Fishermen launch new opportunity for nation's largest utility to develop Welsh generating facility reservoir

An Arlington-based bass club has nudged the largest utility company in the U.S. toward environmental opportunity in Titus County where its Welsh Power Plant owns 3,000 acres of wooded wilderness including one of Texas premier bass fishing lakes.

Embarrassing but important. Each winter, Titus County's Welsh Lake draws thousands of bass fishermen - nature tourists, in chamber of commerce terms. The lake is owned by American Electric Power, the largest generating company in America. In other places, the company maintains parks, wildlife and nature preserves. Here, the condition of the only public access to the lake caused Metroplex visitors to hatch an Internet plan to clean it up. The good news is, their campaign caused AEP-SWEPCO Welsh Power Plant Manager Jim Trimble to cut in, getting ahead of the game. Local fishing guide Bill Ocker worked behind the scene pulling together resources including county government, the state highway department, chamber officials, fishermen, area residents and company employees supporting a fresh start for public access at Lake Welsh.

"I couldn't have been more surprised if Tarzan had come swinging from the trees," Bill Ocker said after company personnel led by Tony Clements beat the Cast-A-Way Bass Club to the punch, starting a clean-up at Lake Welsh. A professional fishing guide, Mr. Ocker lives near the shore of the lake where he caught a 15-plus pound bass that set a new state record in 1983. The bass club scheduled a clean-up day after a fishermen's Internet chat room launched discussion generating in excess of 200 postings about the "dump" provided as the lake's only public access.

The 1,300-acre lake follows the meandering channel of Swanno Creek, where archeological reports written in advance of construction of the 1,650 megawatt generating facility documented Titus County's earliest Anglo settlers.

"The region was heavily occupied during prehistoric times and was the first white settlement locale in Titus County," reads the report produced in the 1970's by Southwestern Electric Power Company (SWEPCO,) now a subsidiary of Ohio-based American Electric Power (AEP.) "An abundance of aboriginal and pioneer sites, ranging from 500 B.C. to the early 1900's await investigation in this area."

Married to an Indian woman, native Georgian Kendall Lewis settled on Swanno, a Caddo Indian word meaning "good water," the report says. About 150 years later, the creek was dammed to create a cooling reservoir for the Welsh Power Plant.

"It's a beautiful lake," said Franklin County fisherman Harold Buck. "The protected coves make it a great place to fish."

The week before coming back to work, Lake Welsh bass put smiles on Cast-A-Way Bass Club 2005 incoming President Dan Dickey (right) and Treasurer Randy Maxwell. A winter morning's sun-kissed mist shrouds the brooding beauty of the warm waters of Lake Welsh, one of Texas' premier fishing lakes. In a trade-off that could enhance the flow of incoming anglers and nature tourism dollars to Titus County, an Arlington-based fishing club's initiative to clean up the lake shore to better accommodate outdoorsmen could also increase fishing pressure at the "undiscovered" lake on Swanno Creek.

"It's God's country," said Randy Maxwell, a MetroMess warehouse manager and one of the Cast-A-Way volunteers who could only smile at his second thoughts after more volunteers from the Mt. Pleasant chamber, the lake Welsh neighborhood and county government pitched in to mow, work rutted roads, sack trash, and clean up an illegal dump. Welsh Plant Manager Jim Trimble joined in, cutting and stacking brush.

"Once we get it all cleaned up, everybody's gonna come," Mr. Maxwell said.

That additional fishing pressure wouldn't bother Chamber Executive Director Pat Carr in the least.

With access to Lake Bob Sandlin and TXU Generating's Monticello Lake drawing tournament fishing traffic as well as individual anglers, the brooding beauty of Lake Welsh is just one more lure to bass fishermen generating seasonal tourist trade.

From first to last frost, before each day dawns, sportsmen launch into the shroud of fog hovering over the warm waters of Lake Welsh, where the clean up started after Cast-A-Way President Bob Smith drove down to check it out in advance of a January tournament.

With low-fare tournament entree fees and as much comradery as competition, members of the Arlington-based Cast-A-Way Bass Club sometimes refer to themselves as "The family." The week after their annual tournament at Lake Welsh, some members returned, endearing themselves as to the local chamber's tourism committee by pulling together an Internet campaign to clean up the lake's public access area, provided by AEP SWEPCO's Titus County plant.

"Most of the fish we catch are released," said Mr. Smith, whose chat-room lament about the boat ramp turned into a cyber-space initiative in keeping with Cast-A-Way members' respect for the natural world. Fish handled by club members go into live wells treated with fungicides and get a pre-emptive dose of antibiotic wash before being returned to the lake.

