“Jacob Sherman, Jr. came here from Missouri in 1853, probably by covered wagon and settled around Lake Charlotte,” said Jesse Romaine “Chipper” Sherman of Wallisville. “Jacob Sherman, Sr. was going to come, but died in Missouri before he could make the trip,” he added. Three years after the death of his father, Jacob Sherman Sr., in 1850, Jacob Jr. married Sarah Magdalene Summers in St. Louis, Missouri and arrived in Wallisville, the same year, in time for the birth of their first son, Sidney Scott Sherman. Together they had six children. Sarah died at the young age of 39, a few short months before her youngest son, Eddie Haven Sherman, turned five. Eddie was Chipper’s great grandfather.
“They burned charcoal for a living selling it to folks to heat their homes and were big timber people,” said Chipper. “Back then travel was done on horseback or by wagon. They went to Liberty when they could for supplies, as Anahuac was still hard to get to at the time. Going to Anahuac, they were required to cross Turtle Bayou by ferry. Even going to Liberty was tough during rainy periods, as it was just a dirt road and was so low near the river bottom it would just be a muddy mess,” explained Chipper. Another preferred mode of transportation was by boat, due to the poor conditions of the roads. In the 1860 census, Edward Haven Sr. listed his occupation as a sailor. Given the fact they sold charcoal, it makes sense he would have a ship to transport it to Galveston. Many of the Sherman men were ship captains. In 1922. Captain Ezra Sherman, cousin of Chipper’s grandfather, Elder Haven Sherman, piloted the first ship up the Houston Ship Channel at night without a tugboat. He mentions in a 1936 newspaper article he first sailed on a ship at the age of 7 (1895), with his father on a charcoal schooner from Chambers County to Galveston. His grandfather, Leverett R. Sherman was also a ship’s captain as was Ezra’s older brother, Hugh.
Legends, Loot & Lafitte
.“Jacob Sherman and his son Edward would use a mule team to pull the cypress logs out of the swamp and float them down the Trinity to the sawmill in Wallisville. They were pulling logs out of the bottoms here in Lake Miller, in 1883, when they snagged something, and it turned out to be a ship. Now they didn’t know if it was Jean Lafitte’s ship or not,” clarified Chipper. “Jacob and his son Eddie staked out the ship, marking the location by driving a large iron spike into an oak tree. Eddie showed his son, who is my grandpa Elder Haven, Violet Clark and others, where it was and that’s how the story of Jean Lafitte’s ship in Lake Miller got started. I never saw it, but daddy did. Some recall seeing the mast, but daddy told me there was an old steamboat in there and its mast was still visible when he was a young man, so they are probably confusing the steamboat with the ship my great grandpa snagged. It was on the northwest corner of Lake Miller and it is covered up by 10 ½-15 feet of dry land today. The lake would have to come up quite a bit to put it underwater again. G.C. Chambliss and some others had plans to shore the thing up, pump it out and raise it up, but the government brought all that to a halt,” said Chipper. In the book, The Treasures of Galveston Bay, by Carroll Lewis, we learn that in 1949, Molly Clark and her brother, Eddie Haven Sherman contacted B. J. Krigar and Leo T. Behne, who had a metal detector for locating buried treasure, and told them about the ship. After a two-month search, they located the ship which had, at that time, sunk over eight feet down into the mud of Lake Miller. They staked out the outline of the ship which measured about 75-feet long by 35-feet wide, which roughly matched the measurements of Lafitte’s flagship, The Pride. The Pride, supposedly, had sunk in the mouth of a small lake loaded with five bearskins full of gold. A man named John Lafitte of St. Joseph, Missouri, who claimed to be a descendant of Lafitte, heard about the discovery and arrived to claim his rights to anything that was found. He said besides the gold, there was also a 43,000-word manuscript written by Lafitte journaling his exploits. That’s when the State of Texas stepped in and shut down any further digging in the lake, stating proper procedure had not been followed. To date there has been no news of the treasure ever being found
“A friend of, Donald Lancon, my brother-in-law, had a dredge and was dredging for a pipeline somewhere in the neighborhood of 1965,” said Chipper. “When he was going across Old and Lost Rivers the dredge got hung up and they had to pull it out. When they were cleaning it out, they ran across gold coins, either 323 or 328 gold coins, I cannot remember exactly, but 328 sticks in my mind,” Chipper replied. Three hundred and twenty-eight coins had to have weighed quite a bit and today would probably be worth over a million dollars. They tried to retrace their steps, but when you are dredging a pipeline, they are putting the pipe in behind you as you go and covering it up, so they could never locate where they dredged up the coins, but it was in the vicinity of the Mission Nuestra Señora de la Luz. Whether it was part of Lafitte’s treasure remains a mystery. Donald actually saw the coins, but the friend who owned the dredge is long gone with them, he disappeared soon after his rich discovery,” grinned Chipper.
