Legends Worth Remembering
Keene Star Reporter, December 19, 1996
Why Adventists Came to Johnson County
You know, Texas is a very interesting place to live, and Texans are
very
interesting people. One man said that when the Creator made the earth
and said
it was "very good," He must have had Texas in mind. Another man said
when
God created the earth He had same leftovers and that's what He made
Texas out
of.
The Indians thought Texas was a very
beautiful place, and that's what the name means-beautiful. If you look
at Johnson County through the eyes of the Indians, before the county was
organized, it was beautiful. From Caddo Peak the Indian could see 25-40
miles in any direction, into Tarrant County, Dallas County, Ellis County
and Bosque County The antelope, wild turkey, and mustang ponies lived
here. Buffalo watered at a spring in what is now Cleburne's West Buffalo
Creek. Native prairie grasses grew four to six feet tall.
When the hard headed, hard working Seventh-day Adventists of Texas
decided
to build a school, they looked at several places in the state. Some
pieces of
land were available to them at no cost, but they chose instead to
purchase land
in the cross timbers of Johnson County, counting that this was the very
best
place in Texas to establish a school. You wonder what attracted them to
this
hill of rock and clay and scrub oak and greenbriers.
Why did they think so highly of Johnson County?
By 1892, which is the date when Adventists
purchased this land, there were many people discovering that Johnson
County was an ideal place to live. First, it had excellent
transportation.
In 1892 Cleburne had 5,000 people, a
railway payroll of $35,000 per month, the end of four railway divisions,
roundhouse, machine shops, and foundry. There was an abundance of
industry. Cleburne had an electric-light plant, a system of water works,
a flower mill and an ice factory.
Second, the county was highly agricultural. In fact, Johnson County
had
already proven that a farmer could get rich. Prime example was Mr. A.D.
Kennard,
near Sand Flat, who had a habit of netting $8,000 per year on a 361 acre
farm,
by raising wheat, cotton, sorghum, bees, horses and mules, cattle and
pigs. This
money did not count what he raised to feed his animals, or his family.
Back then, the land was very fertile. In
Egan, in 1862, you to reach up to pick cotton, rather than bending over.
The Eastern half of the county was very fertile farming land, cotton was
a popular crop, and the Adventists kept their eye on that cotton. There
would be students in the school who needed to work to pay their school
bills, and many of those early students picked cotton around Alvarado.
In fact, for the first few years, school didn't start until November,
when the cotton harvest was completed. In the early 1890's Cleburne
handled 15,000 bales of cotton annually. Adventist's believed in
agriculture, and developed their own farm and grade-A dairy here in
Keene.
But Adventists didn't settle in the black dirt. They settled in
the
cross-timbers, a 12-mile-wide strip of trees that runs north and
south through the county. Why? Theory was that any land that
would
grow trees would also grow crops. It was learned that cleared land was
especially good for gardening, and to run a large school you need a very
large
garden. So they bought land that needed to be cleared. And clearing the
land
gave the boys something to do with all their excess energy. Adventists
believed
in the Protestant Work Ethic. And Johnson County provided the best
conditions in
the state for that to take place.
Finally, Johnson County had 41 school
districts, a high school, a finishing school for girls, a conservatory
of music and many church buildings in 1892. Having been settled by a lot
of good Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Cumberland
Presbyterians, it was a dry county. It was a good place for Adventists
to raise their families, and to sell their books and to share their
faith.
We do not want to lose touch with our heritage. The SWAU Museum of
Student
Life is doing quite a lot of work to preserve this heritage. We have
enough
broom making equipment to set up a factory. We have displays of items
made in
our chenille factory; and we have representations from our woodworking
shops,
our farm, our print shops, our other industries. We have a display to
remind
people that Keene once had a 40-bed hospital, shortly after the turn of
the
century.
We have incredible home movie footage from
the 1930s and 4Os, along with photos and artifacts that show today's
students what life was like back in the olden days when life was simple.
