A history of Texas and Texans, Part 137

Author: Johnson, Francis White, 1799-1884; Barker, Eugene Campbell, 1874-1956, ed; Winkler, Ernest William, 1875-1960
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Chicago, American Historical Society
Number of Pages: 906

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barn on the place, and so arranged it that his tenants might have even the conveniences of hot and cold water in their houses. He also did much to encourage progress in agriculture in that community and improvement along other lines. He offered a first and second premium to the women who kept their houses and yards in the most attractive conditions, and was thus a pioneer in the "town beautiful" idea, which in recent years has had so much vogue in this state and elsewhere. During the eighties Mr. Daugherty owned a half section of land ad- joining the town site of Colorado, the county seat of Mitchell county, and with his former partners owned a section of land upon which Lubbock, the present county seat of Lubbock county is now located. All told he had title to about one hundred and fifty thousand acres in Texas, and a half interest in over four hundred thou- sand acres of Mexican land.

Mr. Daugherty's home during this time was iu Dallas, and about his lot he laid the first concrete sidewalk ever constructed in that city. His home was for years a landmark in Dallas, and the sidewalks laid in 1881 are in 1913 still in a good state of preservation. He was also actively interested in buying and developing city real estate in Dallas, and a number of early improve- ments might be mentioned which originated with Mr. Daugherty. For several years he was engaged in the grain, hay and wood business, in that city, buying grain from the states of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, and supplying the trade in hay from his large farm at Daugherty.

His increasing investments in land and in various business enterprises brought Mr. Daugherty to his first great business crisis toward the close of the decade of the eighties. It was not from lack of good judgment that he was drawn into his dilemma, since the situation which he had to face also confronted nearly every other business man in Texas. This phase of his career has special historical interest and will bear more intimate consideration. In May, 1882, C. C. Slaughter of Dallas sold a thousand beeves off . the grass on the Chicago market at seven cents per pound. This was the first grass-fed beef that brought as high a price in the United States. As a result the live stock industry became most active in Texas. English and Scotch syndicates, with noblemen as members and others were rolling into Texas and buying its cheap grazing lands, and establishing ranches of fifty thousand, one hundred thousand, five hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand and more acres. All the neighboring states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida were ransacked for cattle with which to stock these ranges, and sheep in great numbers were brought in from Mexico. The Texas stockmen to protect their ranges were forced to buy lands in large bodies. This combined demand for land caused the cheap grazing tracts in the fifty-two Panhandle counties and southwest of them, where during 1875-77 land could he located and titles procured at fifteen cents per acre to jump in selling price by 1882 to from fifty cents to two dollars and a half per acre. Stockmen and landmen had loaded themselves with debt in buying lands, and during the early eighties loans commanded from two to five per cent per month in Texas, and the best of condi- tions called for one per cent per month. The few who could discount their paper in the eastern banking centers at from six to ten per cent were a privileged class.

Then in 1883 cattle began to decline. Over produc- tion forced this decline through the following year, and in 1885 there prevailed a severe drought all over west Texas, continuing through the year 1886. In the mean- time the winter of 1885-86 had been unusually severe. The short range and the cold weather killed cattle and sheep by the tens of thousands. The pioneer settlers who had constituted the first great migration into west Texas, owing to the drought could make no crops, and thousands of them moved out of the country. The obli- gations of the landmen and the cattlemen began to ma-

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ture in large sums, cattle were sacrificed because they could not be fed for market, and under these varied conditions it became simply impossible to sell western lands. Practically all the cattlemen were heavily in debt, and hundreds of them went bankrupt. The few who succeeded in getting through that period of 1886 to 1896 are now among the wealthy class of Texans.

In this state of affairs, being unable to do anything with his western land except pay taxes, and let the cat- tlemen graze them without remuneration, and owing large sums of money, in 1888. Mr. Daugherty transferred all his efforts to the grain business. He obtained con- traets to supply thirteen United States posts in Texas with grain and hay. Then occurred the excessive rain- fall of 1888, which prevented the harvesting of his erops, damaged the oats so that they would not pass in- spection, put the black-land roads of north Texas in such a condition that the farmers could not get their grain to market, and as a result Mr. Daugherty had to ship in grain from Kansas at almost extortionate freight rates in order to fulfill his contract. The losses incident to the difficulties of this year taken in connection with the dull- ness in the land business, so impaired his credit that he could no longer continue to press the grain business.

