Egg-citement! Civil war vet's home, museum collections spawn controversy
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By HUDSON OLD
Journal Publisher
With less than a week before the arrival of two botanists from Illinois, the state ornithologist, several naturalists, an entomologist, three friends of the botanical research institute of Texas, one of two acarologists on earth, a hundred or so members of the Kirk clan and perhaps the nation's most celebrated oological team, the Bankhead Highway Trails and Visitor Center restoration committee found itself immersed in rare and bitter quarrel. These are genteel people.
Passion swelled, then burst into flame, argument punctuated with emotionally charged exchanges as restoration committee members struggled with interior paint color selections at the Thruston Home, a quarter million dollar restoration of the final home of the Confederacy's tallest soldier.
That was a Friday.
By the time of the Franklin County Historical Association's (FCHA) Monday evening covered dish dinner, the last meeting before national media would arrive with the swarms of naturalists, wounds had festered. There were noticeable absences.
Yet shortly, challenge to the abilities of the good people united them.
Who could have known that a truly random moment from the last century would steamroll in a matter of days through events in which citizens felt mocked by one of the state's largest dailies and further betrayed by the research scientists coming to town by invitation?
"They made us sound like hicks," fumed Lynn Radican, referring to a Houston Chronicle account expressing doubts about the FCHA's ability to curate its own exhibits. "We take care of our business." Mt. Vernon Optic Herald publisher Pat Wright editorialized to that same effect.
It was 1991 and the FCHA was in the final stages of the first of its museum projects. Far away in time and space, an Ohio taxidermist named William Cleveland and his son began collecting bird eggs in the 1880's.
"Egg collecting was a fashionable hobby from the mid-19th century into the 1940's," reported the Los Angeles Times in a story billing a California repository as one of the best on the globe. "People bought and traded eggs like baseball cards. Magazines catered to collectors, and oology, or the study of eggs, was popular."
In the 1920's, Mr. Cleveland moved to Texas. He brought his eggs.
He died.
Eight years later his daughter, Ruby Cleveland Rockwell, sold the collection of 220 eggs to A.W. Nations.
He died.
It happened that his son, Matt, lived in Georgetown and was a friend of Mt. Vernon native Lou McCorkle.
Heir to the eggs, he learned from Lou about the FCHA's new museum. He donated the collection, along with his father's butterflies, to the historical association in his friend's home town.
Among the egg specimens, as everybody here knew (as opposed to the Houston Chronicle report) were priceless eggs of two extinct species - the Passenger Pigeon and the Carolina Parakeet. (Subsequently, an egg of the likewise extinct Heath Hen has been newly discovered in the collection.)
Years passed.
Texas Parks and Wildlife Ornithologist Clifford E. Shackelford learned of the egg collection.
He contacted the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, the Camarillo, California facility that inspired the LA Times feature.
"We immediately made plans to view the collection," said Dr. Linnea S. Hall, foundation director.
In the way that events shape visions, with the arrival of the butterfly and egg collections, the FCHA's original idea of a local history museum evolved.
"Rather than the narrow and traditional focus on rural history, we seized the opportunity to rotate natural history exhibits through our facilities," said local attorney B.F. Hicks, friend (and cousin) to Mrs. McCorkle.
It was a twist that changed things.
In addition to what's swelled to something over a million dollar investment in five museum locations, a group of local land owners has teamed with the Nature Conservancy, pledging to leave undisturbed one of the last remaining natural prairies. Just north of town, researchers and naturalists now come to study the flora and fauna of Daphne Prairie.
At the Bankhead Highway Trails and Visitor Center, Eagle Scouts Cody Wooden, Walter Vanderlaar, Ryan Dillard, Robert Moore, Tim Folk, and Derrik Hendrix constructed a nature trail winding over 57 acres donated to the FCHA by Mary Dupree Scovell.
At the Labor Day dedication of the Thruston home, Mrs. Scovell said things have changed since the days her father bought the small farm. Graduating SMU in 33, she returned only briefly before marrying and moving away.
"I meet people here now and they say, 'Oh, well I'm from Dallas, or Austin, or some other place. We live on the lake.' There wasn't a lake," she said, remembering other days.
The land once a part of her father had become, over the years, little more than a tax burden, its value insignificant compared to Counselor Hicks' eloquent request for its donation to a community envisioning it as a nature preserve alongside the new visitor's center. She passed the decision on to her children.
The visitor's center next door occupies the final home of Civil War Veteran H.C. Thruston. Known throughout the Old South as "Colonel" Thruston, the available historical record indicates he never rose above the rank of private after enlisting with Missouri's Morgan County Rangers in the Spring of 1861.
His fame was based on the fact that he stood 7 feet, 7 ½ inches according to the story as told in an aging copy of the Confederate Veteran.
According to the July, 1911 obituary that Mr. Hicks supplied offices of government in his application for a "federal transportation enhancement grant" of $272,000, Colonel Thruston was in the home's kitchen, having just buttered a biscuit "when the death blow fell upon him and his heart ceased to beat."
As for how his final home's restoration might relate to transportation, Mr. Hicks pointed out that the structure, last used for hay storage, faces the Old Bankhead Highway which in 1916 was designated by the U.S. Congress as the first transcontinental highway route.
Maybe not an easy line of logic to deliver with a straight face, but years of training as a practicing attorney make it possible.
