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.

Daniel Jett Hankamer was born a true agrarian on July 30, 1936 in Hankamer, Texas to Ira Jett and Gladys Moor Hankamer. Dan attended grade school in Hankamer transferring to the Anahuac School by 8th grade. He graduated from Anahuac High School in 1952 and received his bachelor’s degree in Agriculture Economics from Southwest Texas State Teachers College, San Marcos, Tx. in 1956. His first marriage was to Joyce A. Streetman and started a 3rd generation of rice farming. They raised a family of 3 boys, Danny, Mike and Mitch.. Dan continued farming and cattle ranching and remarried in 1973 to Zelphia Jenkins Troxell who had 2 girls, Tanya and Tonya, from a previous marriage. Daniel had two brothers Wayne and Lester. Both Dan and Lester shared in the Hankamer land to farm and ranch while Wayne worked the Oil & Gas Service Industry in the Houston area most of his adult life.

Dad was a good father and teacher of life itself. He taught us basic economics, farming, mechanics, construction and could build just about anything. . . if we needed it, he could make it, and it was built to last. I remember coming home from school one day and dad was laying out a design in chalk on the concrete by the rice dryers to build a rice cart, the frame was welded out of heavy I-beam steel, sheet metal, adding a gas tank, a steering wheel, and 2 big tires in back and 2 smaller ones in front. We installed a big GMC V-8 engine with a 4-speed manual transmission geared down to handle the load. A large steel hopper sat right on the rear-end designed for hauling 2 combine loads of rice. As soon as it was complete he taught me how to drive it, it was one of the most exciting days for me as a young teenager, he told me I had to learn how to drive a cart before I could operate a combine. This was around the summer of 1967 when dad was farming approximately 200 acres. During the 70s and 80s the rice allotment increased from 200 acres to 400 acres and continued this pace to the mid 1990’s.

This rural country life all began with Daniel’s grandfather Ira Alvin Hankamer (1869-1945) who settled in what was then called Crackers Neck and opened a mercantile store along with his wife Martha. In the spring of 1904, a post office was established in his store with him as postmaster. At that time, the community took the name of Hankamer. As in the case for many other communities in Texas, the postmaster gave the name to the postal facility, which was adopted as the name of the town itself. His wife, Martha was an excellent help-mate for her husband, Allie, always available to help wherever she was needed. She filled the position of postmistress much of the time, freeing Allie up to accomplish the many other responsibilities that made demands on his time. His mercantile store received goods that sailed up from Galveston to Anahuac traveling the Turtle Bayou to what is now White’s Park. 

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.

Albert Wayne Hankamer was the second son born to Ira Jett and Gladys Moor Hankamer on, January 17, 1939. He grew up in Chambers County and attended Anahuac High School. Jimmie Ann “P.D.” Marshall, born October 24, 1941, to Jim Brown and Annie Fay Barrow Marshall, also attended AISD, and Wayne began dating her in June of 1959. Wayne must have known immediately that P.D. was the one he was destined to spend the rest of his life with, as he married her in September of the same year. He was leaving to attend Southwestern Texas College in San Marcos and he was not leaving P.D. behind. 

Their only daughter, Lynda Arlette Hankamer was born on November 14, 1960 and her brother, John Graydon followed a little over a year later on Jan 10, 1962. Their baby boy, Albert Wayne “Hank” Hankamer Jr drug his feet a little making his entrance on May 3, 1965. 

After Wayne left college, the family lived in various locations. Wayne was a pipe distributor and was very gifted at the job he did. They would send him to a job so he could get it lined out and once he did, they sent him to another to get them to fix their problems. In 1973 he moved his family to Huffman when he began working at Gulf Supply Company’s Houston home office. They lived there for about 28 years. 

In the late ‘80s Gulf Supply filed chapter 11, so Wayne resigned and got on with Vallen Safety Supply. He worked with them for over 20 years.

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

My great-grandfather died seventeen years before I was born, but I have gotten to know him. He was in his nineties when he died, but like all men his age, he was probably still a young man just wearing an old body. When he was nine years old, he climbed up on top of a wagon loaded with his family and their possessions As the wagoneer led the team across a narrow cobbled stone bridge over the Lahn River in middle Germany in late 1845, young Karl Hankamer beamed and waved goodbye to his cousins, aunts, and uncles who knew they would never see Karl or his family again. 

