An Unexpected Two Year Sojourn in Texas
Willis Smith: 1853-1928 (Maternal Great-Grandfather)
Cora Leachman Smith: 1864-1943 (Maternal Great-Grandmother)
Lorene Smith Jandy: 1903-1994 (Maternal Grandmother)
While reading Lorene Smith Jandy’s memoir, I discovered that
she, her parents and some of her siblings had spent two years of her childhood
living in Texas. We always knew that she was born in Oklahoma Territory before
it became a state, and that her early childhood was spent in New Mexico. I
assumed that she lived there until the family relocated to Kentucky, where she
attended school and graduated. I believed we were the first members of the
family to have called Texas home when we moved to San Antonio in the late 1980s.
The discovery of the Smith family’s sojourn in Alice, Texas was unexpected. We
now live just 220 miles from where Lorene and her parents spent about two
years.
 |
| Willis, Cora and Lorene Smith, probably a few years after their time in Texas |
Lorene Smith was born in Oklahoma Territory in 1903, but her family moved to a homestead near Clovis, New Mexico while she was very young. When she was about six years old, the area suffered a series of severe droughts that led many homesteaders to give up their land and move. The homesteaders were desperately poor and the crops were failing; people were nearly starving. The Smiths were in the same situation. Lorene recalled:
“Wheat was the main crop that Dad and the boys would try to raise. One year we planted 50 acres and not a grain came up. So by the end of four years most people were just packing up and leaving any homes and barns they had built. They couldn't rent them, they couldn't sell them, they couldn't do anything but leave them behind. Thus ended our stay in New Mexico. People left and went anywhere they could go, principally back east. There was no point in trying to go farther west at that time with the drought hitting.”
Homesteader home in northern New Mexico abandoned around 1910
The family was still living in Curry County when the 1910 census was taken, but they seem to have moved shortly after that. Clovis was in Curry County, which lies along the Texas border in the northeastern part of New Mexico.
 |
| Map of Curry County, New Mexico with Texas border highlighted in red. |
Probably the proximity to Texas led the family to move there rather than go back to Kentucky, despite having no family or friends in Texas, while they had extensive family support back in Kentucky. I find it a surprising decision. Lorene wrote:
“We moved to ten acres near Alice, Texas, about 40 miles from Corpus Christi, where we lived for two years. Dad did not have a church in Alice. He may have had a church at a town called Bentonville, but this is no longer to be found on a Texas state map. Dad earned almost no salary in Alice. Home missionaries had no status in Texas and we were considered ‘poor white trash’… Our nearest neighbors were Mexicans, Jose Moreno and his sister Josefa, who married a Cardona. These two equally poor families lived fairly near us… "
Alice, Texas marked in yellow with red dot. Bentonville is second red dot. Corpus Christi at far right.
We lived in a very small rudimentary, one-story frame house built up on stilts about two feet off the ground. The dogs lay under the house in summer to keep cool. Our "box house" was made of wide vertical plank siding and had two big rooms and two small. A huge, spiky century plant, which took up most of the front yard, was our only decoration. True to its name, the century plant blooms only once in a hundred years. Ours didn't bloom for us but looked old enough. I can't remember any lawn grasses there but recall the Mexicans always sweeping the bare dirt of their yard. We had no fireplace because it was not supposed to get cold there, but once in a while we had a "norther" that would blow down and our neighbors would come over shivering under shawls and say "Mucho frio." Those are my main memories of Texas. When I lived there, I loved the song "Juanita" and thought that Texas was a wonderful state and was very loyal to it. You heard a lot about the Alamo and Texas history. I have not been able to hold such a favorable opinion of Texas since I grew up.
Dad and Charlie grew sugar cane for hay. The rows were planted close together and they mowed the field with a large mower. The end of the blades stuck out and cut off one leg of our collie dog so that it had to be put out of its misery, probably shot. It was Charlie's dog and he cried terribly over losing it.
I remember another incident when I must have been seven or eight years old. Our cow, which was penned in a small corral, had gone rabid. She was butting her head into the heavy black iron kettle that held her drinking water in typical rabid response. Charlie had to lasso her from his perch in a tree by throwing a rope over her horns and tie her to a tree to prevent her breaking out. We had drunk her milk the night before. Mother called a state office in Austin and was assured that the family was safe since the infection was in the cow's blood stream, not its milk."
I did a little research on the Alice, Texas area, discovering that Bentonville, where Lorene thought her father might have had a church, was an unincorporated town with only fifty residents which lay seven miles from Alice. I also discovered that while the Smiths were living there, farms around Alice were starting to transition from cattle ranching to growing crops and vegetables as farmers turned to irrigation. This explains the Smiths’ sugarcane crop, which requires a lot of water. Lorene made reference to this in another section, stating:
“This was a truck farming area and Texas had good soil. We tried to grow strawberries but the big cutter ants took over. These ants would tear off a piece of leaf, hold it above their heads like an umbrella, and march back to their anthills. I can still see Mother and Charlie wearing leather gloves going down the rows of strawberries and squeezing the ants to death with their fingers. It was the only way we could get rid of them.”
Alice, Texas downtown around 1910.
The area near the Rio Grande and the border with Mexico was also dealing with attacks from bandits and revolutionaries from Mexico during the 1910s. The state sent the Texas Rangers to deal with the border raids, and later the federal government sent the National Guard and other military units to stop the incursions. As one might expect, relations between white residents and Hispanic residents like the Smiths' neighbors were tense during this time period.
