The Grand Tour Read Online Free

Saratoga. Other settlements grew, including Kountze, Thicket, and Sour Lake. The oil fields did in the springs, and the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad ran a branch into Saratoga to service the lumber and oil activities.
    The town was laid out with three sections reflecting the community’s phases of growth. Old Town was adjacent to the site of the springs; New Saratoga adjoined the oil fields that came next. Depot Town sat near the railroad station. By the time of the Depression, however, the oil fields were largely tapped out and the lumber industry had drastically diminished the Thicket. A 1936 survey found it covered no more than a million acres. Conservationists viewed it as a laboratory for biodiversity worth preserving before it disappeared, an effort that increased after World War II. To protect what remained, President Gerald Ford signed legislation creating the Big Thicket National Preserve, administered by the National Park Service, in 1974.
    George Washington Jones had Alabama roots. His ancestors had left there for Texas in the first half of the nineteenth century. Frank Jones, his grandfather, had been a Confederate officer whose son, David Raleigh Jones, born in Nacogdoches in 1872, married Mississippi native Mary Elizabeth Farris, a tough, volatile woman who enjoyed a drink or two and whose family had a reputation for hard living. The couple had separated by the time of George Washington Jones’s birth in Lufkin, Texas, on January 10, 1895. Living with his mother and her family, he grew into a tall, strong man who enjoyed the bottle, played the harmonica, and danced, but also possessed a powerful work ethic that never left him.
    Clara Patterson’s ancestors also hailed from out of state. Her mother, Martha, was born in Mississippi before her family moved west and settled in the Thicket. Her Florida-born father, Jepton Littleton Patterson, known as Uncle Litt, was a deeply religious farmer. He not only imparted his fundamentalist spirituality to his fourteen children—twelve daughters and two sons—he also constructed a church on his property. Clara, the couple’s seventh child, was born in Nona, Texas, on March 10, 1896. Her love of family and religion were seamless. As she matured, she became a fine singer and formidable organist, the last young woman one would think would fall for someone like George Washington Jones.
    When they met in the tiny settlement of Thicket, Texas, northwest of Saratoga, each found much to like about the other, leading to a move totally out of character for Clara. The couple secretly married on August 14, 1915. Clara’s father, well aware that his new son-in-law was part of the rowdy Farris clan, was not happy. The couple settled in the Thicket, moving from rented house to rented house through the region over the next twenty-five years. They both realized mere survival required backbreaking labor in the thick, hot, piney woods and taking whatever work could be found.
    The census of 1920 revealed George Washington Jones, twenty-four, and Clara Patterson Jones, twenty-three, renting a home in Hardin County, in the middle of the Thicket. They had one child, Ethel, born in 1918. George’s listed occupation was “teamster,” connected to the local logging industry. The couple and their expanding family scraped out a living through sheer determination. George did whatever he could to provide for the family, delivering and selling ice and whatever else brought in money. When the oil fields tapped out, his specialty became carving and shaping the wooden slats, or staves, that make up barrels. He didn’t come about the lumber honestly, raiding the nearby forests for the right wood. They grew their own food, and Clara’s frontier-era approach made use of everything she had available. When a hog was butchered, she combined the fat with lye to make soap for a family that was growing fast.
    Herman, their first son, was born in 1921, followed by