Texas Bound

Karl was too excited by the prospect of the long journey which lay ahead not to savor the moment as his envious playmates ran as far as their mother’s would let them. Karl’s step-father and mother had signed a contract with Prince Solms of Braunfels, an idealist from a neighboring village, to take their family to the prince’s new domain in what was soon to become the newest state in the United States. Texas. What the good prince had not elaborated on was that Texas, although soon to be a bona fide state, was still controlled mostly by war-like Comanche Indians, rattlesnakes, and wild animals.

Soon the excitement of leaving Dietz wore off, and Karl and his brothers and siter snuggled into nooks among the swaying baggage to sleep, while Papa walked along with the teamster and Mamman dozed atop the wagon, as it creaked along the mud road to the Rhine River. In the mid-1980s, I retraced the path of great-grandfather Karl and his family westward along the shady banks of the Lahn River. We crossed the Rhine on a mighty bridge at about the point the family boarded a riverboat for the trip down river to Cologne, and eventually to Antwerp.

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.

Earl Curtis Hankamer, son of Karl Christian “Charles” Hankamer of Germany and Katherine Icet. Earl was born on Jan 16, 1862 in Crackers Neck, Chambers County, Texas. He was educated in a one-room school located three miles from his home. Earl said they typically got up at 5:00 every morning and parched and ground their own coffee. The coffee grinder was the alarm for the household members to get up. After they had their coffee they headed out to milk the cows and perform whatever farming tasks needed to be done. Earl’s mother died when Earl was only 3-years-old and his father raised Earl and his five siblings along with Earl’s seven half-siblings, with firmness tempered with kindness. 

Earl left home at the age of 13 to work in his brother Roy’s dry goods store in Sour Lake, Texas. He rode a big gray horse back to Hankamer to visit his family, a distance of about 30 miles. He also delivered the Beaumont Enterprise and sold copies of the Houston Chronicle on the streets of Hankamer at night. Eventually, he save $1,000 which paid his way to Baylor, then named Baylor Academy in Waco. Earl possessed an aptitude for math, an aptitude he handed down to his grandson. Earl returned to Sour Lake as a Baylor graduate in 1915. He formed a partnership with his brother Roy called Hankamer Brothers Outfitters. 

Sour Lake was an oil boomtown and Earl began investing in wells. “Grandad was in his forties before he really made a success in the oil business,” said Earl’s grandson, Earl III. “Most of his wealth came from trading oil leases with the Texas Co. (Texaco), Humble (Exxon), Superior Oi (Mobile), and others. Grandad would travel to Houston during the week, peddling oil leases to the major oil companies. After a while he became the chief lease hound for Humble and others. He was able to keep and override, or interest, in many of the deals that he brought to these companies.” 

“Honest dealings and personal relationships served the senior Hankamer well,” his grandson added. “It was trading in the oil leases that made him a wealthy man. His knowledge of the property owners who traded with him at his dry-goods store was a tremendous benefit due to his integrity an honesty.” Earl formed the Prudential Drilling Company in the late 30s which was successful in discovering some large oil reserves. The largest was the West Hampshire Field in which four wells drilled in 1949 were sold for $9.6 million.

In 1938, Earl Hankamer left his mercantile store, giving each of his two longtime employees half the store, assuring them a good living for the rest of their lives. Earl was a very benevolent man. He tithed and more to his church and gave very generously to educational, medical, and other causes with his time and money. He served on the Baylor Board of Trustees for 41 years and was the chairman of the board of Baylor College of Medicine for 15 years. Besides being  major donors of the business school building, they Hankamer’s also gave to the Armstrong Browning Library building and provided a significant endowment for the Hankamer School of Business. 

Earl Curtis Hankamer, Sr. who had moved his family to Houston, died there in his home on September 24, 1985 at the age of 88. His grandson said he never heard a negative word about his grandfather who treated the shoeshine boy and CEO alike.