America's Most Musical Small Town? RoadyGoat

There has to be something in the water here in Linden. How else do you explain how a tiny town in the woods of East Texas produced such an incredible number of music giants? Think about it. Don Henley, whose voice defined the sound of the Eagles, grew up right here. Before him, Aaron 'T-Bone' Walker was born here, a man who essentially invented electric blues guitar and influenced everyone from B.B. King to Chuck Berry. And even earlier, the 'King of Ragtime,' Scott Joplin, spent part of his earliest childhood right here, before his family moved on to Texarkana. Ragtime, blues, and rock... the seeds of modern American music were all sown right here in Linden.

3.6 mi away

Queen Bess, The Daredevil from Atlanta RoadyGoat

Somewhere near the town you're driving through, a young girl named Bessie Coleman once looked up at the sky and decided she belonged up there. Born in Atlanta in 1892, Bessie was an African American and Native American woman who refused to let the barriers of her time ground her dreams. When American flight schools rejected her based on her race and gender, she didn't give up. She learned French, moved to Paris, and in 1921, became the first woman of her heritage to earn an international pilot’s license. She returned to America as a star, 'Queen Bess,' a barnstorming daredevil who captivated audiences with her loops and dives. More importantly, she used her fame as a platform, refusing to perform at airshows that wouldn't allow integrated audiences. Though her life was tragically short, Bessie Coleman’s journey from the fields of East Texas to the skies of the world remains one of America's great stories of courage.

RoadyGoat → · 11.4 mi away

When Black Gold Hit the Piney Woods RoadyGoat

In the 1930s, during the depths of the Great Depression, a different kind of fortune erupted from the ground near Atlanta. Wildcatters working this corner of the state opened the Rodessa oil and gas field in 1935, a field that ran out of Louisiana straight into Cass and Marion counties. The frantic part happened over toward the state line, where rigs went up by the hundred and a wide place in the road swelled into a genuine boomtown almost overnight. But the money reached here too, and the timing mattered: the Depression had shut Atlanta's businesses down to eighty-five rated firms by 1936, and Rodessa oil is what took the worst edge off. By 1940 the town had canneries, lumber mills, wholesale houses, a brick plant, a hospital, and 2,453 people. The forest of derricks is gone now, but that field is the reason this old lumber town came through the thirties standing up instead of hollowed out.

RoadyGoat → · 11.4 mi away

Baker, Cullen Montgomery

1854

Cullen Montgomery Baker, infamous desperado and guerilla, the son of John and Elizabeth Baker, was born in Weakley County, Tennessee, probably on June 22, 1835. The family moved to Texas in 1839 and eventually settled in Cass County, where John received a land grant of 640 acres from the Texas Congress. Cullen soon became a hard drinker, quarrelsome and mean-spirited. He temporarily ceased his dissipated ways and married Mary Jane Petty on January 11, 1854, but nine months later he killed his first man. In the years before the outbreak of the Civil War he spent considerable time at the farm of his mother's brother, Thomas Young, in Perry County, Arkansas. After Mary Jane died on July 2, 1860, and Baker had murdered another man, he returned to Texas. By now the war had begun. Baker joined Company G, Morgan's Regimental Cavalry, on November 4, 1861, at Jefferson. His name is on the muster roll for September-October 1862, and he received pay through August 31, but he is designated a deserter on January 10, 1863. On February 22, 1862, he joined Company I of the Fifteenth Texas Cavalry at Linden. He is listed on the muster roll from February 1862 to February 1863; after "August 1862" beside his name is written, "left sick on the Arkansas River." After his service he was paid $252.80 and discharged due to disability. He married Martha Foster on July 1, 1862. His activities until the war's end are surrounded by numerous legends. Some believe he led a band of Arkansas guerrillas that preyed upon everybody, regardless of wartime sympathies, although there is no evidence for this. When peace returned, Baker and his wife briefly settled in Cass County, where Baker attempted to earn a living in the ferry business. Martha died on March 1, 1866, and, by most accounts, her death deeply depressed Baker; nevertheless, he proposed to her sister, Belle Foster, two months later. But Belle married Thomas Orr, a schoolteacher and later a prominent community activist and politician, and he and Baker became bitter enemies. Somewhat later, the Union Army and the Freedmen's Bureau came to the area, and Baker focused his attention upon harassing and killing employees of the bureau and their clients. In December 1867 Baker also wrought havoc upon Howell Smith's family because of their alleged "unorthodox" relations with the black laborers they employed. He was wounded, but the local citizenry and the army failed to capture him. Baker returned to the Reconstruction scene again in mid-1868 as the leader of various outcasts and killers. He and his group are credited with murdering two Freedmen's Bureau agents, one in Texas and another in Arkansas, and numerous black men and women, all the time eluding the army. When his gang disbanded in December 1868, Baker returned to his home in Cass County. There a small group of neighbors led by Orr, whom Baker had earlier attempted to hang, killed him and a companion on January 6, 1869. Legend has it that the whiskey Baker drank was laced with strychnine. Orr collected some of the reward offered for Baker. Baker may have had links with the Ku Klux Klan . Although he began his killing long before that organization appeared, he abetted the Klan's rise to prominence. As an obstacle to federal Reconstruction, he became notorious in the Southwest and even drew the notice of the New York Tribune . He received the nickname "Swamp Fox of the Sulphur" because of the area where he grew to manhood. Although he was not the legendary quick-draw artist some have maintained, writers have made much of Baker's prowess with a six-gun, his harassment of the United States Army, and his defense of "Southern honor" during and after the Civil War. Others see him as a mean, spiteful, alcoholic murderer. Louis L'Amour memorialized Baker in his novel The First Fast Draw .

