Family Tree

Genfo,

I thought that given your interest in the magic and mineral springs in Texas that this story might amuse you. It seems that springs played an important part in my heritage. I’ve never paid that much attention to the family tree thing. I don’t care who my ancestors were unless they left me some land or a title so I have never actively searched my family tree. But my ancestry has a way of searching for me and besides the stories from my grandmothers, several other members of my family have done research and sent it to me. Recently Sativa’s husband followed the January side of my family and there were some interesting facts.

My ancestors were among the first Anglos in Texas. Some of my mostly Scots-Irish relatives fought in both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Then they migrated steadily west for a couple of generations through Kentucky and Alabama. They arrived in Texas in time to fight with Sam Houston at San Jacinto in 1836. Several of them died in Indian fights and buffalo hunts. They were rugged folk, mostly farmers and frontiersmen. After escaping from Santa Anna’s army in the Runaway Scrape they obtained land grants from both Mexico and the new Republic of Texas. By the mid 1800’s they had settled in north of Austin and my great great great great grandfather, John Berry dammed a spring creek and established a grist mill. People came from miles around to have their corn and wheat milled into flour. Today the old millstone sits on the Georgetown Courthouse lawn with a bronze plaque on it commemorating the Berry family.

John Berry’s daughter Hannah married Moses Hughes and when Hannah Berry Hughes got ‘dropsy’ which is what they called general ailments of the liver in those days, they followed an indian legend and found the sulphur springs about fifty miles into indian country where she drank the waters. Her health improved enough for her to eventually bear twelve children and since she was the first white woman to be cured by the spring, it was named after her, Hannah Spring. Moses Hughes, like his father-in-law, John Berry, dammed the spring creek and established a grist mill. They were the first Anglo family in the town of Lampasas which grew around the healing spring. I drank the clear cold water from that spring when I was a child. I learned to swim in the water from it which was so cold that your lips and fingernails turned blue. I went fishing in the mill pool that Moses built. By then it was filled with ancient moss and catfish bigger than some imported cars. My grandfather helped to build the golf course that now straddles the banks of Sulphur Creek and the waters of Hannah Spring fill a modern swimming pool.

Springs made my family’s survival possible, those gifts of Nature, fresh clean water bubbling straight from the ground. When I was around ten years old I remember marveling at the spring. By this time a pipe had been placed in its mouth and the water bubbled up from the middle of a little concrete pool that had been constructed to keep the water pure and clean. The pool was in the shape of a keyhole and I would lie belly down on the warm concrete slab and watch the icy water flow from the heart of the earth. I would put my face in the churning pool and drink what had fallen as rain centuries before. It had a soft taste and a texture that made it feel almost thick and nutritious. It tasted like time in liquid form steeped through the Great Plains, a rich tea of buffalo hooves and indian flint dripped slowly through the capillaries of the Ogallala Aquifer which runs all the plumbing in the Hill Country. That taste in my memory has made me suspicious of self-proclaimed spring water that comes out of a plastic bottle. I don’t care how exotic and enchanting the label is, it doesn’t taste the same as the water from Hannah Spring. I don’t know if it cured me of anything but I’ve always been pretty healthy. Maybe I should drag my old liver down there and have a sip of that water for my dropsy.

So, when you are updating your book (I can’t ever remember the name of that one) on Texas mineral springs, you might take a look at Hannah Spring in Lampasas.

toots

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Clay,

Thank you so much for that amazing true story. I am here at my current temp job at United Way, helping to raise dinero for good causes. We’ll be going out to companies and giving speeches, so I’ll get to indulge my fetish for standing up in fronta strangers and running my trap.

Oddly enough, just last night I got an email from a lady in Lampasas asking me to send her material about my public palavering for a program their local library puts on. I was in contact with this woman a lot last year when I was researching a medicine man who was based in Lampasas County last part of 19th century.

I do have some info on Lampasas in my 1991 book Crazy Water — the Story of Mineral Wells and Other Texas Health Resorts. But it barely scratches the surface of the whole story, and I woulda loved to have your reminiscence about sipping the sauce at age 10.

I have a buncha geneaological stuff my mother and father did on their sides of the family, but I too have never been much of a digger into all that, though it’s interesting for sure. It sounds like Sativa’s husband dug up a lotta fascinating info on your ancestral haunters. Maybe one a these days I’ll get to poking more into mine. I did research a story about an ancestor who was tried as an accomplice in a famous double murder case (Fort Worth and Amarillo) right before WW Two.

G
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Yeah, I was hoping to find some outlaws in my lineage but there either weren’t many or else they didn’t get any press. I feel like there must have been some outlaws somewhere because the larceny in my heart seems so congenital. Oh well, at least my dad played one on TV. Meanwhile, on the other side of the family, my sister Christye is even blinder than I am but one thing she has been doing is to research our family on the web. The reason we are going blind is because cataracts like people with blue eyes. So, it was a bit of a surprise to find out that we are about a quarter Jewish. It’s on my great-grandmother’s side (my mom’s grandmother.) This was not completely surprising to me, however, because for some reason I have always thought that there must be a yid in the woodpile somewhere. My first Jewish friend in school was Barry Goldblatt. I always had this strange kinship with him like he was my brother. There has never been a hint of Jewish culture or religion in our family. We were raised as Methodists. But for some reason I read all of Leon Uris’ books and I’ve always been fascinated by the saga of the Jews. Maybe I’m related to Woody Allen…haha!

But from looking rearward down the genetic spiral I suddenly go to looking forward. Sativa is going to have twins I am told. Their science project has yielded results. Ba-da boom, and the beat goes on.

toots