From 1912-1916, the town of Alice became the headquarters for the Texas Rangers serving in South Texas. The Smiths seem to have lived there from about 1911-1913, so they were there when the Rangers were working out of Alice. Lorene’s recollections of her school days featured a reference to the Rangers’ status in the community:
"We lived two miles from town. I walked to school, attending my first real school there. After they tested me on reading and spelling, I was put into third grade with Miss Sadler. (Note: Lorene was probably seven or eight years old—young for third grade) The teachers stressed multiplication tables, and I remember a boy named Robert Ross who could recite all twelve tables as smoothly as the barking of a dog. None of the rest of us was that good. I had to struggle a little bit with my math. I got along all right there in school so far as my own lessons were concerned because I was as quick as any of my older classmates.
I had the unhappiness of having to walk home with two girls named Schoenbaum. Their father was a Texas ranger and they were, in their own opinion at any rate, high in Texas rural society. Schoenbaums lived a half mile or a mile away from us. They had a big old ranch style home and mulberry trees, a typical Texas setting. They had a brother named Gayhart. Lottie Schoenbaum was in third grade with me and her sister Cathy was younger. We would walk home down the road of sand six inches deep, and I remember we had to pass Dr. Atkinson's home. We could have a heavy downpour and in half an hour the sand would absorb the rain, so the road was never muddy and one could go barefoot. Lottie was always teasing me, belittling my book satchel, my lunch pail, or anything she could. My cloth satchel advertised that "My Mother uses Kingfisher Flour."
One day I went home crying and Mother said in anger, "I just wish you were big enough to knock Lottie down." Of course, she didn't mean it and didn't think I could do it. But I took my cue from her remark and a few days later when Lottie started in, I just dropped everything and started to pummel her. It took her so by surprise that I won the fight, even though she was bigger than I. (This tactic of taking people by surprise has stood me in goodstead through the years in dealing with and disciplining school kids. Take them by surpriseand you can pretty much do with them what you want.)
Lottie then became a friend of mine, one of those peculiar twists in human nature. ManySaturdays I would be invited over to their home and we would have good times together. We used to climb trees and eat mulberries; that was the one thing that was plentiful.
Many years later Mr. Schoenbaum was sent to prison for shooting and killing a man who was having an affair with his wife. I lost all trace of the Schoenbaums and practically everybody else in Alice when we left there after two years. It's about the only place I ever lived where I didn't keep contact with people afterwards.”
I was fascinated by Lorene’s story of the Schoenbaums, so did a little research. Given that she was so young when they lived in Texas, her memories were amazingly good, but there were some striking differences from the actual facts. Researching the story was an unexpected bonus.
While Lorene had the names of her schoolmates, Lottie and Cathy, correct, she was a little off with her memory of their last name and their brother’s name. “Gayhart” was actually Gerhardt, and the surname was Schoenbohm. Lottie’s father was also named Gerhardt, and he was a German immigrant to the area. He was not a Texas Ranger. He was employed by the Texas Mexican Railroad as a conductor and station master in Alice for fifteen years. Probably a different classmate of Lorene’s had a father in the Texas Rangers and she confused the two fathers.
 |
| Texas Mexican Train Depot where Mr. Schoenbohm was stationmaster. Circa 1910. |
Lorene’s memory of Gerhardt Schoenbohm’s fate was also a bit off. Rather than many years later as Lorene claimed, the shooting occurred in 1914, only one year after the Smiths left Alice. On August 18, 1914, Schoenbohm travelled by train to Brownsville. He was partially disguised, having colored his hair, darkened his skin, and shaved his mustache. He checked into a hotel under an assumed name, Lee Burgess. He had sent a letter to a man named Ed Dubose, asking him to meet him at the hotel.
Dubose was anxious about the meeting, so enlisted his brother, H.G. Dubose, the head of the United States Immigration Service in Texas and a former Texas Ranger, to accompany him to the meeting. Both Dubose men carried pistols. When they arrived at the hotel, a gunfight ensued. Witnesses said fifteen to twenty shots were fired, and when the shooting stopped, both H.G. Dubose and Schoenbohm were dead. Ed Dubose was injured. He refused to say much about the incident, including why Schoenbohm wanted to kill him. He simply claimed self-defense, and was fortunate that a hotel employee said Schoenbohm fired the first shot. Ed Dubose was never charged with a crime.
 |
| Corpus Christi Caller headline from August 18, 1914 |
The Corpus Christi Caller Times reported that “the theory has been offered that domestic difficulties in the Schoenbohm family was one of the reasons.” So Lorene was probably correct that Mrs. Schoenbohm’s infidelity led to the incident. However, Schoenbohm paid a far higher price for his actions than Lorene’s claim of a prison sentence. He paid with his life.
As for Lorene’s friend Lottie, her family moved to Corpus Christi after her father’s death. Following her high school graduation, she married a classmate in 1920. She had several children, and seems to have had a good life.
When the Smiths left Alice around 1913, they moved back to Kentucky. Willis Smith found a job as a minister in Dawson Springs, and the family remained there for the rest of Willis’ life.
I am so glad that Lorene wrote
about the Smith family’s years in Alice, Texas. I have been unable to find a
single record that shows they lived there, so without her memoir, those two
years would be nearly forgotten. This unexpected discovery enriched my
understanding of Lorene’s childhood.
Sources:
“Alice Texas: 1900-1990”. MB50’s “Liquid Mud” Rant. https://mb50.wordpress.com/2011/10/06/alice-texas-1900-to1990/
Corpus Christi Caller Times. Corpus Christi, Texas. Headline. August 18, 1914.
Vintage postcards of Alice, Texas.
