towns – Page 5 – Texas History Notebook

La Reunion Community

This Day in Texas (Austin American, Austin, Texas, June 16, 1950)”

June 16 – “On this day in 1855 some 200 immigrants arrived to swell the population of the newly established colony of La Reunion on the west bank of the Trinity River, near present-day Dallas.

La Reunion had been founded by Victor Prosper Considerant, a wealthy Frenchman who was an ardent disciple of the outstanding 19th century Socialist, Charles Marie Fourier. The town was carefully built, rows of small houses around a small square. The government was like that of democratic Athens, by general assembly, and the only punishment ever imposed was banishment from the colony.

One of the first activities of the colony was to found a school of vocal music, and the strains of their songs floated across the river to where a grimmer breed of men and women was pursuing the rituals of everyday existence. In time, the La Reunion colonists joined them., for their lands had been poorly chosen, the farmers were unenthusiastic and the terrain was poorly drained. By 1856 the colonists were drifting away.

The Frenchmen never had sought to prevent their daughters from marrying American settlers across the river and the settlement was completely absorbed within a generation.”

Thurber, Texas

Thurber is located about seventy-five miles west of Fort Worth just into Erath County as you travel west out of Palo Pinto County. It is now only a collection a few building sites and foundations of others but once Thutber was a boom town of as many as eight to ten thousand people.

Adobe Walls

It is now a ghost town in Hutchinson County, far north in the Panhandle, but in the 1800s it was a community that briefly came together during what would be the latter days of buffalo hunting in north Texas. It is also the site of two battles between the mostly Anglo inhabitants and the native tribes that came together to try and eliminate them.

The Lubbock Brothers

Three brothers figure into the history of Texas. They are Thomas, Francis and Henry Lubbock. Colonel Thomas Saltus Lubbock is the brother for whom Lubbock county and the city of Lubbock is named. He was born in South Carolina in 1817 and came to Texas early enough to participate in the Siege of Bexar in late 1835. He was also a participant in the ill-fated Santa Fe Expedition in 1841. Thomas was captured in New Mexico while Texas troops were on their way to Santa Fe. He was taken to Mexico and imprisoned, but was one of two individuals to be able to escape. He later made his way back to Texas. When the Civil War broke out, he first served in an irregular unit comprised mostly of former Texas soldiers and Texas Rangers as scouts for the Confederate Army. He and some others later joined the Confederate Army and were founding members of “Terry’s Texas Rangers,” the 8th Texas Cavalry. Lubbock was promoted to Colonel and put in command of the regiment after the death of Benjamin Franklin Terry but happened to be ill with typhoid fever at the time. Thomas died the following day on January 9, 1862 before he could take command. He is buried in Glenwood Cemetery in Houston, Texas.

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Clinton McKamy Winkler

Clinton McKamy Winkler was a lawyer, judge and a member of the Texas Court of Appeals for many years. He was born in North Carolina in 1821 to David Tate and Lavinia Cates Owen Winkler. He moved with his family first to Indiana in 1835 for a few years before relocating to Texas in the early 1840s. They settled in what is now Robertson County to be near other Winkler relatives. The family was said to be descended from German immigrants, but his grandfather was born in North Carolina according to traditional genealogical sources. McKamy was also an old family name and many of these McKamy relatives were also residents of North Carolina.

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