Texas History Notebook

Fort Bend

The area around Brazoria and Fort Bend counties first had Anglo-American settlers in the early 1820s, associated with the colonists of Moses and Stephen F. Austin. According to a newspaper article from 1946 in the Freeport Facts, Freeport, Texas, they included the family of Capt. Randall Jones who landed at the mouth of the Brazos on December 23, 1821 in a schooner named “Lively” and brought their possessions upstream near a promising bend in the river near the current town of Richmond. The settlement was called Fort Settlement or Fort Bend. Jones was joined by about fifty other families in that immediate area. If there was an actual structure that gave its name to the Fort Bend area, it was most likely a simple shanty or cabin, rather than a more traditional military style-fort. The historic location of such a building does not appear to be precisely known.

Tex Schramm

Texas Earnest Schramm, Jr. was born in 1920 in San Gabriel, California. His father was named Texas Ernst Schramm and his mother was Elsa J. Steinwender Schramm. Tex’s father later adopted the spelling Earnest for his middle name, but at birth his father had shared the middle name Ernst with four of his siblings. Tex’s grandfather, Edgar Ernst Schramm had come to the United States from Germany and his grandmother, the former “Tony” Benner, was born in New Braunfels. The Benners had been long time Texas residents, as Tex’s grandmother Benner’s family had had arrived in the 1800s. His Schramm grandparents had resided in San Antonio for many years. Tex’s father had moved the family to California where Tex spent his early years, attending high school there. Tex attended University of Texas in Austin, graduating in 1947 with a degree in journalism, after serving in the United States Army Air Corps in World War II.

Caro Crawford Brown

Thirteen women were inducted into the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame on September 18, 1986. They included astronaut Sally Ride, women’s basketball coach Jody Conradt, business executive Mary Kay Ash, former ambassador Anne Armstrong, rancher Mary Lavinia Griffith, educator and civic leader Ada Simond, educator Wilhelmina Delco, pathologist May Owen, attorney Hermine Dalkowitz Tobolowsky, publishing editor Margaret Cousins, civic volunteers Alicia R. Chacon and Frances E. Goff and journalist Caro Crawford Brown.

Herbert Gibson

Before there were the nationwide chain stores like Kmart, Target, Wal-Mart and various others, there was a chain of stores known as Gibson’s Discount Centers. Gibson’s was founded by Herbert R. and Belva Gibson. The couple exemplified an American dream of starting small and building a national business.

Gordon McLendon

Gordon Barton McLendon was born June 8, 1921 in Paris, Texas to Barton Robert and Jeanette Marie Eyster McLendon. A week after Gordon was born, there was a birth announcement in an Oklahoma newspaper about Gordon, stating that his father was visiting his newborn son and wife from Idabel, Oklahoma where he was working. We also know that Gordon’s grandfather, Jefferson Davis McLendon was a lawyer and judge living there in Idabel at the time. A few months later, there was another short article in the local Idabel newspaper saying that Gordon was with his mother in California and that his father was visiting them while Gordon had been taken ill. By 1930 when the federal census was taken, Barton was practicing law and the family was residing together in Idabel, Oklahoma.