The Hankamer Legacy

The three Hankamer brothers were farmers and ranchers and very much involved in community life in the Crackers Neck settlement. Karl Hankamer owned the two-masted schooner, The Lady of the Lake, which they used to transport produce from their farms to the markets in Galveston. In 1858, Fritz Hankamer went to Galveston to learn the blacksmith’s trade, which his brother John assured him would be a beneficial trade to have in the farming and ranching area in which they lived. John Hankamer also served as Justice of the Peace and Notary Public for Chambers County.

In 1862, John, Karl and Fritz, as well as their half-brother George Stengler, enlisted in Company F of Spaight’s Battalion. The Battalion, commonly known as “Moss Bluff Rebels,” was commanded by Captain William B. Duncan of Liberty. The company was mustered into service on 21 April 1862. Charles and John were 1st and 3rdcorporals in the company, with John advancing to Sergeant. During 1864 and 1865, John William Hankamer maintained a diary that records many interesting observations about daily military life. 

The catastrophic disease of smallpox entered Chambers County in late 1876 when a Captain Turner from New Orleans visited the county. John lost his wife, Lurenda and six of his children, the youngest two being twins, during the smallpox epidemic that ravaged Chambers County until the spring of 1877. Fritz lost his wife Annie Middleton Chism Hankamer and their two youngest children, a son aged 1 and one stillborn just a week before Annie’s death. His 3-year-old daughter Ella survived.  Johannette Hankamer Stengler also succumbed to the dreaded disease. Charles’ wife, Joanna Higgenbotham Hankamer died on the 14th of February 1877, at the age of 35, assumably from smallpox.  John, Charles, and Fritz were probably vaccinated for smallpox during their service in the Civil War. James Jackson of Double Bayou heard about a vaccine for smallpox and sailed to Galveston to get it then started a vaccination campaign. He vaccinated all of his household including his slaves and none of them died from the deadly disease. He offered it to any who would take it, but sadly, out of ignorance and fear most declined. The mortality rate of those who refused the vaccine was almost 100% as is evidenced by the many tombstones in our county with the death date 1877.

In 1902, before he was postmaster, he had 20 acres cleared of timber and started rice farming. Ira Alvin averaged 80 acres and reached his peak of 600 acres up until 1929. A huge pump house was built near Turtle Bayou to pump water in the Hankamer-Stowell Canal that brought water to several thousand acres of rice to other farmers in the area by 1914. Ira Alvin retired around 1931 but still raised cattle on land that was not farmed in rice. By 1930 the area really began to prosper with electricity and Gulf Oil Company coming in to drill for oil in what is now called the north and south Hankamer oil fields which are still producing today.

It was Ira Jett Hankamer (1904-1992), Daniels father, who continued the family farming and ranching passing on this tradition to Daniel by the 1960’s. For a brief period during the 1950’s Jett was a CASE tractor dealer and furnished Dan with one of the first rubber tire tractors to plow the soil. Dad said, “This was the first tractor I learned to drive, it had a manual lever to gradually engage the clutch to get the tractor going, and when it did all you could do was hold on to the steering wheel because there was no power steering”. By the mid 1970’s Dan also farmed several hundred acres of soybeans to rotate land from constant water flushing of nutrients from the soil when growing rice. It was the decaying soybean stalks that put nitrogen back into the soil once the land was plowed before spring planting of rice again, plus soybeans were somewhat profitable. Once the rice was harvested and put in storage to dry, it was later sold through the Winnie Rice farmer’s Co-op on the open market. Once it was sold it was trucked in the winter months to the port of Houston or Beaumont. Soybeans were usually harvested in October to November and sold as a commodity through the Co-op as well.

The history of the Hankamer’s migrating from Germany (Prussia) reflects to the 17th century when the name was spelled Hanckhammer. The (c) was dropped earlier, and one (m) was dropped most likely around 1900 when they got to Texas. Johanetta Scheester Hankamer was the mother of three young boys, John William, Charles and Adolph “Fritz” Hankamer, who came with her on the ship the “Harriet” into Galveston in December of 1845. It was the same year, 1845 that Texas became a state and that the Stenglers and Hankamers Petitioned the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas. John William Hankamer (1843-1907) the original pioneer settler, was Daniels great-grandfather and Ira Alvins father. Other family names that settled in the Crackers Neck area were Weaver, Barrow, Abshier, Moor, Lee, Smith, Morgan and Harmon.

