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NOGALUS
PRAIRIE , TEXAS
aka Nogallis Prairie, Nogalus, & Prairie ViewTrinity
County, East Texas
Farm Road 357
13 miles NE of Groveton
Population 106 (2000) |
From
"No Gallows"
by Bob Bowman
The names of some East Texas
towns can be downright confusing. And much of the confusion arises from mispronunciations
which, during the passage of time, have become actual names.
Take, for
example, the name Nogalus Prairie in Trinity County.
Local lore
suggests the name originated when two horse thieves were hung from the branch
of a large tree because the community had "no gallows."
While a morsel
of truth may lie in the story, Clell Davis of Trinity County helped shed some
light on the community's real origin.
The community was originally named
Nogales Prairie because of the walnut and pecan trees that grew there when
Texas was still a province of Mexico and Spanish families lived in the area. Nogales
is Spanish for walnut and sometimes pecan.
When the first European settlers
came to the area, they spelled the name like it sounded, and Nogales became Nogallis.
The first post office opened in 1858 as Nogallis Prairie. In the late 1800s,
it was sometimes called Logallis Prairie, but in 1894 the post office was known
as Nogalus Prairie.
No less than John
Wesley Hardin, the preacher's son and outlaw who spent a lot of time in Trinity
County, mentioned the name in his autobiography, "The Life of John Wesley Hardin."
Hardin shot and killed a former slave near Moscow
in Polk County in the fall of 1868 and was on the run from federal reconstruction
troops.
His brother Joe was teaching school "on Logallis Prairie, about
twenty-five miles north of Sumpter" and John Wesley fled there.
When Joe
also told him that federal troops were coming to arrest him, Hardin waylaid and
killed three soldiers in a bed of a deep creek. He buried the bodies in the creek
bed about 100 yards from where the fight occurred.
Some 55 years ago,
as a young boy growing up at Nogalus Prairie, Clell Davis was walking along a
creek bed and found some bones. "That night at supper, I told my father about
it, and he told me that his grandfather, Alexander Davis, told him that back in
the l800s, a man shot three men and buried them near the creek bed," said Davis.
"The story really got my attention, but for some reason I never went back to look
for the bones and, after 55 years, I had almost forgotten about it until I read
Hardin's book," said Davis.
Today, however, the creek has been dammed
and a pond covers the site. "A short distance from there, you can see the old
roadbed where it used to cross the creek, and I believe this is where John Wesley
Hardin shot the Union soldiers and where they were buried," said Davis.
As far as hangings are concerned at Nogalus, there were a number that occurred
in the vicinity during and after the Civil War. During that time, a large group
of Civil War deserters were camped in the community when they were chased down
and hung from convenient tree limbs.
From the 1840s to about 1900, Nogalus
Prairie was a "fair sized community," said Davis. From 1900 to 1918, the community
had a Methodist church, several stores and saloons, a cotton gin, grist mill,
and a Woodmen of the World lodge.
The post office closed in 1920 and today
Nogalus is mostly a dispersed rural community. Its last population figure in 2000
was 106.
From "All
Things Historical"
April 2, 2007
Distributed by the East Texas Historical Association. Bob Bowman
of Lufkin is a former president of the Association and the author of more than
30 books about East Texas. |
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