By Marie Hughes, Chambers County Museum at Wallisville
The early 1900s brought a wave of settlers to Texas searching for land – lots of land, and Texas had plenty of it. The movement was encouraged by the various railroads that operated in Texas. They offered cheap excursion rates to Texas points and back for as little as $18 for the round trip.
Many of these settlers came from Kansas, but why would Kansas farmers, so proud of their “amber waves of grain,” pull up stakes and relocate to Texas? Two words: grasshoppers and drought.
In the mid-1870s, grasshoppers descended upon Kansas, stripping it of all vegetation, and the 1890s found Kansas a parched land thirsty for water with little or no rain in sight. It is no wonder the green pastures of coastal Texas looked so inviting.
“Our grandfather, Harry Arthur Turner, told me their family moved from Kansas to Texas when he was 4 years old, that would be 1902,” said Gregg Turner of Anahuac. “He told me he left Kansas because of the grasshoppers. He figured there must be something better. Their farm in Kansas was between Ottawa and Centropolis, southeast of Topeka. My great grandfather, William E. Turner, traveled alone from Kansas to Ganado, Texas to evaluate the area. He then wired my great-grandma to sell the place and everything on it, load the kids up and catch a train to Ganado.”
They began farming rice. Once their crop was in, they hired out to do custom plowing. He traveled up and down the Gulf Coast plowing for other farmers and that’s how they ended up in the Anahuac area. Around the time they arrived in 1919, the Lone Star Canal Company salted out, so they moved to Devers and began farming on Boyt land. They remained there until the Canal Company resolved the saltwater issue, then returned to Anahuac.
“Big Grandpa (William) had some humongous tractors. I started working for grandpa when I was 9 years old and worked for him until he died. I was 19 then. I heard many a story from him, many a story,” said Gregg with a chuckle. “Grandpa told me when they were working their way towards Chambers County, they would have to cross wooden bridges. After they had crossed over them, there wasn’t much bridge left. He said those steel wheels would ruin a bridge. Grandpa said they had the 4080 Twin City steam tractor and a 3060 Hoffpauir steam tractor. He said in the wintertime, before they invented antifreeze, they always carried barrels of water with them to the fields. In the evening, they would drain the water from the tractors and fill them back up in the morning. They were tough old people back then.”
Veteran earns first shot at buying farm equipment
“During the war all the metal went into making war machinery, tanks and airplanes and such,” said Greg.
“This created a shortage of farm equipment,” interjected his brother Kim.
“After the war, if you were a veteran and especially a wounded veteran, you had first shot at buying farm equipment. Our dad, Roy William. had served during World War II under General George Patton in the second armored division called ‘Hell on Wheels’ and had his hand cut off with shrapnel when his tank was blown up. Because of his injury, in 1946, he and our Grandpa were able to buy a brand-new combine for $4,000,” Gregg said.
The same equipment would cost roughly a million dollars today.
“They had the German Prisoner of War camps out at Pear Orchard Road and daddy would go and hire them to come work in the rice fields,” said Gregg. “I have the record of the men he hired and how much he paid for them to work,” added Kim.
William E. Turner always put his crop in out of his pocket, not borrowing money up until a certain point. After the rice came up, he had to have money for the fertilizer and the harvest.
“He would go to the American National Bank in Beaumont. Ocie Jackson was on the board there. Grandpa applied for a loan and they came out and looked at his rice. They said, ‘Mr. Turner, we can’t loan you any money, you don’t have a crop, all you’ve got is pop beans.’ Sesbania had taken over his field. It made that old man mad and he went out and mowed that whole rice field down. The mowing killed the beans, but it made the rice stool and it came back thicker than ever. He said he made more money that year than he ever made,” said Gregg with a laugh.
Leslie Turner recalls life on the farm
“It was on the family rice farm in Ganado that my grandfather, Harry Arthur, learned the fundamentals of rice cultivation,” said Leslie Turner, of Anahuac. “An interesting note, Ganado is in Jackson County and my youngest daughter, Jill, is county judge of Jackson County. My grandfather married Naoma Harris in 1919 and then the Turner family relocated to Devers, Texas. I know they were in Anahuac by 1923 because my dad, Edman Arthur ‘Ed’ Turner was born there.”
Her father was 7 years old when the Great Depression hit. Leslie recalls asking him to describe what it was like.
“He said, ‘I didn’t even know there was a depression. We were just as poor before the depression as we were when it hit,’” said Leslie. “They raised their own beef, pork, and chickens, and with eight kids, they had a big garden. My grandma made all the girls dresses and my dad and his brothers had enough uncles that they got hand-me-down clothes to wear, and when they outgrew them, there were enough kids to keep handing them down to until they were worn out.”
“My dad said the rice back then was put in sacks. He had a binder that he used to cut the rice and then they put it in shocks. Once the shocks were dry, they would haul them to the separator where the rice would be put into sacks and the hay into a large pile. The sacks of rice would weigh about 220 pounds. My great-grandpa was offered $11 a sack for his rice but he heard someone got $14, so he turned it down. That was when the depression hit and he loaded his rice onto a barge just below the hill and sent it to Galveston. When he got there, it didn’t bring enough money to pay the barge freight,” Leslie said.
