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The town of Chickenfeatherby
Bob Bowman | |
Except
for a rural cemetery, little is left of Chickenfeather in the once-rolling hills
of eastern Rusk County. Its distinctive name was long ago forgotten and its history
was compiled only from the remembrances of its former residents.
One of
those residents was John Wilson Lee, who came to Rusk County around 1901 after
hoboing his way on freight trains from the Illinois-Indiana area.
According
to an interview with Lee when he was in his declining years, a group of young
boys decided to go hunting one autumn night around 1910, but failed to bag any
game.
Late in the night, feeling hungry, they swiped a couple of chickens
from a farmer, built a fire behind New Hope Church, and roasted the chickens.
To hide the evidence of their theft, they tossed the chicken feathers and viscera
into a well where churchgoers and schoolchildren drew their water each day.
Contaminated with the chickens’ remains, the well had to be cleaned out and salted
to restore the water to drinkable quality. Thereafter, New Hope was better known
as Chickenfeather.
Lee, a native of Kansas, came to Texas
in 1899 and made his way to Timpson,
where he helped built the Blankenship Hotel as a skilled bricklayer. He also helped
build the First National Bank on Henderson’s
square around 1902.
Lee returned to the Chicago area later in 1899 to
marry his sweetheart. They moved to Whitewright,
Texas, in 1900 and a year later moved to the area around New Hope Church,
where Lee bought a 100-acre farm.
New Hope, which would later become
Chickenfeather, began as a community around 1901 when C.B. and Bonnie McLemore
donated land for the New Hope Community School and a church.
In the 1930s,
a preacher from Waco
often drove to the community, held services on Sunday, and received as his payment
a ham, a slab of bacon, buckets of homemade syrup, and a small amount of money.
Chickenfeather was soon applied to the road which ran through the community and,
as the years passed, the town acquired a blacksmith shop, whose owner, Wylie Lee,
was one of the first blacksmiths to use lignite coal in his forge. The lignite,
found in abundance in the area, would later lead to the end of the community.
In 1983, Texas Utilities Mining Company came to Chickenfeather to mine lignite
and bought most of the land in the community and surrounding areas.
Today,
the rolling hills around Chickenfeather have been smoothed away by giant lignite
mining scoops. Little remains from the community’s existence.
But on each
second Sunday in July, former residents of Chickenfeather gather at New Hope cemetery
to share recollections of the days when the community was still alive.
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