-grading and weighing, fur trading, and other
commercial techniques, for every item on the frontier had to be bought,
bartered, or sold. Often there was the clink and glitter of gold coins
on the counter, but payments were often made in fur pelts, land certificates,
or titles to slaves.
Gus spent many months away from the store on his schooner. He carried
cotton bales, furs, and cattle hides to Galveston
or New Orleans, and returned with barrels of lard, flour, and whiskey;
hogsheads of sugar, tobacco, or molasses, and bolts of calico, muslin
or woolen cloth. The shelves held all varieties of hardware, glassware,
gunpowder, lead, and others items too numerous to mention.
Almost everyone Sophie met was a stranger, for the nearest neighbor,
Solomon Sparks, lived a mile upstream. She knew that a lone woman
was considered easy prey for some criminal. Sophie always wore a fiber
bag tied at her waist, which usually bared a portion of her yarn and
knitting needles, but never the Colt pistol upon which they rested.
All of the river men stopped at her store to deposit or pick up mail,
and a sign above the trading post soon read: "A. Pavell, Cotton Factor
and Post Office, Shellbank, La." Prosperity reigned throughout the
1850's, allowing the Pavells to accrue a large stock of inventory,
land certificates and gold coins.
Baby Expected
One
day, when Pavell returned from Orange
with a schooner load of cattle hides and lumber, Sophie met him at
the wharf and cried out excitedly: "Guschen, I think I am going to
have a baby!" Half in disbelief, Gus exclaimed to her, "A baby? Can
that really be so?"
Time passed, the gold coins clinked daily, and Sophie whiled away
the loneliness while playing her zither, knitting tiny garments, and
puttering with her pot plants. As the cotton bales collected in the
warehouse and their stock of merchandise dwindled, Gus reminded her
that he would soon need to sail to Galveston
for supplies.
As he loaded the schooner Sophia with cotton bales and hides, Gus
begged his wife to close the store and go to the hotel in Sabine
Pass. But Sophie refused, reminding her husband that her customers
depended on her for supplies, and besides the baby was not due for
two more months.
Gus kissed her goodbye, and sailed away toward the Island City. It
was indeed a vexatious voyage for him, with winds too calm to fill
his sails, no docking space in Galveston,
and a week transpired before the Sophia returned once more at the
Shellbank store.
Sophie greeted her husband with tears. Between sobs, she led Gus to
a tiny grave, where she said she had buried her stillborn daughter.
She added that one day when she saw a coiled snake on her kitchen
floor, she fell against the stove and was soon smitten with birth
pangs.
Despite her screams, Sophie had to give birth alone. She soon fashioned
a coffin from some cypress boards, and after hacking out a shallow
grave in the clamshell mound, she buried her infant. Gus soon bought
and erected a small tombstone, which read: "In Loving Memory of Ann
Eliza Pavell, Born-Died Sept. 10, 1858."
Thereafter Sophie lavished much affection on the tiny grave, banking
its sides with marsh mud, and in the center she buried a bronze urn
in which she placed a fresh bouquet of flowers almost every morning.
It soon became a byword among the Sabine River boatmen that no other
grave ever received more attention than that of Ann Eliza Pavell.
Time soon healed Sophie's wound, as the gold coins continued to clink
on the counter every day. And the years passed by until one day the
guns of the Confederate Army began to explode all over Virginia. With
business ground to a standstill, Gus soon learned a new occupation,
that of running schooner loads of cotton past the offshore blockade
ships. Pavell was successful at that trade too, eluding the blockaders
until he quit in 1864. And he stacked up a lot more gold coins in
the process.
Move to Galveston
One
day in June, 1865, Sophie suggested to her husband that they close
their store at the lonely outpost and move to Galveston.
Gus agreed, and they soon carried their stock of merchandise to the
Island City, where they reopened another store. But before leaving
Pavell's Island, Sophie insisted on digging up the remains of her
infant and taking the coffin with them. For two years the Pavells
continued to prosper, but in 1867, Gus died during the yellow fever
epidemic.
After the bad hurricane of Sept. 13, 1865, Solomon Sparks visited
Pavell's Island, with intent to purchase it and move his shingle mill
there. As he looked at the excavated gravesite, he spotted the cherubim-decorated
object that he thought was a flower urn, but in reality was a 2-foot
section of bronze pipe, sawed from a bed post. It bore the tarnished
markings for all those years it had stood upright in the grave.
At the bottom of the grave, he found a residue of rust of powder consistency,
undoubtedly from the coffin nails. His great surprise came when there,
beneath a clam shell, Sparks found a $20.00 gold piece, that Sophie,
in her haste to leave, had overlooked.
Back at his home, Sparks pondered his strange findings, wondering
too if Sophie had really exhumed a small skeleton from the grave for
reburial in Galveston.
And if so, why had Sophie left the tiny tombstone of her infant, Ann
Eliza, which logic concluded would be needed at the new gravesite?
Sparks wondered too: "Did Sophie really have a baby, or had she only
perpetrated the grossest of hoaxes on her husband and neighbors?"
Or were the fresh bouquets intended to disguise the coin entrance
of Sophie's private "bank" in the clamshell mound?
Perhaps the world will never know the truth for certain, but the evidence
at hand accounted for one of the strangest and most widely-circulated
legends ever told along the lower Sabine River. |
©
W.
T. Block, Jr.
"Cannonball's
Tales"
May 8, 2006 column
Reprinted from Beaumont Enterprise, August 24, 1978, p. 2b., and "Legend
of Shellbank," The Cameron Pilot, December 10, 1998, p. 4. |
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