About this time Mr. Daugherty first became interested in the country in and about Houston. In 18SS, in order to get more land for the production of hay, he bought six thousand acres in Harris county, abont twelve or fif- teen miles west of Houston. He gave the right-of-way to the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway, and got a siding for the townsite of Dairy, now Alief, situated near the center of his land. He also acquired the land across from the Grand Central Station in Houston, now occupied by the Brazos Hotel. Soon afterwards he di- rected his energies to a proposition in the city of Dallas, whereby he endeavored to commit the officials of the Houston & Texas Central Railroad, including Mr. Jay Gould, to locate the Union Depot on a block of land controlled by Mr. Daugherty. The negotiations were carried on for a year between him and Mr. C. P. Hunt- ington and J. Gould and resulted in a practical agree- ment for the location of the depot on the proposed site, and Mr. Huntington had signed the contract, but following a series of delays and excuses on the part of Mr. Gould the latter finally refused to sign the last papers and thus repudiated the contract of agreement to which he had previously consented.

Following the results of the great drought of the eiglities eame on the panic, beginning with the year 1893. Mr. Daugherty was burdened with the ownership and control of thousands of acres of land for which there was no sale. He was land poor in the most rigorous sense of that phrase. Judgments were taken in the courts against him and all of his lands, which in normal conditions then would have commanded from fifty cents to two dollars and fifty cents per acre were taken away at fifteen cents to forty cents per aere, so the proceeds did not bring enough to satisfy the judgments by a large sum. However, Mr. Daugherty refused to take advan- tage of the bankruptcy act, and in all his subsequent difficulties has never accepted the leniency offered through that avenue of legality.

In January, 1894, he determined that Houston and the coast country of Texas presented the best territory for his efforts. He left his family in their home in Dallas, which, as a result of the wise homestead laws of the state, had been exempt from the numerous ex- ecutions laid upon the other portions of his property. He arrived in Houston with his experience as his cap- ital and with more than one hundred thousand dollars in judgments hanging over him. He had procured a selling contract for the six thousand acres he had pre- viously owned, west of Houston. Subdividing this into forty-acre tracts, and having a side-track put in at what is now Alief, then called Dairy, he brought farmers there from the black-lands of north Texas. He offered

and paid premiums to the farmer who produced the most cotton on his land in the Dairy community, thus anticipating by about fifteen years the efforts of the Texas Industrial Congress along the same line. It is to his efforts that Harris county owes its most successful agricultural community, and it was to Dairy that the Houston real estate men made their first excursion with the business men of Houston when they were demon- strating that it was possible to successfully develop Harris county along agricultural lines. In all of his land transactions Mr. Daugherty has never foreclosed the vendor's lien on a tract of land sold by him, and after the disaster following the Galveston storm in 1900 he protected the settlers on his land and stood responsible for their notes until they were all paid. At Houston he had sold the block of property previously mentioned, and induced the purchaser to build a part of the hotel now included in the well known Brazos Hotel. Mr. Daugh- erty operated extensively in the lands of the Brazos Val- ley, and led the way in colonization and development in that section of the state. After the bollweevil had blighted the prospects of the cotton growers in the gulf coast country about 1898-99, he brought an expert to- bacco grower to this vicinity and experimented with to- baeco productions. His first erop in the Brazos Valley was destroyed by an unprecedented flood in the Brazos river. And abont the time the cigar leaf tobacco in- dustry was in a fair way to development, especially in Montgomery county, the United States took off one-half the tariff from tobacco grown in Cuba, and all of the tariff on that grown in the Philippines and Porto Rico, and this tariff reduction destroyed the cigar-leaf tobacco business in southeast Texas. In 1900 he indneed Dave Harris, a noted broom corn grower of Tuscola, Illinois, to locate in Fort Bend county and experiment with the growing of this plant. The winds from the Galveston storm of 1900 blew the entire erop flat to the earth, and thus ended another praiseworthy attempt at agricultural development.

In 1900 Conrad Bering successfully grew the first erop of rice in Harris county. In the fall of that year the first grain thresher was brought through Houston on its way to the Bering farm. The rice erop yielded about twenty bags to the acre, and as rice was then selling from four and a half to five dollars a barrel, the initial crop brought new financial prospects to the coast country of Texas.

