Anson Ancestry

I've been to Anson, Texas twice--once in the 1990s with Mari, Mom and Dad, and again at the start of our family vacation this summer.  When we got back from our trip this year, I dragged the internet for information about Anson and my ancestors who lived there.

Instead of stuffing this information into the post about our summer vacation, I'm giving it a space of its own. This is an edited version of that report. I have a fuller version in draft form.

Anson is twenty miles northwest of Fort Phantom Hill, which was abandoned on April 6, 1854, less than three years after it was first occupied in November 1851, on land in the Comancheria that one of its soldiers described as "a barren waste." In 1858, the remains of the fortress were repurposed as a waystation for the Butterfield Overland Mail, which one New York traveler describes as "the cheapest station on the route."

1858 map with the Butterfield Overland Mail Route marked in blue.

General Sherman stopped at the fort on his post-Civil War tour of Texas, and "Capt. Theodore Schwan led one column of Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie's raiders from the post in the first series of Indian campaigns into West Texas between January and March 1872," which is described in S. C. Gwynne's fascinating account of a time when the Comanches ruled the Texas plains--Empire of the Summer Moon (2010). MacKenzie is the one who ordered his troops to shoot and kill 1424 captured Comanche horses in Palo Duro Canyon.

This is a colorized version of a photo taken of Randall Slidell MacKenzie in 1863 or 1864.

Fort Phantom Hill was the county seat of Jones County for brief time in 1881, but voters elected to give that title to Anson in November 1881. My good friends at Wikipedia tell me, had a population of 546 in 1880 according to the U.S. decennial census. When it was declared the county seat in 1881, Anson went by the name of "Jones City," but it was renamed "Anson" in 1882. Anson's Western Observer newspaper began publishing there in 1883.

In the late 1880s, Williams Lawrence "Larry" Chittenden, a journalist from New York who was staying overnight at the Star Hotel in Anson, wrote a poem called "The Cowboys' Christmas Ball" about a annual Christmas dance the hotel hosted for local ranchers and cowboys. The poem was first published in the Anson Western on June 19, 1890, after the Star Hotel had been destroyed by fire earlier in the year and information about the old hotel was being sought. Chittenden conspicuously outfitted the poem with colloquialisms that presumably reflect the quaint speech mannerisms of the the locals--"the cattle are a'browzin," while the "fellers" and the "wimmin folk" commence the stampede. The poem has since been anthologized, set to music, and frequently memorialized as a sentimental tribute to a "bygone era."

William Lawrence "Larry" Chittenden, dressed as a cowboy

And it experienced a bizarre afterlife in 2011 when it was re-set in Nevada and released as the sixth annual Christmas song released by the Las Vegas rock band "The Killers," with all sales proceeds benefiting AIDS charities as part of the Product Red campaign organized by Bono.

By 1890, the population of Anson had grown to 3797. By 1900, it was 7,053.  That number included my great grandfather, Gilbert Nathaniel "N. G." Ferrell, who was employed as a "day laborer," his wife of 12 years, Sarah "Sadie" Bell, and their five children: Alma (1889), Claud (1892--a daughter), Willie (1894), Richard (1896), and Ruby (1899).

Rosie, another daughter, was born in 1903. And on September 15, 1905, a seventh child and fifth daughter was born: my grandmother, Ida Gustella. Sadie and N.G. had one more son: Jack, who was born in 1909.

Like my own children, N. G. and Sadie were themselves born in Illinois (Ferrell in Williamson County on February 20, 1860, and Sadie in 1868), and they were married in Hunt County (Commerce, Greenville) east Texas on February 16, 1888. After they moved to Anson, Jones County experienced a substantial growth spurt which brought the total population of the county to 24,299.

According to a Texas State Historic Landmark plaque in Anson, dated 1963, the Anson Opera House was built in 1907 "for diverse programs: stock company and Chautaugua [sic] productions such as 'East Lynn' and 'The Klansman' (for which Sheriff Tom Hudson's horse was borrowed and led on stage); 'Perils of Pauline' and other silent moving pictures; a state championship wrestling match in era of local pugilist Boomer Moore; and Anson High School's first (1909) graduation."

Since 1886, a brick courthouse had served the county, but in late 1909, the Jones County commissioners court asked a Stamford (15 mi. N) architect to design a new courthouse and hired the Texas Building Company of Fort Worth as its contractor. The courthouse, completed in 1910, had Beaux Arts styling, with influences from the Arts and Crafts movement.

According to the Abilene Semi-Weekly Farm Reporter, Ferrell won the Democratic primary for sheriff in July 1908 and in November he was elected as sheriff and ex-oficio tax collector of Jones county

An unsourced internet post that lists the sheriffs of Jones County, reports that the County's first sheriff took office on January 1st, 1883 and served a 2-year term. His successors served terms of 4, 5, 1, 8, and 4-year terms. Ferrell was the 7th sheriff of Anson County. But while every sheriff of Jones County between 1883 and 1980 took office on the first of January and left office on the 31st of December, Ferrell's resigned on July 14th, 1910, six months short of his full term.

The population of Jones County never surpassed the high-water mark that it reached in 1910.

In 1920, the Ferrells and 5 of their children were still living at home in Anson. The two oldest girls--Alma and Claudie--had moved out. That same year, the family moved to Malone, Texas, southeast of Hillsboro. That December, N.G. and Sadie's youngest daughter, my 15-year-old grandmother, eloped with my grandfather, 16-year-old Marvin Frank of Milford, who, according to family legend, met her at a box supper auction at Midway Methodist Church, northeast of Carl's Corner.

By 1924, fourteen years after he turned in his badge, Ferrell ran for re-election to the post he had resigned from in Anson. He lost in a three-way race to Tom Hudson (see "The Klansman" above), who had 191 votes, as noted in an article titled "25 Years Ago," in the Anson Western Observer (August 4, 1949).

By the time of the 1930 census, Sadie was living in Anson at the home of her daughter Claudie and Claudie's four children, aged 14-4.

In 1933, the city council passed an ordnance that banned dancing and in later years, the town became known as "No-Dancin' Anson." The ordnance became a subject of feature articles in national newspapers after the release of the film Footloose in 1984, and after much debate and initial resistance from the town's most prominent civic and religious leaders representing the town Baptist and Church of Christ congregations, the ordnance was repealed in 1987.

Ironically, in 1934, shortly after the no-dancing ordance was passed, the annual Cowboys' Christmas Ball tradition was revived, presumably with special permission from the city council.

N. G. Ferrell died in Anson on March 20, 1939, a little more than three years before his seventh child, Ida, had her own seventh child, my mom, Carolyn Wynelle Frank.

Three years after that, Anson's best-known native unrelated to me was born. Jeannie Riley (nee Stephenson) was actually born in Stamford, but she was raised in Anson where she was a baton-twirling majorette in the band. Riley became a national sensation when her recording of "Harper Valley P.T.A." topped the charts in 1968.