Leslie is unsure if that is when he stopped farming.
“I cannot tell you when my grandpa started farming. There was no Lake Anahuac then, there was just a river that separated Turtle Bay from East Bay. There wasn’t a reservoir then, the lake would either get salty or go dry if there wasn’t enough rain. So, until they put in the levee to make Lake Anahuac, there was no constant water supply. I know my grandpa ended up losing a crop one year because they ran out of water, so he moved to Devers and worked for the Boyt’s farm. He moved back to Anahuac about 1939. I know that because my dad graduated from Anahuac High School. My mom moved here in 1937. Her dad worked for Humble Oil in Monroe City, he was a pumper-gauger. They had three girls and all three of them married rice farmers. My mom married my dad, Ed Turner, my mom’s twin sister Catherine married Donald Willcox, and Mary married Elton Kirkham who everybody called ‘Goog.’ They had four grandsons and all four are farming today: me and my brother Jimmy, Donald Wayne Willcox, and David Kirkham. At one time, all of my dad’s brothers farmed rice,” Leslie said.
In 1953, Leslie’s father built the very first air dryer and it worked great. Someone pitched the idea to him, and he took a chance on it and built it. J. C. Willcox and Percy Kinser built ones after him.
“You talk about labor-intensive! It was a Quonset hut building, and inside, you had bins, which were walls that clamped together. You would back up to the dryer, and Dad had two augers that went up to the top of the Quonset and dropped the rice into the trough. The augers would go both ways because you had to move the rice back out. Once the rice was in the trough, it would go down to a gate that was open, and that would be the bin you would put the grain in. On the outside, they had big fans that forced air in at the bottom and through the rice to dry it. It was unique, and Dad was the first one to build one. We would get up at four or five in the morning to watch him on TV on the Dewey Compton Farm Show in Houston. Just about every farmer ended up building one, and the old round ones became obsolete. They tore them down to get them off the tax rolls, and many were sent down to Belize. My son Rhett has the first ones my dad built with the pit. Like I said, my dad built his first one in ’53, then in ’64, and then again in ’78. One of my uncles built some in ’64 too. All of these dryers are still around. My brother Jimmy has two, and Rhett has the dryers on 61. I think Donald Wayne has a set of dryers that belonged to the Shultzes. Just about everything else is torn down, and there was a bunch of ’em,” Leslie continued.
Around 1953 they put in the allotment programs because supply and demand had a roller coaster effect on the rice industry. Farmers would have a good year and then everybody and his brother wanted to be a rice farmer. That would cause a surplus and the price of rice would go down, causing a lot of the farmers to get out.
“Some would hang in there and start again, and the price would go up, and you’d hit the high-end again, and the process would start all over, so that’s why the government got involved and started the allotment program. I believe they would calculate it on a five-year average of what you were farming. I know my dad was farming 600 acres, but when he got his allotment, he ended up with a 300-acre allotment. Texas farmers did really well with the allotment, but the other states who farmed rice, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and California didn’t like the allotment. The numbers were stacked against us, and in 1982 they put in the base system where the landowner owned the right to farm the base acres. With the allotment system, if you owned the land I was farming and I owned the allotment and we got into a disagreement I would go on down the road with my allotment, lease land from someone else, and continue farming. When they went to the base system if the landowner and farmer get into an argument, the landowner can get someone else to farm his land and the farmer hits the road, he’s just out of luck. So, that’s how the Texas farmer got messed up. The year after they did away with the allotment program, Arkansas planted a million acres more of rice than they had the previous year,” Leslie said.
Farming in the forks
“Dad farmed the Middleton forks on Oyster Bayou, the land between East bayou and West bayou. Jimmy and I started farming in the forks about ’76 and I’ve been farming it ever since. I have the same fields that I farm every other year. I don’t really have that much labor help because I don’t need it. I have a guy who works over at Big Hill who loves working for me. I have a little mini excavator on tracks and a little backhoe. In the old days you walked the levees and cut all the holes with a shovel. Now, I just go out there and if I need to get rid of a lot of water I’ll cut a hole as big as this table cause I know when I come back I can just put the dirt back in there and stop it,” Leslie said.
“My brother, Jimmy and I started farming a little in ’68, because the government gave the farmers a 5 percent increase in the number of acres they could farm. Nelson Fancher, Clint’s dad, already had his crop in and didn’t want to farm the extra 80 acres they allowed him. He asked my dad if he wanted to farm it. Daddy said ‘No, why don’t you let the boys do it?’ I was still in college and Jimmy was in high school, so we farmed that 80 acres and we didn’t farm any more until I graduated from college. I graduated from college in ’71 and Jimmy graduated from high school in ’72 and we worked the farm with our dad. It wasn’t until ’73 that we put in our first crop and farmed together and to me that was the greatest year ever for rice farming. That year it took $150 for everything you needed to put in a crop of rice, now $150 most times won’t buy the seed. Vernon Hargraves and Clyde Sullivan had an allotment, and they let Jimmy and I farm it because they had quit farming. That’s how we got our start and we probably made more that year than rice had ever brought before because the cost of farming was so low,” Leslie continued.