In the meantime in January, 1901, the Lucas Oil Gusher broke forth at Beaumont, and during the fol- lowing months the attention and speculative desires of half the nations of the world were centered on this local- ity in southeast Texas. Immediately after the discovery at Beaumont Mr. Daugherty and Edward Moskowitz of Houston went to Beaumont and took a ground lease on a lot, upon which they erected a corrugated-iron build- ing. They bought and shipped two dozen cheap desks and invited a number of their friends to occupy them, their intention being to use the free desks as factors to draw them land business. Mr. Daugherty during the ex- citing times at Beaumont following this oil boom saw that among the various classes of business men and in- vestors were a great many interested in mineral devel- opments, and he formulated a plan to set before these men the resources of Texas in the mineral field. An ex- pert was secured to gather up a carload of samples of the best minerals in the Llano regions, and these were dis- played at Beaumont, where they attracted general atten- tion and led eventually to the sale of the Iron Moun- tains in Llano county. In spite of his leadership and active interest in these and resulting transactions, Mr. Daugherty never received a dollar for the sale of the mineral lands in Llano county. In this connection it should also be noted that in 1886 Mr. Daugherty co- operated with Professor W. C. Dollins in mining and introdneing for practical use the first carload of lignite coal from the Texas deposits. He also actively con-

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cerned himself and did much valuable work toward bringing other mineral resources of this state to the at- tention of capitalists and others interested.

His experiences in developing the rice industry are of particular interest. In 1901 he prepared literature set- ting forth the results that Conrad Bering had accom- plished in rice growing in Harris county. The pioneer of rice growing in southwestern Louisiana was W. W. Duson, and he was the authoritative head of all the rice industry in the southwest. Mr. Daugherty obtained a sack of rice from the Bering crop, sent it to Mr. Duson, without informing him where the rice was grown, and in return received a very favorable statement as to its quality from Mr. Duson. Mr. Duson had hitherto claimed that the Texas coast elimate was not suitable to rice growing. After this letter had been included in the lit- erature prepared by Mr. Daugherty, many of the Louisi- ana rice planters were induced to come to Texas and ex- amine conditions, as a result of which in a short time there was more or less of a general immigration of those interested in rice growing to this section of the gulf coast. Mr. Duson and his brother were thus forced to come to Texas and open an office and join in boosting the rice industry of this state. In the summer of 1901 Mr. Daugherty began the construction of the Brazos Canal in Fort Bend county, an enterprise now known as the Cane Belt Canal. The difficulties encountered by the company of which Mr. Daugherty was president and manager are too long to be recounted here. Be it said that through the disloyalty of his partner, the company was eventually put to hard straits, and involved in va- rious lawsuits and other troubles, thus crippling the financial power of the company and preventing a sue- cessful culmination of the project along the lines orig- inally planned. Mr. Daugherty finally got out from the enterprise, after a loss of abont thirty-five thousand dol- lars, and has ever since been paying off the company's debts for which he has held himself personally responsi- ble, although the machinations of his partners really produced the crisis and unfortunate conditions of the company's affairs.

In 1905, Mr. Daugherty interested himself in bringing in the Humble oil fields. He induced George H. Her- mann to sell to James B. Weed of Beanmont two hundred acres near where Barrett was boring for oil. Weed sub- divided this traet of two hundred acres and sold it to leading oil producers, each of whom promised to bore for oil. This brought about a general immigration to the fields, and in the course of operation D. R. Beatty of Houston was the first to bring in a gusher, and estab- lished an oil field which is even yet one of the largest in Texas. A son of Mr. Daugherty, Bryan Daugherty, sunk a hole in Liberty county, from which he obtained a small supply of gas, and finally through lack of cap- ital surrendered his interest in the property. In this same hole was later placed the drill which brought in the first gusher in what is known as the Batson field.

Among the more recent enterprises to which Mr. Daugherty has given his attention should be mentioned the laying out of a subdivision in 1908 at the Turning Basin of the Houston ship channel. In 1909 he organ- ized with two others the Penn City Land Company, a company that acquired two thousand five hundred and eighteen acres of land along the ship channel and laid ont the site of Penn City as a site for an industrial city. This property was subsequently turned over to Pitts- burg, Pennsylvania, Syndicate, but that group of in- vestors were unable to carry out their obligations, and in going into bankruptcy carried the Penn City deal along with them.