"That 'slime' you feel when you handle a fish is really a protective coating," Mr. Smith said. "It's impossible to handle a fish without disturbing it. When we put a fish back in the lake, we want it to be healthy."

It's care in keeping with AEP wildlife, forestry and and environmental stewardship programs around the world. Beyond corporate environmental programs, AEP works with outdoor clubs, nature societies, national, state and local governments to share its lands with the growing base of "nature" tourists.

More details about AEP's restoration and preservation of wild lands and wildlife habitats in Bolivia, Brazil and Louisiana's Catahoula National Wildlife Refuge are at the company web site, www.aep.com.

In southeastern Ohio, the company's 30,000-acre "ReCreation Land" includes 380 campsites free for public use.

The company worked hand-in-hand with the Central Ohio Mountain Bike organization to develop a biking trail, a web-site story told by the company's Ohio-based recreation programs coordinator, whose office worked with the club in setting up the first cross-country race.

Another 7,000 acres of company land are open for public hunting through a program coordinated through the Ohio state wildlife offices.

Here, nearly 2,000 acres of company land rise from the remnant of Swanno Valley, where today the fingers of Lake Welsh follow the channels of the old creek's spring-fed tributaries into sheltered coves ringed by stands of native hardwood forests, commercial pine and grasslands.

Largely uncleared, the flooded floor of hardwood forests and transmission lines limit sailing and pleasure boating, but create a haven for fish in Lake Welsh.

The clean up at Lake Welsh gave 9-year-old Metroplex dweller Matthew Dickey opportunity to work on woodsman skills as he helped clear boat-ramp right of way.

"We seldom fish this lake that we don't land a keeper," said Cast-A-Way Dan Dickey, an aerospace engineer sacking trash while third-grade son Matthew hacked with a hatchet through underbrush around the parking area. There was more afoot here than a father's chance to demonstrate stewardship.

"Living in the city," he said, pausing to watch his son, "he doesn't get the chance to do things like this every day."

Likewise, it was local guide Bill Ocker's chance visit to the Texas Fishing Forum chat room that launched new vision for AEP's unkempt access to Lake Welsh.

"Bill Ocker's been all over this thing," club President Smith said.

Contacting Titus County Commissioner Thomas Hockaday, Mr. Ocker got the state to give up stock-piled iron ore for the county to make repairs at the launch area. Signing the local chamber of commerce on, he next persuaded Nortex Rentals to furnish free portable toilets for the parking area, started hunting a dumpster and settled for trash barrels. The chamber linked with AEP's Ohio offices and within days Welsh Plant Manager Mr. Trimble unleashed manpower.

"I got a crew and we went to work," said 27-year Welsh employee Tony Clements, who in years past has enlisted volunteers to keep the ramp clean.

Arriving on the designated Saturday to find Mr. Clements and company had hauled three trailers of refuse from the parking area, Cast-A-Way members launched into a new project, cleaning road-bed right of way leading to the ramp.

Milking the most out of volunteers, Mt. Pleasant - Titus County Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Pat Carr, center, pulled strings to get Bodacious Barbecue to provide lunch for the clean-up crew blending Metroplex fishing club members, chamber volunteers, neighborhood residents and the Welsh Power Plant's high command. From left are: Randy Maxwell, Matthew Dickey, AEP SWEPCO's Jim Trimble, Bill Ocker, Bob Smith, Ms. Carr, Dan Dickey and chamber employee Joyce Simpson.

Having the plant manager's ear, President Smith pitched an angler-conceived plan for a connecting link that would create a smoother flow of traffic at the launching area.

As for understanding the potential for use of AEP's Titus County assets, the fishermen could have been preaching to the choir when talking with the plant manager.

A seasoned outdoorsman, Mr. Trimble is a past champion of The Texas Water Safari, a grueling 250-mile canoe race.

In his off time, Mr. Trimble can sometimes be found skimming across Lake Welsh.

Welsh Power Plant property today owned by America's largest electric utility was the Anglo pioneer cradle giving rise to the brief era of Southern Plantation life in Titus County, the roots of the family farm culture that dominated life here for a hundred years.

From the one remaining antebellum home cited in the study done in advance of the plant's construction, the story reaches through the bottleneck of written history to the seasonal camps of pre-historic man.