In 1985 Daniel and Zelphia built, owned, and operated DJ’s Country Store. They started selling BBQ beef brisket, his legendary BBQ helped create a popular eating establishment and thriving business for 17 years in Chambers County and surrounding areas. By the mid 1990’s Daniel discontinued rice farming and converted the land into crawfish farming for 12 years which was a seasonal spring to early summer harvest affiliating the sales with DJ’s Country Store. He was highly respected in the community and dedicated steward of the land raising Hereford Cattle and later crossing with Brahman Cattle. He was an avid outdoorsman that enjoyed duck and deer hunting, gardening, and most of all cooking for family, friends, and neighbors. Dan was a very generous man, and incredibly supportive of local events like the Chambers County Youth Project Show, Trinity Valley Exposition, and BBQ cook-offs in Anahuac and Winnie. He was a lifetime Member of the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, past President of the Winnie Rice Farmers Cooperative Association and Board Member of Security State Bank in Anahuac for many years, Honorary Director for Southwest Cattle Raisers Association, and past Master of the Anahuac Masonic Lodge. Daniel passed away in January 2018 doing what he loved to do, and that was putting out hay to his cattle on his tractor.

After retirement, Wayne and P.D. moved back to Hankamer. Wayne was very active in the First United Methodist Church in Anahuac and always volunteered wherever there was a need. He was very much a “people person” and found great satisfaction speaking at recovery programs, helping with the Christian Caring Center, and just making himself available wherever there was a job to be done. Wayne was a member of the 100 Club for Youth Project Show and ran it for about 15 years. 

One of Wayne’s great loves was hunting, especially quail hunting. He hunted often in South Texas in the Cuero area. He took great pride in training his own dogs.

Wayne was a devoted family man and absolutely adored his wife, P.D. He worked hard to make sure she could stay home and made sure she was able to do whatever she took an interest in. He definitely stepped out of his comfort zone when he took her on an Alaskan cruise for their 50th wedding anniversary in September 2009. It was not something he enjoyed doing, but he did enjoy being with P.D. and granting her every request. It would be the last big trip they would take, as he died on January 30, 2011. 

"After the process of making charcoal was finished and it cooled down the folks would load the charcoal into sacks and bring it to the store for Ira to sell.  Ira sold some, but some he took to the shipping warehouse he had on Lee's Gully.  The warehouse sat on an acre of land, and it was used to store goods to be shipped to Galveston," explained Lester. He said the ships would travel down to Turtle Bayou into the Bay and then on to Galveston.  The people in Galveston used a lot of charcoal for their charcoal heaters. 

Lester’s parents moved the family to Hankamer in 1948 and his dad, Jett, had his boys tear down the old store.  He made sure they saved every one of the square nails.  Lester said they filled three 15-gallon wooden kegs with nails, but where they are today is anybody's guess.  All the lumber from the store was used to build the large barn on the property as well as the smaller calf barn, Jett bought creosote posts for the uprights, but the rest of the barn was built with the store’s 1 x 12 cypress boards.  I imagine that barn will be standing long past the time when many of us are not.  The windows and doors from the store were used to build the old implement store in 1953. The shop was a distributor and repair shop for Case tractors; it closed its doors circa 1960 and is now Arlette’s beauty shop where she has proudly left the entrance just as it was built in 1953. Arlette is the daughter of Wayne Hankamer, middle son of Ira Jett and Gladys Hankamer.

Saving all the nails and lumber was very much a part of the depression mindset of those who lived through the "dirty thirties."  Lester said his parents lived through those years and survived by raising sweet potatoes and corn.  Meat was never a problem for when they needed some, they would just kill a yearling, one of the benefits of living on a farm.  Lester recalls one time when he shot a yearling for them to butcher.  He said they used the tractor to hang it from the old pecan tree just south of the house by the water well, “It was called the “butcher tree," stated Arlette.  They had just begun dressing it when two men stopped by wearing suits and asked them what they were doing.  Jett said, "Well we're dressing this beef out and we're going to cut it up and put it in the deep freeze.  Y'all know where you get steaks and roasts from, don't you?"  "They said no," recalls Lester, "and daddy said, well this is how you do it."  "Oh, Lord", they said, we'll never eat another piece of beef." 

