Robert Monroe “R.M” White Through the Eyes of His Great Gran

“R. M. was not involved in ranching so much at first [other than the acquisition of the land,]” stated Bobby. “He was in the cattle business, but he approached it more from the business side, he just wasn’t much of a cowboy. He had a combination store, saloon and bank at the forks of White’s Bayou and Turtle Bayou, where Whites Park is today. He had his own sailboats to haul stuff. He couldn’t rely on anybody else, so he built his own boats to get supplies from Galveston to the store. One of them was for coal oil and the other was for food. You never wanted to put coal oil next to the food ‘cause everything would taste like coal oil,” clarified Bobby. Once the sailboats crossed Trinity Bay, they would lose the wind when they got to the mouth of the bayou. “No one had motors at the time, and I mentioned to Nanny, ‘you still had another mile once you got to the mouth of the bayou, how did you get the sailboat up to the store?’ She said they had to tow it up the bayou from the bank, either with a couple of mules or a crew of people. I asked her how much they paid people back then to do something like that and she said either twenty-five cents or a chicken,” he said with a laugh. “You have to assume they had to clear the bank of any timber,” interjected brother Sandy. “Yes,” responded Bobby, “I’m sure that bank was just slick from hauling loads, ‘cause there were other people who had boats, he wasn’t the only one. I’m estimating they had to haul the boats about a mile, could be a little more,” he added. 

“I remember Nanny saying they had a little wharf where they loaded stuff on and off,” said Sandy. “She said she was sitting there waiting with custard for the ice to make ice cream. The way she talked, that was a really big deal back then, to have ice during the summer to make ice cream. From what I understand, the ice came from Lake Michigan, or someplace like that, they cut it out of the lakes.  They built barges and packed them with ice and shipped it down the Mississippi. It’s my understanding, when they got to New Orleans, the barges couldn’t go back so they tore them down and used the timber to build houses.” A curiosity arose, amongst us seated round the table, as to how they got the ice to the south without it melting. Tommy explained that when they built the barges to ship the ice, they used the sawdust created by cutting the timber as insulation around the ice. The ice was also stored below the deck, therefore, the water surrounding the barge added extra insulation. It was shipped during the winter and stored in icehouses once it arrived at its destination. 

“They let them make ice cream on the day the ice showed up,” mentioned Bobby. “Other than that, they couldn’t use the ice to make ice cream because it was too valuable. They had a lot of medicinal purposes for the ice, when people had fever, it saved a lot of lives. Because it was so precious, you could only get it for ice cream the first day it showed up. After that, it would be the next ice shipment before you could make ice cream again,” explained Bobby. 

“When the 1900 storm hit it flooded Monroe’s store,” said Sandy, “and it’s my understanding he rebuilt it up higher, but the original structure still stood, so he turned it into a saloon. I remember Nanny telling me that as a little girl her mom, Mattie, told her not to ever go down there. She went down there, and she evidently knew the bartender, the guy who maintained it. He picked her up and sat her on top of the bar and gave her some iced lemonade to drink. There wasn’t anybody in there, that’s the only reason he put her up there like that. Someone came up to the saloon, in a wagon or on a horse, I don’t know which, and the bartender didn’t say a word. He just picked Nanny up, glass of lemonade and all and turned around, opened up the back door and set her on the back steps and closed the door. He didn’t say a word to her. When she finished her lemonade, she left the glass there and went back home,” noted Sandy with a smile.  Bobby said when Monroe moved to Stowell, around 1900, he kept the store and saloon at Turtle Bayou, but the banking business he moved to Stowell. He hired someone to run the store and saloon, but they didn’t do a very good job, and it went downhill. It continued to operate at least until prohibition. During prohibition, he couldn’t sell whiskey anymore and he had a lot of barrels of whiskey there. They loaded all those barrels of whiskey on wagons and hauled them to his house in Stowell and built a shed just for the whiskey barrels. Anna said they used some of that whiskey to make peach brandy and various other things. So, they had an endless supply of whiskey there. His wife didn’t drink, and she didn’t like people who drank too much,” continued Bobby. “Including her daughters,” laughed Tommy. 