More than 2,000 years ago, one study concludes, the shores of Swanno Creek were camps of stone-age man, hunters and gatherers following a seasonal harvests of spring berries and autumn nuts. They hunted the hardwood forests and fished the creek's waters. For more than a thousand years, the Caddo Indians lived as peaceful farmers and traders, establishing the splintered traces connecting their villages along the creek with Caddo villages ranging to the southwest near Alto, where the Angelina flows through Cherokee County, to the southeast to their settlements on Caddo Lake, and northward beyond the banks of the Red, where their story of origin says their people came up from the earth.

The Indian lands along Swanno Creek became the stage for Anglo settlement reaching back before the Texas revolution.

Pioneer, statesman, fugitive, friend to Sam Houston and Indian Agent Kendall Lewis, who made a home on Swanno Creek, claimed to have been the first Anglo settler between the Sulphur and Cypress Rivers, wrote historian Traylor Russell in Pioneers and Heros of Titus County. A Maryland native born in 1781, Mr. Lewis descended from Scots who by 1795 had moved to the Georgia frontier where the story brushes with legendary tales of his growing up among the Creek Indians. In 1805, when the Creeks were pushed out of Georgia, he went with them.

"In the summer of 1808 he returned to Hancock County, Georgia to visit with his family," Mr. Russell wrote. "He had lived so long with the Indians that he had acquired their manner of dress and wore his hair in long Indian fashion. On July 2, he was walking down the street when he passed a group of men sitting in chairs in front of a store."

Expressing his disgust, a man named Edward Denton spit on him.

"This act cost Denton his life," Mr. Russell wrote.

Lewis beat him to death with a chair and fled.

Citizens petitioned the governor to issue a warrant for his arrest. He was described as a small man of slender build with black hair and eyes, missing two fingers on his right hand.

They never got him.

Mr. Lewis took an Indian wife and he first met Sam Houston in the 1812-13 war between the Creeks and the Seminoles. The U.S. came into the war on the side of the Creeks and both men served under Andrew Jackson.

In 1828, Mr. Lewis took his family to Oklahoma; in 1835, two years after former Tennessee governor Sam Houston came to Texas, Kendall Lewis followed, settling in present Titus County on Swanno Creek a year before the spark of the Texas rebellion burst into the fire of the war for independence from Mexico.

Mr. Russell says Mr. Lewis settled on the Caddo Trace, the route of U.S. 49.

The utility company archeological study done in advance of the damming of Swanno Creek describes the same location, but calls the road the "Choctaw Trail."

The two names, says Franklin County researcher B.F. Hicks, reflect the road's origin as a Caddo route leading to Caddo Lake, where Mr. Lewis lived immediately prior to entering Texas, and its later use by the Choctaw, as America's expansion pushed them westward.

With Republic of Texas independence secured by his victory at San Jacinto, after being elected to the nation's presidency, Sam Houston made Mr. Lewis his agent to the Texas Republic's then-recognized Indian nations.

That the road by his home was of Caddo origin seems confirmed by his application to the Red River District Land Board for a league and labor of land beginning "at a stake in a small ridge of iron ore gravel, north of the Caddo Trace."

Sam Houston signed patents to Kendall Lewis conveying to him land on the west shore of "Swannano Creek."

In the 1840s, there was Indian trouble.

A man named Box was killed near Cypress Creek.

Sam Houston lost the presidency to Maribu Lamar, whose campaign platform contained an anti-Indian plank.

In 1841, eight members of the Ambrose Ripley family were killed in "The Ripley Massacre" on the western edge of the county.

Mr. Russell's narrative of Mr. Lewis says he was prone to be away for long periods of time and that after Anglos began arriving "he ruled his Indian followers with an iron hand . . . because he knew any crime committed against whites would bring on war.

What war there was came in 1841, when at the request of the Republic, American forces moved into East Texas to push the Indians north across the Red River.

His loyalties tied to the people who had become his own, Kendall and his wife "Kizzie" Lewis left with the Indians for sanctuary in Oklahoma's Indian territory.

Some 20 years later, their only child, Seaborn Lewis, enlisted during the Civil War in the First Regiment of Indian Home Guards Kansas Regiment.

He was discharged at Fort Gibson, Oklahoma May 31, 1865, and died the same year.

Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Muskogee, Oklahoma, say that Seaborn had been married, that his wife died in 1863, and that they had one child, Nancy, who died at the age of 9 in 1870.

"With her death," Mr. Russell wrote, "Kendall was left with no descendants."

According to the "Archeological Study of the Welsh Power Plant," (Maynard Cliff, Carol Carter, Linda Verrett, March, 1974) the Lewis home on Swanno creek was once "a flourishing trade center and inn for Choctaw, Caddo and traders traveling the Choctaw Trail."