Jett's uncle, Max Noack, who served in the Civil War, was disabled.  During his service in the Civil War, he worked as a cobbler repairing the shoes and boots of his fellow servicemen.  He also kept a diary of his daily activity during the war, written very beautifully in perfect cursive.  The diary was given to Jett's family who in turn donated it to the museum.  Because Max was unable to care for himself, Jett built an addition onto his garage where Max lived out his final days and Jett's family cooked and cared for him as he could not make a living on his own.  Arlette recalls that they still called it Uncle Max's room long after he was gone

After a time in the bawdy port of Antwerp, while they waited for their ship to come, the family boarded the wooden sailing vessel Harriet, along with some eighty other immigrants, and began their crossing—in the dead of winter—on the stormy north Atlantic. This first experience with a ship under sail profoundly impacted the nine-year-old German lad, who would sit for hours on end watching shipboard life, in all its aspects, rough and sublime. At some point during this voyage, a dream was born, a passion for the wind and the water. One day, years later, Karl would realize his dream and become a captain of his own ship. A sloop which would run for many years on a regular schedule on Galveston Bay . . . and he would marry a shipbuilder’s daughter to boot. Good thing for me, because Karl’s marriage to Katherine Icet of Cove, Texas, produced my grandfather, and eventually me! 

But lots of life stood between the young boy and his second marriage years later, at the age of 52 to my grandfather’s mother. First the stormy Atlantic had to be crossed. From diaries we know that the steadfast heads of all the families aboard the Harriet spent a lot of time on their knees, horrified by the violent weather and the smallness of their vessel, praying for deliverance from the colossal storms that threatened their ninety-foot-long wooden boat. After two months at sea, the green of the island of Cuba was sighted, and a few days later the Harriet slipped over the sand bar which almost connected Bolivar Peninsula with east Galveston Island and came to rest in the primitive Port of Galveston.

Settling in Anahuac

Choosing not to make the last short leg of the trip down the Texas coast to the mouth of the Guadalupe River—the jumping off point for the wagon trip to New Braunfels—my family stayed in Galveston doing odd jobs to save money until they could afford to settle on the north side of the Bay, near the old Mexican Customs House at Anahuac. 

Family legend says that Karls’s stepfather traded with the local Indians for his patch of ground, and that once settled in their new home, it was not uncommon for the family to spot bears and large cats around their cabin, where the Piney Woods of east Texas meet the waters of upper Galveston Bay. Not much is known of the family until twenty years later, when an extraordinary collection of Civil War correspondence between Karl, his brothers, Fritz and Wilhelm, and their mother were discovered and obtained by the Barker Texas History Library of the University of Texas. Drafted into the Confederate Army when in their late twenties, the three brothers were posted in Louisiana and in the Sabine Lake region under Dick Dowling. When Dowling and his forty-seven rebel soldiers through deception turned back ships of the northern navy which contained tens of thousands of troops sent to invade Texas.

Lying low with his fellow soldiers behind the hastily built breastworks on the edge of the large salt water lake, Karl peered out at the large sailing ships loaded with men, and his boyhood memory of crossing the Atlantic must have returned vividly to his memory. Karl and his brothers kept in touch with home while at war through tiny letters written on one side of scraps of paper as small as four inches across—paper and almost everything else was scarce during the war—and some scraps had as many as 350 words on them. The back side of each letter was left blank, for the reply from Mamma. The letters were carried as a courtesy by random travelers. The subject matter of the letters were the unpleasant conditions of life in the army, the size and activities of barnyard animals belonging to the brothers, and the thread bareness of the brothers’ shirts.

At the conclusion of the war, we know Karl returned, married, and raised his first family of seven children. He became respected in the Anahuac area, and his dinner table was always open to travelers who stayed up late in the night sharing the latest news and political gossip from Beaumont and Houston. Karl was widely read and consulted by others in the rural community on subjects ranging from medical remedies to weather and agriculture.