R. M. White built his home in Stowell in close proximity to the train track. “Someone told him he needed to build his house next to the railroad track,” stated Bobby, “They told him he didn’t want to build out in the middle of nowhere, but close to the railroad track so he could get things cheap and it would be much more reliable, and they were right,” agreed Bobby. “They would take the train to High Island and down the Bolivar peninsula. Then the train cars would be loaded on a barge and floated over to Galveston.” “The barges are still sunk in there,” interjected Tommy. “One time Anna and Lillie Mae were going to Galveston for some event,” said Bobby. “Anna had gone on ahead with Monroe and Lillie Mae was on a later train. They had loaded the train cars on the barge and were crossing the channel when a bad little storm came up. It got so bad that the guy running the tugboat got scared and cut ‘em loose. They drifted for a long time before they got over to the other side of the bay and then traveled to Galveston by the back way. When they got to the hotel, Nanny looked at Doodle and said, ‘You look like h3!!.’ Oh, they were mad at that guy for cuttin’ them loose,” remarked Bobby. “I don’t know if that was the shopping trip or if it was another one,” added Sandy, “but Anna and Lillie Mae had bought corsets during their shopping spree, then went upstairs to rest or something when they got back to the hotel. They heard some barking and looked out the window to see what was going on. Jack and Cade were out there barking like dogs, the boys had gotten the corsets and put them on the hounds,” laughed Sandy causing a ripple effect around the table. “The girls didn’t like that too much,” he added with a chuckle. 

“Monroe mortgaged the railroad right-of-way at one time, while the trains were running,” interjected Bobby. “The reason I know it wasn’t an accident is because he didn’t mortgage the whole railroad track, he mortgaged it from the center of the track west. If it was an accident, you would just claim it all, but he was very specific, center of the tracks to the west. He saw that as the true boundary between him and maybe Josephine. He saw that as the true boundary even when the trains were running,” reiterated Bobby. 

R.M. built his house in Stowell shortly after 1900,” said Bobby, “they brought the carpenters from Louisiana to build it and Archie Middleton liked how they built it so much that he had them build his house.” “It took them two years to build Monroe’s house,” interjected Tommy, “and Jamie said, according to the records, he spent $5,000 on it, which was a fortune back then.” The group continued to reminisce about the old home, each remembering some special aspect that was memorable to them. They recalled it was built out of cypress cut from the river bottom in Wallisville. They had running water and lights, when no one else had it. Before they got the Delco battery setup for power they used carbide for lighting. They explained how they dripped acetone on the carbide to make the gas to light the lights.  One memorable feature to all was the acetylene chandelier, and acetylene fixtures on the walls, particularly in the kitchen. They had two big cisterns on the porch. Sandy reminded the group there was a brass valve there where you could draw water. “I drew water to drink one time,” Sandy said, “and Nanny chewed me out. She said don’t drink that nasty stuff.” Bobby said he used to drink out of cisterns all the time and never got sick. They remembered fondly the syrup mill at the house where they extracted the juice from the sugar cane to make syrup and molasses, and the old glass cylinder gas pump located underneath the sheds where they kept the vehicles. “They had an old gas tank buried underground and they had a gas pump that was hand operated, and fuel was dripped into the gas tank by gravity flow.” The group continued to recall features of the home that held so many fond memories for them. They marveled at how self-sufficient the entire setup was with carriage house, gas pump, syrup mill, smoke house and remembering the essential old whiskey house drew laughter from all of them. Dinah especially relished the memory of all the bluebonnets in the front yard. Tommy added his memory of the Indian paintbrushes, recalling how Mattie was big into the wildflowers.  

Mattie with her great-grandchildren

Although Monroe’s great grandchildren didn’t know him personally, most did know and love their great grandmother, Martha “Mattie” White, or GaGa as she was affectionately called. She was known to be a quiet woman who didn’t have a lot to say. “Every Christmas we would all go to the house in Stowell,” recalled Bobby, “the Hamiltons, the Heberts, the Edwards, the Dunns, it was a big crowd. It was mostly for the kids, but we’d always have a great time.” “She would have all those little stockings hung on the mantle,” added cousin Dinah, “She’d put five dollars in them and I thought, oh my gosh, I’m in the money now,” swooned Dinah with a touch of drama, sending a ripple of laughter around the table. “Oh, and the pretty little sandwiches and she broke out the sterling silver,” added Susan Edwards Bollich. “Alison’s been polishing on a lot of that silver,” said Tommy, “and we’ve had the two-family bibles redone. The lady who rebound them said it’s rare to see bibles with the kind of paper they were printed on. It is like cotton fabric paper,” he noted. 

