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Road Log 1922 by
Mike Cox | |
| Every
year when school's over many Texas families take to the highways for a summer
vacation. The only thing that's changed over the decades is the quality of those
roads. |
A
daily log kept by James A. Correll in the late spring and summer of 1922 shows
it's a little easier to get across Texas than it used to be. The log was included
in the 1986 privately published book, "Texas Cousins: Correll, Tisdale, and
Related Families" by Marie C. and Albert A. Tisdale.
The
Correll clan - Correll, his wife and their four daughters - left their home in
Austin at noon on June 14, 1922 in the family's Buick for California. Needing
first to attend a family function in Kansas, they went west via Oklahoma, Kansas,
Colorado and Arizona. |
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En route to Waco,
where they would spend their first night, they encountered "fair roads but numerous
detours due to recent washouts." It took them eight hours to travel 119 miles.
They
left Waco at 8:30 a.m. the following morning, making it to West in an hour. But
a knocking engine sounded like trouble, so the family waited in West while Correll
took the Inter-urban electric train back to Waco to buy the needed part, a differential
pinion. Their car repaired, they got out of West at 5:15 p.m. and made it to Hillsboro,
where they camped for the night. (They had a white canvas tent and four cots.
The younger girls slept in the car seats.) In all, they only made 44 miles that
day.
On the third day of the Texas leg of their trip they covered 144
miles, from Hillsboro to Alvord.
Correll assessed the highways they traveled as fair to fine, with even a section
of what he called "concrete pike."
June 17, the fourth day out of Austin,
they proceeded via Bowie, Ringgold,
Henrietta, Wichita
Falls and Burkburnett through
the oil fields into Oklahoma, where they camped on the roadside near an Indian
reservation. Total mileage: 118. Again, Correll noted the road conditions in Texas
as varying from fine to rough and sandy.
The
vacationers returned to the Lone Star State on Sept. 14, arriving in El
Paso via "concrete highway" from Las Cruces, N.M. After reprovisioning, they
left the border city at 5:15 p.m. and enjoyed 40 miles of paved west-bound roadway
before the route turned to gravel. About 9:30 p.m., having covered 150 miles,
they put up their tent for the night at a pumping plant about 10 miles east of
Sierra Blanca
in Hudspeth County.
The next day, traveling on a good gravel road, they
passed through Kent and
on to Pecos. On that stretch,
Correll wrote, their car hummed along a good road to a point about 12 miles from
town, when the route turned bad and sandy.
"From Pecos
to Ft. Stockton,"
he wrote, "just [a] trail across desert land, rocky stretches followed by sandy
stretches through mesquite and greasewood." They stopped at 8 p.m. to make camp
after covering 167 miles, their one-day mileage record in Texas. "Terrible alkali
dust all afternoon," he noted.
Having gassed up and bought more grub,
the Corrells left Fort Stockton at 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 16. After driving on a good
gravel road, they had a blowout 35 miles from Sheffield.
Their spare tire made it only another 33 miles. Somehow they got into Sheffield,
bought a new tire and continued to Ozona,
where they purchased a second tire. Leaving the Crockett County seat at 6 p.m.,
they stopped for the night 10 miles west of Sonora.
Total mileage: 144.
"We crossed ranches going through bump-gates and
cattle guards, some ranches as much as a hundred miles across, fording creeks
and streams," one of the Correll children later wrote. "Most of this route went
through private property, as there were no state highways in that country, roughly
where Interstate 10 goes now."
At 8 a.m. on Sept. 17, they left via "poor
stony road" on into Sonora. From there
to Junction they enjoyed a
better road. "Crossed Llano River and numerous creeks many times," Correll wrote
in his log. After getting a new tire to replace one punctured by a mesquite thorn,
they drove to London and
then Mason. From
Mason to Fredericksburg,
he continued, they traveled on a "fine gravel pike," making the 45 minute trip
"in less than 2 hours."
Finding the road from Fredericksburg
to Austin "too bad to travel at night,"
they camped in Gillespie County. The next morning, Sept. 18, they covered the
final 84 miles to the Capital City.
When they could see the dome of the
Capitol, Correll's daughter remembered, everyone in their car began yelling and
cheering.
Texas highways are much better today, but some things about
family vacations haven't changed. "Dad said that he couldn't have made another
day," she wrote. |
©
Mike Cox
"Texas
Tales" >
May
3 , 2007 column |
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