Mr. Daugherty is now giving his energies to an at- tempt to reorganize Penn City, and he has very sanguine hopes of its becoming a great industrial center, especially with the early completion of the ship channel. Only a most summary review has been taken of Mr. Daugherty's extensive operations in the land business in Texas, and

a great many of the deals which smaller land men would esteem notable and conspicuous of themselves shrink to insignificance among so many of the same of larger na- tures carried out by Mr. Daugherty. He claims that he has bought and sold and handled more Texas lands than any man who ever did business along this line, and a complete record of his transactions would prove to any unprejudiced individual that his claims were well justi- fied. He has probably seen more of Texas than any other individual and knows more of its resources. While at the same time up to the present he has less to show for his indefatigable industry than many who have con- fined their operations to a much more modest scale. That he has not been rewarded on a liberal seale for his work is due, according to his opinion, to the fact that his contest- has been waged with debt and its strong ally, interest, taken in connection with the results of the drought of 1885-86, the flood of 1888, and the panie of 1893. In the settlement of his many obligations he has been harrassed much to suits of attachments and gar- nishments, His earning capacity has been greatly cur- tailed by them, and by the further fact that he could not take titles in his own name to the properties he has been buying and selling. At times he has not had money to pay railroad fare or to buy. stamps with which to push his business, but he has never faltered in his determina- tion to pay all his just obligations, and no one who has had dealings with Mr. Daugherty or is familiar with his record will doubt that he has the ability, provided he lives, to satisfy every claim. Notwithstanding the fact that for more than twenty years the bankrupt law has been in force, he has never availed himself of it to wipe out the old judgments and has paid large sums in their satisfaction.

While many of the large land transactions of Mr. Daugherty have been in the nature of public enter- prises, aside from these he has had a large and beneficent part in public affairs. He had been located in Texas but a short while when he became interested in behalf of some of his friends in the city polities of Dallas. A little later he participated in the movement originating in that city after Dallas had voted one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to secure the building of the Dallas and Wichita Railroad. Then during the winter of 1875-76 came up the subject of building a railroad from Dallas to Cleburne. The people of Johnson county were much aroused over this project, and were peculiarly open to any projects that might be proposed for support- ing the enterprise. Some of the men who had been most prominent in the Dallas and Wichita projects were also taking the lead in the new proposition. They had spent the donation made by Dallas in building about twenty miles of track from Dallas, and thereafter the enter- prise had practically come to an end and there was no prospect of its completion. Mr. Daugherty was the only responsible party representing Dallas at the meeting in Cleburne, and though a young man he took it upon him- self to address the local citizens and explain the failure of a similar enterprise promoted and engineered by the same parties who were making such a vigorous appeal to the people of Johnson county. As a result the conven- tion" at Cleburne voted to delay their immediate support to the undertaking until they could investigate the stand- ing of the railroad promoters, in Dallas. This cheekmat- ing of the plans of Col. Obenchain, the leader of the railroad promoters, resulted a day or so later in a per- sonal conflict between Mr. Daugherty and the colonel, in which the latter was sorely bested. However, the chief purpose was attained in discounting the irresponsi- ble management and exploitation of local citizens in sup- port of a badly matured enterprise which would never have brought anything but disaster to all the supporters and contributors and would have proved a serious set- back to railroad construction from Dallas.

Mr. Daugherty took an important part in the guber- natorial campaigns in which J. W. Throckmorton was

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candidate, and owing to Mr. Throckmorton's disregard of a general petition for the establishment of Eastland as one of the places for holding the Federal court in the northern judicial district, Mr. Daugherty took it upon himself to lead the opposition to that candidate when he sought the nomination for governor. Outside of pure polities, Mr. Daugherty during those years lent his ef- forts to much that was political and at the same time closely connected with the economic welfare of the state.