“If you go up the Trinity River there was a pass that took you to the mouth of Lake Charlotte, on the south side, just above Lake Miller. Everyone called it Lake Pass but it actually had a name. Pop referred to it as Markum Pass. On the East side of Lake Charlotte over to 563 was the Sherman settlement. We used to walk over to the lakes, and it was nothing but swamp, we called it the cypress break for obvious reasons. Just above Lake Charlotte, in Liberty County, is another lake that was cut in half when they built the Sulphur plant. They made a cut from the Trinity River to the Sulphur Plant so barges could access it. Fact of the matter is, some of the barges that blew up Texas City came from the Texas Sulphur Plant.
Grandpa's Neck of the Woods
“Edward Haven Sherman married Nellie Shelton, and together they had nine children. “Daddy called Nellie “Old Mamma.” I believe Aunt Winnie was their oldest child and my grandpa, Elder Haven Sr. was the second oldest. Edward Haven Sherman is buried in the Sherman Cemetery on Lake Charlotte Road,” noted Chipper.
“This was grandpa’s neck of the woods, he knew Wallisville backwards and forwards,” exclaimed Chipper proudly. Elder Haven married Clara Munger and together they had four boys. Chipper’s dad, Romaine, was the second oldest. “At one time, Pappa had about eight hundred to a thousand acres of land situated in the N. D. Labadie survey and the James Allen survey. He sold some of it to make some money. They also kept cattle on their land where the Gulf Sulphur Company used to be. They branded and ear-marked their stock, our brand number was 22T. They fed the family from their beef stock and sold cattle to make money. There was no industrial revolution as yet down here, so you had to have a noggin that knew how to make money,” declared Chipper. “Back when things were a little lean, my grandpa, also known as Pop or Pappa (Elder Haven, Sr.) had a mail boat. He would leave Lake Charlotte with the mail or cargo, whatever needed to be
transported and travel down to Smith Point. Joe Nelson and his father, Cornelius, would meet him at the point with mail or cargo they needed transported to Galveston. When he returned from Galveston, he would bring back mail and merchandise people asked him to pick up.
Elder Haven Sherman
“I asked my pappa (Elder Haven Sherman) one time, ‘What fool got out there and cut those cypress trees off up there seven feet in the air?’ He said, ‘Well, the fool’s name is Elder Haven Sherman.’ I asked him what he did that for! He told me that was the best way to get them out. Most of the trees they cut were just below the house in the bottoms and they would wait for the water to come up and when it did, they would cut the trees down and float them out to the sawmill During the hurricanes, like Carla, the water level would rise between 15-16 feet in Lake Charlotte and when they let the water out of the dam just recently it raised it about twenty feet. Most of the trees they cut were cypress ‘cause that’s what grew there. Most of the old homes in this area were built with cypress boards.” clarified Chipper. “Some of those slabs of cypress made boards three foot wide. I’m seventy-six and the stumps are still back there and they were there when my grandpa was a boy, so, I think cypress gives a pretty good show of just how long it lasts,” chuckled Chipper.
“My grandpa, Elder Haven, Sr., when he got old enough started into the timber business. Fact of the matter,” said Chipper, “that Doyle Scribner measuring stick I gave you to display here at the museum was his. Pop used to go to different places and assay their timber to calculate how much they had, how much they could get for it, so forth and so on. He could calculate how many board feet were in each tree by using the Doyle Scribner scale. Not only did he assay the timber he also cut timber to sell. I imagine Jacob Sherman had a lot to do with the logs being sent to the Cummings Sawmill in Wallisville.