“They used to put dad on a little white horse named Mike with the mail bag and send him to the post office to get the mail,” said Susan of her dad, Billy Edwards. “The horse just knew where to go,” explained Bobby. “He would get to the post office and the postal lady would come out and put all the stuff in the bag and the horse would just come back. Out of habit, the horse just knew what to do, you could just set a kid on him and let him go, and that’s what they did,” said Bobby matter-of-factly. 

“I remember Anna and Nanny saying O.C. Jackson used to go to Monroe’s house a lot,” commented Bobby. “He didn’t trust too many people because many had taken advantage of him, but he trusted Monroe. Monroe was kind of his mentor and when he had a problem, he’d come and see Monroe. Shortly after the beginning of the oil boom and long before oil was discovered at Oyster Bayou, land in and around Chambers County became a hot commodity. Somebody went by O’C,’s house and told his wife he was selling vacuum cleaners or something and got her to sign a paper, signing away the mineral rights to Oyster Bayou. O.C. went to see Monroe to find out what could be done about it and Monroe got hold of the guy. Monroe, much after the fashion of the Godfather, made him a deal he couldn’t refuse, and he got the mineral rights back for O.C. Monroe decided the way he handled it would be the quickest and more reliable method. Monroe and O.C. were already friends but they became bigger friends after that,” declared Bobby. 

“I remember Nanny saying Monroe made a cattle shipment out of southeast Texas, by rail from White’s Ranch. It was several trains,” stated Bobby. “It was a big deal,” he continued, “there were so many cattle one engine couldn’t pull all the cars, they had to use two. He had contracted these cattle and when they gathered everything up, he didn’t have enough. He had to go around buying cattle from other people in the county to meet his contract. They shipped them straight from White’s Ranch to Kansas, I believe.” Sandy mentioned it was a long rail ride, and Bobby said, “Yes, they had to stop every so often and unload them and get them water and what not, and people were in charge of four to six cars,” explained Bobby. “They had to poke them with sticks to make them stand up,” interjected Tommy, “that’s why they got the name cowpokes.” 

“Yount Oil Company wanted fresh water for High Island,” said Bobby, “because they were having to haul water in by train for this boiler and it cost a lot of money. They identified an area where they could build an enclosure and pipe water down the side of the railroad to High Island. That’s what the Stanolind Reservoir was. Frank Yount asked Monroe, who owned the land, what he wanted for his land and Monroe said he wanted one of his dairy bulls. Frank Yount had a dairy herd with fine animals around Beaumont and Monroe knew it. So that’s what was paid for the Stanolind Reservoir,” stated Bobby. “They pumped out of it to Smith Lake,” added Sandy, “that’s where they stored it and drew out as they needed fresh water, and Smith Lake still exists there. It’s the Audubon Bird Sanctuary now,” Sandy commented. 

“After partition of the land, Monroe got into some financial problems,” stated Bobby. “He had a bank and during the depression a lot of the banks had real problems and his was no exception. To get right with everybody, he had to sell a lot of land to make sure everybody got what they were owed. Some of that land was purchased by W.P.H. McFaddin and J.M. Hebert.

“He liked the banking business, he really did,” remarked Bobby. “He was the director of the American National Bank in Beaumont plus he had his own bank, I believe it was in Stowell. His bank was more like a private bank.  There were a lot of five-dollar gold pieces always laying around Nanny’s house. Nanny said every time they had a meeting in Beaumont, they would give him a five-dollar gold piece. 

Bobby recalled how his Nanny was very impressed with Texas Ranger, John Abijah Brooks. “Whites Ranch would hire Brooks to stop cattle rustling. Being a Texas Ranger and already killing a lot of people, he was no one to mess with. He stopped the cattle rustling, but the Whites got scared they were going to get in trouble with him killing people while he was working for them. So, they slowly retired him and he went back to where he lived in West Texas, in fact they named a county after him there. He was a rough rough character. When the Whites hired him, he put the fear of God in the cattle rustlers,” noted Bobby emphatically.

“I remember Nanny saying when they heard that the State wanted to build a road from Stowell to High Island they got really enthused about it ‘cause it would go right through Whites Ranch,” said Bobby. “Getting around back then was such a hassle,” he continued. “They were just jumping up and down, ‘Yeah, yeah, we need a road down there, we really do. We’ll give you the land to build the road, just build the road,’ but the State told them they couldn’t except gifts. They said, ‘Okay, we’ll sell it to you for a nickel an acre,’ and so they did, they sold it for a nickel an acre just so the State could say it wasn’t gifted to them. They were just cash poor and land rich,” noted Bobby.