Tsha Handbook →

Pleasant Hill School

1925

Pleasant Hill is one of the oldest African-American communities in Texas. Pleasant Hill Baptist Church was organized in 1843. Prominent church members donated this land beside the Old Monterey Road, and a frame church and two-story schoolhouse were built here. In 1925, citizens built this school with help from the Julius Rosenwald School building program, established to improve education for African Americans in the rural South. The school cost $3450, with the Rosenwald fund matching the $700 contribution of African American citizens. It was built per Rosenwald plan 20-A, from materials salvaged from the previous schoolhouse plus new materials. The plan features an “industrial room” in the central bay and two classrooms originally separated by a movable partition. The school opened with about seventy students and two teachers, Della Lindsay Warren and Professor R. S. Guise. Approximately 1,200 students attended school up to eighth grade at Pleasant Hill; those who wished to complete high school attended Fairview School near Linden. In 1964, with attendance around 26, the school closed and the students were transferred to Linden. The one-story side-gable schoolhouse features a symmetrical front elevation with a central projecting gable flanked by two front doors. Craftsman-style detailing on the wood frame building includes wide overhangs, exposed rafter tails and knee braces. Large 9/9 and 6/6 light windows dominate the front and rear facades. The historic grounds also include a playground with swing set, merry-go-round and slide added during the Great Depression and a concrete storm shelter built in the 1950s. Twenty-three Rosenwald schools were built in Cass County, but today Pleasant Hill School – restored ca. 2009 and now a community center – is the only one remaining. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2010

Historical Marker →

Walker, Aaron Thibeaux [T-Bone]

1910

T-Bone Walker also known as Oak Cliff T-Bone, the only son of Rance and Movelia (Jamison, Jimerson) Walker, was born Aaron Thibeaux Walker in Linden, Texas, on May 28, 1910. Looking for a better future for her son, his mother left her husband and moved to Dallas, where Aaron attended Norman Washington Harllee School through the seventh grade. His mother played guitar, and his stepfather, Marco Washington, played bass and several other instruments. Family friendship with Blind Lemon Jefferson and Huddie Ledbetter familiarized him with the blues from infancy. T-Bone was recruited to lead Jefferson around the Central Avenue area, and he absorbed the legendary musician's style. While still in his teens, Walker met and married Vida Lee; they had three children. Walker was a gifted dancer who taught himself guitar. Around 1925 he joined Dr. Breeding's Big B Tonic medicine show, then toured the South with blues artist Ida Cox. In 1929 in Dallas he cut his first record, "Wichita Falls Blues," under the name Oak Cliff T-Bone, using the name of his Dallas neighborhood. Around 1930, after winning first prize in an amateur show promoted by Cab Calloway, Walker toured the South with Calloway's band and worked with the Raisin' Cain show and several other bands in Texas, including those of Count Biloski (Balaski) and Milt Larkin . He also appeared with Ma Rainey, a great figure in blues history, in her 1934 Fort Worth performances. In 1935 Walker moved to Los Angeles, where he quickly made a name for himself singing and playing banjo, and then guitar, for Black audiences in two popular nightclubs, Little Harlem and Club Alabam. Crowds of fans were attracted to his acrobatic performances, which combined playing and tap dancing, and in 1935 he became the first blues guitarist to play the electric guitar. The Trocadero Club in Hollywood, where Walker had become sufficiently well known to appear as a star, welcomed integrated audiences after his 1936 performances. From 1940 to 1945 he toured with Les Hite's Cotton Club orchestra as a featured vocalist; he recorded the classic "T-Bone Blues" with Hite in New York City in 1940. Walker used a fluid technique that combined the country blues tradition with more polished contemporary swing, his style influenced by Francis (Scrapper) Blackwell, Leroy Carr, and Lonnie Johnson. He was subsequently billed as "Daddy of the Blues." He also toured United States Army bases in the early 1940s and, recruited by boxing champion Joe Louis in 1942, went to Chicago, where he headlined a revue at the city's Rhumboogie Club so successfully that he returned year after year. In the mid-1940s he became a bandleader, signed a recording contract with the Black and White label, and turned out some of the best titles of his long recording career, including "Stormy Monday." Many of his songs reached the Top 10 on the Hit Parade. In the 1950s he recorded under the Imperial label and worked for Atlantic Records. In 1955 he underwent an operation for chronic ulcers. In the early 1960s T-Bone joined Count Basie's orchestra, appeared in Europe with a package called Rhythm and Blues, U.S.A., and played at the American Folk Blues Festival and Jazz at the Philharmonic. This began a new phase of his career as a blues legend, during which he appeared before largely White audiences. He was a regular attraction abroad, where his recordings made him a great favorite, and he was a participant on television shows and at jazz festivals in Monterey, California; Nice, France; and Montreux, Switzerland. In Europe he recorded a Polydor album entitled Good Feelin' , which won the 1970 Grammy for ethnic-traditional recording. Among his other albums are Singing the Blues , Funky Town , and The Truth . As an artist and performer, Walker was accurately evaluated by blues authority Pete Welding as "one of the deep, enduring wellsprings of the modern blues to whom many others have turned, and continue to return for inspiration and renewal." Among thos