“Fat Grandma, my mother’s mom, was married to A. B. Cross. She divorced him and he would not give her any alimony or any form of support. A.B Jr. lied about his age and went into the army. He was about three years older than momma. Momma (Bernice) and Aunt Benny Leah were put in a children’s home. The children’s home people, Mr. and Mrs. Moore, were super Christian people. They ran a tight ship, momma had to learn scripture every morning before she went to school. She was thirteen at the time and had to make sure the other children learned their scripture and could cite it to Mr. and Mrs. Moore. She stayed in the children’s home for about three and a half years. Grandma was quite a seamstress; she did all of the fur work and alterations for The White House department store in Beaumont. She could do anything with a piece of cloth,” he proclaimed.
“My parents, Romaine Sherman and Bernice Cross married September 21, 1940, and together they had six children: Judy, Sibbie, Janet, me (Chipper), KK, and Leslie. Although, both our parents instilled in us the love of God and taught us the importance of leaning on Jesus Christ as our Savior, mom (Bernice) was the driving force. Her desire to keep us close and Godly was due to the experiences she had faced in life as a child. She was the glue that cemented us together and made us a close-knit family unit.
Loving the Lake Charlotte Life
“Every year we’d have a big family gathering at Lake Charlotte with all the families; the Sherman’s, the Worthy’s, the Welch’s, the Munger’s, the whole kit and kaboodle and there was a bunch of them. We lived in the Eminence Community which was made up of the areas of Eminence, Wallisville, and Lake Charlotte. Our home was at Lake Charlotte, which was not very far, and we went to Church at Eminence. About 1938 or ’39 my dad went to work for Standard Coffee Company out of New Orleans, LA. He stayed with them for nineteen years. His territory included everything between Longview, TX and Brownsville. He got to be a “big dog” in the company with salesmen working under him. They sold more than just coffee, they sold large bottles of vanilla extract and things like that.”
“I loved growing up in our community. The day I would love to have back was when we visited folks back then, on Sunday, everybody had a cake baked, we always had coffee. There was V.R. McManus and his kids, Charlotte and the Mungers and so forth, and we might meet down at J.C.’s. It was just laid back, fact of the matter, Interstate 10 didn’t even exist. Wallisville had everything we needed back then, in fact most of our grocery shopping we did with Edwin Speights. The post office was right there on the river in Wallisville, Mrs. Riggins used to run it. Mr. Edwin Speights had a pretty good-sized grocery store. You could get the coldest drinks there. He’d get ice from Anahuac every morning and put it in those chests out front and I tell you what, I loved Nesbitt orange, and he had some of the coldest that there was,” said Chipper closing his eyes as he savored the memory. “We had some great times there, like I said, Wallisville was so laid back. There was an old man that lived in Wallisville along the edge of the river, his name was Rufe Dutton. The men used to all meet up there at Edwin Speights store and Rufe was one of those who didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, good man, just didn’t know when to be quiet. They were sitting up there one day and Rufe said, “Anyone who doesn’t vote the way I do is a %@*! fool. Everybody looked at him and someone raised their eyebrow and said, ‘just what exactly do you mean by that Ruffe?’ Rufe said, ‘Well, I vote like I %@*! well please, and I suggest you do the same thing.’ There were some characters back then. Mrs. Dunman lived down the road from here, there probably wasn’t a better baker in Chambers County at that time than her. That lady knew how to bake. When we would go to her house on Hallowe’en, she would always give us some home-baked goods she’d baked. Man, cookies, muffins, and things like that. We loved it. She’d have a little basket for each one who went by there. Man, I had some great times in the fifties. We used to ride our bicycles up and down interstate ten when they were building it and try and race those yukes. Some of them would mess with us and they’d put ‘em in gear, and, shoot, we couldn’t keep up with them for nothing. We’d get up on top of the Trinity River bridge before they finished the approaches and Robert Thomas and myself would get on top and phew,” laughed Chipper motioning his descent with his hand, “down we’d go, that was fun. “People knew everyone else, they visited, it was a kind gentle era.”
