06-18-01

While I am thinking about it, I want to mention that back during and before 1874, the farmers used rail fences or wooden structures to hold their livestock at night to keep them away from raiding visitors who were hungry and needed essentials for daily living.

A company in Illinois invented barbed wire and began looking for places to distribute their new product. They brought some of the barbed wire to Texas where they originally began marketing this new product. They found a hardware store in Gainesville that began selling the new wire.

It became a modern necessity on the farm and news about the new wire for fences spread rather quickly and it came on the market in many different locations in Texas and the range country.

I have an old photo of the local hardware store that was located on the east side of Main street in the downtown area and on the front of the building was a sign that had printed in very large letters J.I. Case Implements, and in front of this old store there were hundreds of rolls of barbed wire neatly stacked. The rolls were stacked about 3 rolls high and covered the front of this store.

This photo was made in 1918 some 44 years after the invention of the wire for fencing and was still a popular item for sale which is evidenced by the large inventory.

The local area was a free range, so to speak, as not much of the area was immediately fenced after the invention of the wire.

The many miles of fencing during 1874 spelled a lot of trouble for the native Americans, since they were assuming to claim possession of much of the local territory and area land.

While the barbed wire story has nothing to do with the photo in this week’s paper, I thought it might be a worthy subject since we have all grown up with the restrictions of barbed wire.

The photo is of the third grade class at Aubrey School sixty-three years ago in 1939. This photo was made at the same time the cotton gin that was located close to the Aubrey school was operating. The gin would run out of space to store the bales of cotton while waiting for the freight train to load them and would stack them all of the way down the railroad track into the school’s playground..

The large bales of cotton were so closely stacked along the railroad track, that there would be close to 2000 bales (that’s my estimation). The third class boys pictured in this photo would get their exercise by running and jumping from one bale to another.

We would play on the cotton bales until we would almost drop over. Then suddenly a fight would break out, but I was always so tired from jumping on the bales that I couldn’t fight. However after a bitter fight, we would struggle home.

The same activities would take place the next day because more cotton bales were stacked in our playground area. The cotton bales would stay in the area on up into the late fall when the cotton harvest slowed down.

Some of the students of Miss Jones’s third grade during 1939 are as follows: Mary Fay and Martha Rae Starr, Housden girl, Edna Coffey and her sister Doris Mann and her little sister, Billy Jack Hodges, Griffey, Hernandez, Bouncer, Paul Harris, J.M. Jones, Laveta Hunn, Mary Goin, Angel Rodgiquez, Filipe and Subrara and M.C. Smith. The others I can’t recall their names, so if you can help me to identify them, please do.

This building was the fourth school building that was in Aubrey. The first school was located where the Key Settlement Cemetery is located and the second is where the present high school is now located and the third was located where this building was during 1939 at Chestnut street in Aubrey, and was on the same foundation that is in the background for this photo.

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