Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Immortal Meals #25: Champagne, Nests and the Courthouse September 4, 2015

Beach is not sure why he finds this meal so appealing, but it is probably something to do with the disregard for frontier law and the ability of Texans to improvise entertainment out of a goose, a shack and some eggs. Sherman is and was the capital of Grayson County in Texas. In 1858 a huge party was held in the town to honour one John Patterson and the Overland Mail. The townsfolk were celebrating the first stage from St Louis to arrive in Sherman: postmen everywhere must be wishing that they got this kind of treatment. We don’t have perfect details of the meal, as everything seems to have been hazed over in alcohol the day after: champagne figures in all the accounts that have come down to us. But we do know that at one point the guests began to argue about the nest of a gray goose which lived in central Sherman: this alone tells you something about just how frontier Sherman was at this date. So passionate did this argument get that the party next tipped out onto the street and ended up at Sherman’s courthouse, where some diners claimed the gray goose had her nest under the building. At this point, he good folk of Sherman should have sobered up and gone home: hoping that they would remember nothing in the morning. Instead, the argument became more vociferous and the crowd tore the courthouse down to get at the nest underneath. ‘Bets were freely made while the demolition was going on, and music furnished by a banjo player whose fingers were made exceptionally nimble by the champagne.’ (History of Grayson County Mattie D. Lucas and Mita H. Hall). The courthouse was replaced and then burnt down in 1876 after the trial of an African-American, Hughes, led to high feelings among the local populace: there was an attempted lynching and in the end the charred body of Hughes was dragged through the town. The search for the grey goose’s nest was from an earlier and more innocent time. The courthouse at the head of the post dates to 1900 and still doesn’t look proof against ornithologists or rioters.  The photograph below was supposedly the 1858 courthouse: if so it perhaps needed to be replaced. However, it is best to be suspicious of anonymous looking sheds in black and white snaps from brownie cameras.

Other immortal meals: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

30 Sep 2015: Ruth (an old  friend of the blog) writes in, ‘Re the picture you weren’t sure could be the courthouse, it could well have been at the time. Frontier towns were extremely rough, many times the local saloons were used as such in a pinch (yes, like in the movies). There were also tents used as necessary buildings because most of town was what was called a “tent city”. Towns could grow up almost over night and any shelter was useful until buildings were more common. Usually the first building in any town was the saloon, thus it was used for many functions, rather like the gents clubs of your country. Sometimes standing for a church, even. The second was probably a funeral parlor, death being extremely common, you know, violent or otherwise. My husband’s mother lived in a sod house for a time as a child, probably back in the early 1900’s. (A sod house was one built from chunks of sod, rather like igloos are built from chunks of ice.) My family moved into Oklahoma during the land run and had a land grant in Oklahoma City. Oklahoma state is very young to the union, they were granted statehood in 1907 and you can still see examples of primitive housing in towns that are outside of the main cities. Sorry, got off subject, but I’ve seen buildings like that one around.

Thanks, Ruth!