Sherman Home Center
Judy Sherman Next to Sherman Lumber Company ~ Feb 1960
“In October of 1958, Trinity Valley Lumber Company in Anahuac decided they were going to go out of business, Daddy and his older brother, Arthur, formed the corporation of Sherman Brothers Lumber Company at that time. Daddy did a lot of building on the side, building homes but mostly commercial work when he could get it. Where the row of buildings used to be going to the courthouse which included Million Brothers, Vogt’s, and so forth, that’s where the post office was. Mrs. Nelda Miles’ Dar-Len Shop was there for a while, There was a furniture store there and at one time there was a Crocker’s Jewelry Store. between there and the post office is where the drug store was. On the end, we built the Outfitters.
“The Quonset hut at the lumber yard was built in 1946 or ’48, Goonie Willcox owned it and sold it to daddy in ’58 when we went into business. We started adding property until we reached from the Quonset hut to Main and south to where the bail bonds offices were. That was ours until 2016 when I sold it and you see how much property it covers now. After I retired, Bubba had it for a while then decided he didn’t want to run it, so I bought him back out and handled it until I sold it in 2016.
I Was Chief Flunkie
“I was ten years old when I started working at the lumber yard. I was chief flunkie. I had to make sure the roofing felt was standing up, and I had to pick up the 90-pound roofing squares. Remember the old brick siding that came on a 120-pound roll, oh, that stuff was heavy!” exclaimed Chipper. “When dad started building a little bit, I had to hand the boards up to the people that were doing the work. If we were putting a house on a slab, I would have to help dig the ditch to put the plumbing in. Everything that was in the store had to be counted every year, so when I inventoried, I learned the difference between a Phillips screw and a regular screw, a number 10 and a number 7, or 12 or whatever. We had everything in the store it took to build a house, so that’s how I grew up learning the trade, either on the ignorant end of a shovel or the ignorant end of a board going up a ladder.” he chuckled. “Fact of the matter is, that’s why I have a bad back today. One day a truck came in and I unloaded 80-pound bags of concrete. The guy would put it on the edge of the eighteen-wheeler deck, and I would move it inside the shop. I moved about 500 bags that day. You know what came next! The next day they brought in a truckload of roofing. This was in 1960 in the summertime, I was twelve years old. There’re two hundred squares on a truckload, two hundred time three, that’s 600 bundles I unloaded one bundle at a time and stacked them. I told my dad, ‘Look, Dad, if you want me to last, you’re going to have to get a forklift. Two days like this I can’t go.’ I was lean and mean, I didn’t have an ounce of fat on me. Between that and when we came home, we had the garden to tend to, but I got through it with just a few back problems and neck problems.
“We worked in Anahuac, but I grew up in the Wallisville area. I used to ride up and down this road on my bicycle when it was still a dirt road. The bus route started at the county line with Charles McManus (J.C. McManus’ boy), and Peggy McManus (Hill.) It started there and came all the way up Lake Charlotte Road to FM 563. We had to walk about a quarter of a mile to the bus stop, rain, shine, sleet or snow, it didn’t make any difference, we had to get there,” laughed Chipper. “Judy, Sibbie, Janet and myself all went to Eminence School through the third grade. There was one teacher, Ms. Gregory, who came from Paris, TX., and she taught all three grades. KK stayed two years and then they disbanded it and everyone went to Anahuac. After the bus picked us up, we traveled down No. 9 Road coming around and picking up the LaFour’s and Mayes’ then we went into the town of Wallisville. The old hanging gallows were still there, in kind of bad shape, but still there. After we picked everyone up in Wallisville we headed to Anahuac. We got to Turtle Bayou and the road didn’t go straight across at that time. It was always fun to sit in the back, because the bus driver, Mr. Clayton, Nicolas Clayton, would hit that thing and phew, up we’d go, we could almost jump and knock our heads on the top of the bus. We picked up kids all the way to what is now Otter Road. We had a 72-passenger bus that was packed to the hilt, fact of the matter is sometimes we had to stand up.