Barbed wire as fencing material was first introduced into Texas in 1877. By 1880 the cattlemen were fencing in large areas they did not own or legally control. This brought about the era of wire-cutting, and resulted in many feuds and much blood being spilled among the wirecutters and the various groups into which the cattle interests were divided. The state school fund, the state university and the different counties of the state owned millions of acres of land upon which the cattlemen were grazing their herds and paying nothing for their use. It was the consideration of this fact that led Mr. Daugherty to issue a call to the leading land men of Texas to meet in Dallas for the purpose of forming a real estate association. There were a large number who responded to the call and at that time was organ- ized in Texas the first state real estate men's associa- tion, of which Mr. Daugherty became president. He submitted a resolution which was adopted, declaring that it was the sense of the association that "all land should be made to pay a revenue to its owner, whether the owner was an individual, corporation or a fund." He drafted a bill and had it published in the Galveston News, in which it was proposed that the legislature should enact into laws and in substance did enact into . law a measure prohibiting the fencing of land which the party enclosing it did not own or control under lease. The enactment of this law forced the cattlemen to rent millions of acres of land that prior to that time they had grazed for nothing, and thereafter they paid into the treasury of Texas, as part of the school fund, from a quarter to half a million dollars each year. His activity in this matter brought him the antagonism of many of the old cattlemen, but most of them have since accepted the plain justice of the case, and are now his warm admirers for the work he did in this instance.

His part in connection with another semi-official or- ganization of Dallas should be noted. It had been his observation that many business men, bankers and indus- tries prior to 1882 had sought Dallas as a location, but after investigating conditions had gone away to other places for lack of having the advantages of Dallas prop- erly presented. At the same time many fakirs and pro- moters of unsubstantial institutions had come to the city and had remained long enough to get the local money without any adequate return. Thus originated with him the idea of the city having such a public organization as might look after its general welfare. At that time there was no city in the United States with such a standing committee. Dallas had its board of trade, and at a meeting of that board early in 1882 Mr. Daugherty of- fered a resolution for the creation of a committee of twenty representative business men to be known as ".The Committee on Public Interests," whose duty it was to investigate all subjects affecting the general welfare and to encourage those that were meritorious and to con- demn such as were otherwise. This committee was con- stituted, and the results of its splendid work are still to be seen in the permanent commercial prosperity of Dal- las. This committee encouraged the building of the Santa Fe Railroad from Dallas to Paris, of the Missouri, Kansas & Texas from Dallas to Hillsboro, brought about the construction of many local buildings and the estab- lishment of institutions which have been an essential part of the business organization of Dallas, and among other things brought about the organization of the Texas State Fair Association. Other cities seeing the suc- cessful work done by the Dallas committee, adopted the

same idea, and since then the idea has spread all over the United States, but Dallas has credit for having had the first committee, and Mr. Daugherty was author of the original idea. He was chairman of the committee for six years, and did the work free that in later years is performed by commercial secretaries at large salaries. . Mr. Daugherty took a very important part in the agi- tation over the creation of a deep water port at Galves- ton. He was living in Dallas at the time and Dallas citizens as a whole were at least apathetic, if not actively hostile to any project concerning what seemed to be a more intimate benefit of the coast city. Mr. Daugherty was one of the broad-minded and far-sighted men who realized that the establishment of a deep water port at Galveston was closely concerned with the entire destiny of Texas in its commercial relations. During the various negotiations and the various phases in the contest be- tween the citizens of Dallas and those of Galveston, the Galveston News kept a correspondent constantly in Dal- las. The chief Dallas paper, at that time the Old Herald, was aligned with the forces of opposition to the deep water plan. Mr. Daugherty during the long-drawn-out campaign finally presented to the managers and proprie- tors of the Galveston paper the advisability of establish- iug their paper at Dallas, which possessed superior ad- vantages over Galveston for printing and distributing a large paper. After a business conference between the Dallas Committee and the proprietors of the Galveston News, the proposition was made that if twenty-five thousand dollars of capital stock in the News would be subscribed by the citizens of Dallas, the News would es- tablish a branch in Dallas, and publish as good a paper in Dallas as was the Galveston News. This proposition was accepted, the subscriptions to the stock were oh- tained in one afternoon, and in sixty days the Dallas News was founded, and in another sixty days the new paper had absorbed the old Dallas Herald. This was the beginning of what is now easily the greatest newspaper in the southwest and one of the premier journals of the entire nation.

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A history of Texas and Texans, Part 137

Author: Johnson, Francis White, 1799-1884; Barker, Eugene Campbell, 1874-1956, ed; Winkler, Ernest William, 1875-1960 Publication date: 1914 Publisher: Chicago, American Historical Society Number of Pages: 906

Author: Johnson, Francis White, 1799-1884; Barker, Eugene Campbell, 1874-1956, ed; Winkler, Ernest William, 1875-1960
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Chicago, American Historical Society
Number of Pages: 906