Tsha Handbook → · 3.2 mi away

Trammel's Trace

1800

Trammel’s Trace, an early road into Texas, ran from the Red River to Nacogdoches where it met the Camino Real de los Tejas ( see OLD SAN ANTONIO ROAD ). The trace had two points of origin—one at Pecan Point, Texas, and another at Fulton, Arkansas, where it connected with the Southwest Trail from Memphis. The trail began as a series of Caddo trails which were first used by Anglos in the early 1800s for illegally smuggling horses from the Red River prairies in Spanish Texas . Trammel’s Trace was the first road to Texas from the northern boundary with the United States and was used for migration from Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee before Texas became a republic. Nicholas Trammell is credited with first using the 180-mile trail that today bears his name. Trammell, a Tennessean, was involved in stealing and racing horses, gambling operations, and taverns in both Texas and Arkansas. In 1824 Daniel Davis helped Trammell cut the trail for use by wagons for Pecan Point residents wanting to head toward Mexican Texas and Stephen F. Austin ’s colony. Sam Houston and David Crockett rode down Trammel’s Trace on their way into Texas history and legend. Spanish and Mexican maps as well as early original headright surveys document the route of Trammel’s Trace across seven East Texas counties. Trammel’s Trace from Pecan Point crossed the Sulphur River at a crossing later known as Stephenson's Ferry . The route from Fulton crossed the Sulphur River at shoals once used by the Moscoso expedition at a location later known as Epperson's Ferry . At the Sabine River, it crossed on a lignite coal shelf later served by Ramsdale’s Ferry at the present intersection of Rusk, Panola, and Harrison counties. Sections of the old road remain visible on private land and at one historical marker on a public road in Cass County.

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Civilian Conservation Corps at Linden

1937

As part of the New Deal's efforts to offer unemployed workers jobs on public projects, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the United States Congress created the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in March 1933. Three months later, Company 1814 was organized in Fort Logan, Colorado, to serve in reforestation and other conservation efforts. After transfers to Groveton and Austin, Texas, the company was transferred to Linden on June 4, 1937. The CCC enrollees in Linden established their camp here on the nearby hillside. Working closely with the U.S. Forest Service, they built 35 miles of roads with 25 bridges, ran 147 miles of telephone line, and spent many hours fighting and suppressing forest fires in the area. While living here, the men also landscaped their campground with flowers and grass. In April 1939, they held an open house for the community during which hundreds of residents came out to learn of the accomplishments of the local CCC camp. On October 4, 1939, company 1814 was transferred to Arizona, and the camp in Linden was abandoned. Some physical evidence of their headquarters, including rock walls, cabin foundations and equipment, remains at the site. Their legacy stands as an important part of the heritage of Cass County and the East Texas forest industry. (2001)

Historical Marker → · 3.4 mi away

Cass County Courthouse

1846

When county was organized, 1846, courthouse was in Jefferson (now in Marion County, created from Cass in 1860). Linden was made county seat, 1852; a frame courthouse was built here, 1853. This brick structure, begun in 1860, was not completed until after the Civil War ended in 1865. It cost $9,877.00. It was enlarged in 1900 and 1917. After a fire in 1933, third floor was added. Courthouse now is valued at $1,000,000.00. Site of early work of 20th century U. S. Congressman Wright Patman and Texas Supreme Court Justice Ralph Hicks Harvey. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1967

Historical Marker → · 3.2 mi away

Cass County, Texas

Music in Cass County

Songs About Cass County

Artists From Cass County

Rivers & Roads in Song near Cass County

History of Cass County