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A
Moving History
Governor Bill & Vera Daniel Historic Villageby
Bob Bowman
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The
recent death of Bill Daniel of Liberty
removed from East Texas one of its most colorful personalities, a bigger-than-life
rancher and politician who, according to one of his eulogists, "squeezed a lot
out of life."
Daniel, who was 90 when he passed away, was a member of
a dynasty which produced Texas Governor and U.S. Senator Price Daniel, Bill's
brother. Bill himself became governor of the U.S. Territory of Guam in 1961 through
a presidential appointment by John F. Kennedy.
But Bill Daniel is best
remembered by some admirers for one of the strangest events in East Texas--the
move of an entire town from Liberty
to Waco, a distance
of more than 200 miles, in October of 1986 during the Texas sesquicentennial celebration.
Daniel and his family lived on historic Plantation Ranch. Over the years,
he acquired more than two dozen historic buildings around East Texas, restored
them and established a frontier village on the ranch.
In the l980s, Daniel
and his wife Vera donated the buildings, their furniture and artifacts to Baylor
University, where he graduated.
The caravan of forty moving companies from
six states, made up of nearly 100 vehicles, snaked its way across the East Texas
landscape through Palestine,
Mexia, Groesbeck
and dozens of smaller towns, seldom traveling more than 20 miles an hour.
Another caravan of nineteen truckloads of more than 8,000 artifacts and furniture
preceded the procession of buildings to a site near the Brazos River on the Baylor
campus.
The moving came with some restrictions from the Texas Highway
Department. No structure could be more than 18 feet tall, 24 feet and six inches
wide, or eighty feet long. Fortunately, the longest building in the village was
a livery stable measuring 74 feet. Visions of a quaint caravan of antique buildings
snaking across the landscape were dashed by another Highway Department regulation.
The two dozen buildings and their support vehicles had to be divided into five
separate caravans a mile apart, allowing for the passage of other vehicles on
the roads.
Among the transported buildings were a 300-year-old water wheel-operated
grist mill, a one-room schoolhouse, a town hall, a potato shed, a hide house where
animal hides were cured, a log house where slaves lived, and twenty-three horse-drawn
vehicles.
Larger buildings, such as the town hall and livery stable, had
to be separated from their roofs or altered to permit the move down the highways.
At the time, the move was believed to be the largest ever made for an entire village
in the United States.
The Daniels bought Plantation Ranch in 1949, becoming
the fourth owner. The ranch's founder was Aaron Cherry, Sr., who came to Texas
in 1818, made friends with the Coushatta Indians and built his plantation home
on a bluff overlooking the Trinity River. Cherry's friends included General Sam
Houston and Captain Hugh Blair Johnson, Daniel's great-great grandfather and the
first alcalde (mayor) of Liberty.
When the Daniels bought the ranch, it had reverted to a jungle. "There
were vines and brush growing even in the plantation house, the fences were down
and wild hogs ran everywhere," said Daniel in 1986.
Over the years, the
Daniels opened Plantation Ranch for special parties for crippled and handicapped
children, bringing in such stars as Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, Loretta Lynn and Hank
Williams to entertain.
Today, visitors to Waco
can see the village standing near the Strecker Museum. |
Governor
Bill & Vera Daniel Historic Village Mayborn
Museum Complex, Waco,
Texas
1108 university Parks D.
Mon.- Sat. 10 a.m.
254-710-1160.
Admission
Fee.
Waco
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August 7, 2006Column
Published
with permission
Distributed by the East Texas Historical Association. Bob
Bowman of Lufkin is a former president of the Association and the editor of more
than 30 books about East Texas. |
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