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Despite the odds of Indian raids, the Civil War, and one man's feud, Weatherford began as a small frontier settlement in the mid-1800s, and quickly grew into a bustling West Texas county seat known for its Victorian beauty, home-grown peaches, and small-town charm. Images of courthouse construction and early pioneering families are among the first glimpses into Weatherford's fascinating history. Other highlights include the development of downtown, forgotten changes to the square, the first city rodeo grounds, photos of the Queen of England sitting for her coronation portrait, as well as rare shots of some of the city's more famous past residents, Larry Hagman and his mother, Mary Martin, and Comanche Chief Quanah Parker. Additional scenes of schools, streets, politics, firemen, parks, hospitals, and residents provide an entertaining and educational illustration of the city's past.
The early years of Weatherford yield stories of trials and triumphs as a rowdy frontier town that matured and became known as the "City of Churches" and the "City Beautiful." Created in 1856 as the county seat of newly formed Parker County, Weatherford was lush with grasslands, timber, and fertile soils. In 1858, the two-story brick courthouse was surrounded by log cabins, frame buildings, and tents. For nearly two decades, the town was the principal supply center for points west and a safe haven for settlers seeking refuge from Indian raids. Stalwart men and women nurtured the development of religious, educational, and cultural refinements. But when the Texas & Pacific Railway arrived in 1880, it spurred Weatherford's stature as an agricultural, banking, and commercial center and opened national markets to local cotton and prize-winning watermelons. The historic City Beautiful is still evident today in Weatherford's picturesque courthouse square and quaint tree-lined residential districts.
The Civil War hardly scratched the Confederate state of Texas. Thousands of Texans died on battlefields hundreds of miles to the east, of course, but the war did not destroy Texas's farms or plantations or her few miles of railroads. Although unchallenged from without, Confederate Texans faced challenges from within—from fellow Texans who opposed their cause. Dissension sprang from a multitude of seeds. It emerged from prewar political and ethnic differences; it surfaced after wartime hardships and potential danger wore down the resistance of less-than-enthusiastic rebels; it flourished, as some reaped huge profits from the bizarre war economy of Texas. Texas Divided is neither the history of the Civil War in Texas, nor of secession or Reconstruction. Rather, it is the history of men dealing with the sometimes fragmented southern society in which they lived—some fighting to change it, others to preserve it—and an examination of the lines that divided Texas and Texans during the sectional conflict of the nineteenth century.
Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press During the decades from 1820 to 1870, the American frontier expanded two thousand miles across the trans-Mississippi West. In Texas the frontier line expanded only about two hundred miles. The supposedly irresistible European force met nearly immovable Native American resistance, sparking a brutal struggle for possession of Texas’s hills and prairies that continued for decades. During the 1860s, however, the bloodiest decade in the western Indian wars, there were no large-scale battles in Texas between the army and the Indians. Instead, the targets of the Comanches, the Kiowas, and the Apaches were generally the homesteaders out on the Texas frontier, that is, precisely those who should have been on the sidelines. Ironically, it was these noncombatants who bore the brunt of the warfare, suffering far greater losses than the soldiers supposedly there to protect them. It is this story that The Settlers’ War tells for the first time.