“When I started fourth grade in Anahuac, I got into it with Mrs. White because she insisted on calling me Jesse. She’d say ‘Jesse Sherman’ and I wouldn’t answer her. She’d say, ‘I’m talking to you!’ and I’d tell her no ma’am, that’s not my name, I’m Chipper. She said, ‘we don’t go by nicknames here.’ So, I went and told daddy and daddy didn’t like the name Jesse anyway,” said Chipper with a smile. “Daddy called the superintendent T.P. White and said, ‘you better tell your wife if she wants him to cooperate in school, she’s going to call him Chipper, is that understood? ‘‘Yes sir, Romaine,’ and that was it,” said Chipper with a twinkle in his eye. “I graduated from Anahuac High School in 1966. When I was in school, the farm kids would have their rifles, twenty-twos for the most part, and shotguns hanging in their trucks, they’d leave the windows rolled down. No one ever worried about theft or someone hurting someone. I always carried a knife with me, my grandpa showed me how to sharpen it,” he added. “We’d be in science class . . . chemistry, and Nick Clayton would say, ‘Chipper, let me see your knife.’ He’d borrow my knife and give it back to me. That’s just the way the school was.”
“When they started the Wallisville Dam Project they took seven acres of our land and eight acres of Arthur’s. They took a 300-foot buffer zone at mean high tide and told us this land is going to be eminent domain. They wouldn’t give it back when they downsized everything, they wouldn’t let us buy it back,” Chipper repeated sadly.
Cotton Picking Time
“There was a cotton farm at the end of Sherman Road on land owned by Mr. Collins. Mr. and Mrs. Wright farmed the land and took care of Mr. Collins. There was about 180 acres in cotton, it was sea island cotton, and they grew it for about three years, I think. I was just a kid and I wanted to pick cotton . . . I picked cotton . . . you can have all the cotton you want! Those cotton balls! you better have you some gloves on, or you better have some real tough hands, ‘cause it would cut your fingers! I pulled that sack, and pulled that sack all day long, heck I didn’t know anything about picking cotton, but I made six cents . . . for ALL DAY! I thought, heck, I can get on my bicycle and put a bag on each side of it and ride up and down the road picking up coke bottles and Nesbitt’s and make two cents a bottle.
"There's Some Big Gators in That Pit"
“When they built Hwy 563 from the Chambers County Line to the four-way in Anahuac they used sand from our sand pit. That’s how daddy got the money to pay for our land. They turned the 90-degree turn there by Booster Stephenson’s into a rounded curve and straightened out the ninety that was south of there. There’re some big gators back in that pit where the dynamite holes are, I’ve seen one not long ago that was about fifteen feet. It made a mud slide three feet wide. My grandson, Cullen said, ‘Pappa, I’ve heard about the dynamite holes all my life, will you show them to me? I hadn’t been feeling very well, but I was feeling pretty good that day, so I told him, ‘Alright, I’ll take my pole you carry the rifle, I’ve got my pistol’ I didn’t trust going in there without weapons. I had put a camera up in that break area, and there were bobcats, foxes like you wouldn’t believe, coyotes, and probably thirty thousand coons,” said Chipper with a laugh. “We got out there and he said, ‘Pa, there he is, is that him?’ I told him yeah, that’s him. I’d never seen a gator that big, not live outside of TV. I looked at him and measured him off, I’ve been in the lumber b’usiness all my life so that wasn’t hard to do. He was massive. I told Cullen, ‘Put the rifle down and take my pistol, I’m going to go up there and get as close as I can. He said, ‘What if he comes at you?’ I told him, you see that pistol, and I know he’s a good shot, I said, ‘You put six bullets right there in his head, he won’t be bothering me anymore.’ I got up there close to him and Cullen said, ‘Pappa, don’t you think that’s close enough?’ I told him, no, not yet, I’ll get’im,’” Chipper relayed with a chuckle. “I started taking a few of the pictures. I got real close for one and he was between two trees with his head sticking out and his hind feet were still in the water, so you know there was at least five or six feet of tail in the water. About that time that gator started moving and Cullen hollered, ‘Pappa, Pappa!’ I told him I was out of the way. That thing turned around to get back in that dynamite hole,” said Chipper, stopping to laugh as he recalled the moment. “Cullen’s eyes got that big around, he didn’t want anything to happen to me. I showed him a lot about Lake Charlotte that day.”