"I remember when it was a gravel road," said J.W. Wallace, who lives across the old highway from the Thruston home. It's been 50 years since the Cooper native traveled this route, collecting milk from mom and pop dairies. Labor Day, he sat on the porch with his wife Joyce, watching as the Sons of the Confederacy, armed with a cannon, gathered in full battle regalia to honor Colonel Thruston on the occasion of his home's dedication as the FCHA's new visitor's center.
FCHA VP J.D. Baumgardner, who organized the day, served as master of ceremonies. Texas United Daughters of Confederate Veterans member Marilyn Bolding led a rousing chorus of "Dixie" before FCHA President Ron Milton welcomed the crowd.
U.S. Army Chaplin Bob Walker, Rt. gave the invocation before scouts posted the colors and led the pledge.
County Judge Gerald Hubbell, a former FBI agent who is the first Republican to hold the county's highest office since Reconstruction (he's not from here, but his bride is and they've retired out on the lake), Mayor Darwin McGill and Camp 441 Sons of Confederate Veterans Adjudant Dr. William Hayden all spoke. Mom and daughter Sue and Camma Morgan sang "God Bless America" before Captain Don Majors of the James P.Douglas Confederate Camp 124 announced the benediction.
The three reigning Miss Mt. Vernons (age divisions) cut the ribbon, a trolley ferried people between the town square and the visitor's center, and most everybody went to eat $1,600 worth of barbecue (leftovers were sent to the senior citizens meal center) under the nature trail pavilion while Jean Ann Marshall and Sally and Bob Ford (all retiree lake residents and FCHA volunteers) attended the register, provided tours of the home, and sold Jean Ann's canned goods out of a kitchen cupboard (fund raiser.)
A couple of weeks had passed since the oologists came. With the prize egg collection on display in Mr. Hicks' law library, ologists of all sorts gathered around a conference table. There they were joined by National Public Radio Dallas Correspondent Wade Goodwin, Houston Chronicle Environmental Writer Dina Cappiello, Mt. Vernon Optic Herald editor Lillie Bush-Reves, photographer Jerry W. Hoefer (special to the Chronicle) and a crowding group of naturalists.
I was there, too, and there were moments you could have heard a pin drop as Rene Corado, collections manager for the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, performed tedious examination.
Small words of affirmation broke the quiet, an almost tangible air of fractious opinion swelled quickly as whispers rippled through the gathering. It seemed that both eggs were authentic meaning the FCHA has become one of only 13 known curators of the Carolina Parakeet egg.
Reports now vary as to who said what and when, and for one, Mr. Hicks says that he has not erased the state ornithologist's telephoned message flatly denying the Chronicle charge that he believes the egg collection should be turned over to the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology.
Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, this helped put the divisive issue of interior paint selection for the Thruston house in perspective. At the dedication, everybody seemed happy with the decision to leave the dull luster of aging wood unfinished in parts of the home, while duplicating by computer match the hue of the earliest flecked hints of various colors revealed as walls were prepared.
And though the rift drew an intellectual line in the sand, there were fine moments that weekend.
That evening all joined Mr. Hicks' covered dish cocktail hour at the old high school band hall that serves as his residence. Scientists unpacked at the adjacent Old Church Inn, once the town's Methodist church, transformed by Mr. Hicks into an eclectic collection of native American artifacts, rural Americana and art - the sanctuary pews still face the pianos on stage, where troubadours not infrequently perform.
As dusk settled over a cocktail hour during which Dr. Debbie Porter wandered the party, serenading with lyric and dulcimer, the assemblage of ologists and naturalists along with their local hosts piled into a caravan led by Dr. Shackelford out onto Daphne Prairie and beyond, to the summer evening thickness of damp air in White Oak Creek bottom.
Admonishing the group to complete silence as stars emerged above the forest canopy, Dr. Shackelford signaled halt deep in the woods. Filling his lungs, cupping a hand to his mouth, he unleashed the call of the Barred Owl. His cry pierced the thickening darkness; at length he hooted again, then a third time before the first of the nocturnal Raptores returned his call of territorial challenge!
A primal stage set, the group moved on, drawing to the bank of White Oak Creek. Hours earlier with help from Austin College biology student Ryan Dillard, setting up artificial lights as his lure, entomologist Will Godwin set up traps in preparation for the capture, study and release of indigenous insects.
Morning brought tours of the town's museums before the California scientists, naturalists and assorted ologists joined a covered dish luncheon at the depot, organized for the fifty second annual Kirk family reunion.
Following lunch, Dr. Hall and Mr. Corado were assigned to table 7 in the Kirk decedents annual Trivia Bowl while Amanda Neil, botanist with the Botanical Research Institute of Texas passed out to all tickets for door prize drawings.
Fittingly, they sat alongside the old Hicks family covered wagon, one of the depot's rural heritage exhibits.
Invited, but electing to pass on activities beyond the egg examination, Ms.Cappiello penned her Houston Chronicle report as a study of mercenary tourism vs the academic purity of science.
"For years, Mount Vernon has been selling its history and bucolic setting to lure Dallas-Fort Worth urbanites 100 miles east. Now, the town is on the verge of marketing itself as the next best place to experience nature -- and the eggs are part of the pitch," she wrote. And, "Scientists recommended the eggs be turned over to a facility that can preserve them properly - a proposition that now pits small town pride and tourism dollars up against the eggs' value for scientific research."
(Among other things, the eggs could be very accurately measured, scientists at the cocktail party said.)
It's a sad thing, when you consider it. Trust me on this -- the devil giggles when like-minded people of true hearts are pulled apart.
Maybe they can get over it, kind of like the Thruston House restoration committee got over it about the paint.