“I lost the vision in my right eye when I was sixteen years old. I was helping my dad, and we were changing the auger on the tractor. I couldn’t get it to break loose, so I struck it with a ballpeen hammer. A piece of steel flew up and went through my eye. My mom rushed me in to Dr. Fahring, who sent me to a specialist who wasn’t much help. The eye dealt me misery for years and my vision in that eye remained blurred. After fifteen or sixteen surgeries on it, in 2001, I had the specialist in Beaumont remove it and insert a glass eye.”
I Love My Heritage
First Baptist Church Anahuac Missions Trip to Ukraine ~ 2004
“Martha and I have always attended the First Baptist Church in Anahuac where I am a deacon. Warren Clark and Oras Ortega were also deacons and believe it or not, each of them also were missing their right eye. We were having communion one Sunday and Booster Stephenson was serving with us. He leaned over in the midst of communion and said, ‘You know, we must be the only Baptist Church who has three one-eyed deacons. We all began to laugh and totally disrupted the solemn occasion.”
“FBC, Anahuac sent all three of us one-eyed deacons, along with others, on a mission trip to Kiev, Ukraine in 2004, and we three one-eyed deacons remained together the whole trip. We stayed with a young couple, Helen and Ruslan, who fed us and housed us while we were there. Helen had a two-burner hotplate on which she cooked our meals. She made homemade bread, cooked vegetables out of the garden, and picked fresh fruit from trees to make our drinks every day. They were very clean people, and we were impressed with how they took care of their elderly. They were very interested in everything we could tell them about America. We stayed with them for seven days. Next we went to Petrovska and taught the five principles of Unity, noon and evening. In Antratsyt, we were warmly welcomed at the Church. They wanted me to sing that morning and I led them in singing “How Great Thour Art.” To my surprise, about six bars into the song the whole church joined me, singing in Russian. At the luncheon after church, a Russian soldier came up to us (Warren, Oras, and Chipper) and asked if he could touch us. An interpreter told us the soldier had been taught all his life to hate Americans and want to kill them. We also met a KGB Agent who was of the hierarchy of the Russian Government. He and the soldier both found Jesus and changed their mindset of Americans. That night after church, we went to the pastor’s house along with the Russian soldier and KGB agent and his wife. Their children tested their English with us. We enjoyed coffee and coffee cake together as we shared with them what Jesus had done in our lives. The next morning before we left Antratsyt, the Russian soldier came to our apartment and gave each of us a piece of gold that he had mined. He told us that would have paid for his children’s education. This really took us back. Each of us gave them some gifts along with some Texas quarters and I gave the soldier a Sherman Home Center cap.”
“The next night was an experience I’ll never forget! I imagine that Warren and Oras are still talking about it in Heaven. Warren was teaching the first principle of Unity. Our interpreter told Warren, ‘I know what to say, He touched me.’ Warren gave her the floor and she began speaking in Russian. The Holy Spirit began moving throughout the entire church. We heard the Russian people speaking to us in East Texas slang with no accent. We had been teaching the first principle of Unity, the Christ in me is the same Christ in you. We taught in three churches which at one time was one church. It split into three over disunity. That night the people realized, as Warren talked, they must forgive one another because Christ does not fight against Himself. There were approximately 500 people there that night, standing room only inside and out. They were crossing the aisles asking one another for forgiveness. What an awesome night seeing and feeling the Holy Spirit in each of our hearts. We went back to Helen and Ruslan’s home and talked about our lives and what Christ Jesus has meant to us this week. On a side note, they fed us for five nights. When we gave them $80 they cried because that was like 3 months pay. She was a nurse, and he was a carpenter. When we got on the train back to Kiev, we had an entourage of people crying and thanking us for spending time with them.
“I love my heritage and the people around me. When the doctor told me I had cancer of the liver I said, oh, well, nothing I can do about it. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not to your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will direct your paths. Take it out of your hands and put it in the hands of the one who knows you inside and out. He appointed my day before the foundation of the world. This may not be my day, but if it is, I’m not worried about it,” concluded Chipper with the utmost peace.