They had their first sale at the American Rice Growers, Anahuac, at Raywood. It was located at Raywood because there is one thing Anahuac has never had and never will, and that is a railroad. Back then in order to have a commercial dryer you had to be located next to a railroad track because many farmers put their rice under loan with the government. The government would grade the quality of your rice and loan you money based on the quality. The main reason for the loan was to buy you time to wait on the market price to go up. You could take the government money and pay down your bank loan, which had a higher interest rate than the government loan. Once you secured the government loan, you had nine months to sell your rice. Once you sold it, you would pay off the government loan first, then the remainder of your bank loan, and what was left was yours. However, if the rice sold below market value, the government would take ownership of the rice and your debt with them would be cleared.
“I got on the American Rice Growers board in 1981. At that time, this side of Louisiana, there was an American Rice Growers, Beaumont; American Rice Growers, Devers; American Rice Growers, Winnie; American Rice Growers, Dayton, and the American Rice Growers, Anahuac Division at Raywood, and we’re the only commercial dryers left. We had to shut down last year, we didn’t take any rice, because when we had the big freeze in 2021, we developed some cracks in the concrete dryer. My son Rhett, my brother Jimmy, and I had to carry all of our rice to Chesterfield last year. The freight to deliver our rice to Raywood was fifty-five to sixty cents, and to go to Chesterfield was about a dollar forty. We were lucky we were able to go there. They had about 40,000 acres out of production along the Colorado River because the lakes were so low,” Leslie said.
“The biggest change I’ve seen in the rice industry is the variety of rice. You always tried to make the best rice you could but that rice was chest high and the more fertilizer you put on it the heavier it would get. Then about the time you were ready to cut it there would come a rain and wind and it would all fall down. When they came out with the dwarfs and semi-dwarfs you could pour the fertilizer to it and you didn’t have to worry about it falling down. Another big change has been the equipment. Back when I was a kid we used to run the combines on that old black land down on the Middleton place where we farmed, it was black gumbo. Those old combines weren’t rear wheel driven and we would get the same combine stuck four, five or six times a day but those little self-propelled carts could run all over the field all day and pick up two maybe three hoppers and not get stuck. Combines started getting rear wheel drive with a lot more power, dual wheels, and some have tracks but now the tractors have big tires on them with carts behind them and they get bogged down and can’t pull them out of the field. So the situation had completely flipped,” Leslie continued. “Farmers would be dead in the water today without the government programs. As long as you can make the target price for your crop you do okay, but when the market price falls, and you can’t make it the government comes alongside and takes up the slack. If they didn’t farmers would go out of business. There are not as many farmers today as there was. When I was farming in the ‘80s there was 20,000 acres of rice on the canal.”
In the old days, most farmers leased land. Very few farmers owned their own land. You had land you farmed one year and you had your cows in another field, and you rotated them each year.
“People started growing soybeans and my dad was one of them. He came by the house one morning and asked if I could help him do something. I told him ya, what? He said Jimmy and Gene Nelson and Donald Wayne had gone to Katy to an auction of a farmer who was selling out and each one of them bought a drill. He said, ‘Gene or Donald said I could borrow their drill and I know I can borrow Jimmy’s. Will you come help me plant some beans with a drill? Those airplane pilots said they can control the weeds and grass.’ I said, okay so we go out there and we plant 300 acres. We were planting them in cuts, water level fields and we didn’t know what we were doing. We stopped up every other hole on one drill, left all of them open on the other drill and we were constantly changing them, ‘cause we didn’t know how much we were putting out, then we sprayed it. At that time, down here in this area a good crop was 35-36 bushels. By the time he got through, if he hadn’t carried some to Raywood and just put them all in his dryer he would have made 40 bushels. Farmers could use the same rice crop equipment to plant soybeans, but due to excessive rainfall in Chambers County, a lot of farmers lost money. It’s been a long time since farmers planted soybeans down here ’cause with the wet conditions and increased land rent, most nearly everyone went broke,” Leslie said.
Ag farmer becomes ag teacher
“I’d have to say my greatest hardship has been the economics of it. Of course, hurricanes were always a problem. I’ve farmed for 50 years and in the 90s, we decided I needed to do something else to help make ends meet. I got district certified as an Ag teacher and started teaching Ag, still farmed, but I taught Ag in Anahuac for 16 years. The longest any other Ag teacher taught there was nine years. Anahuac also offered dual credit courses, that’s how I met Lee Masters, he taught welding for Lee College. When Lee quit coming, I was able to get qualified to teach the dual credit courses. My greatest joy of teaching was interacting with the kids. The kids learned how to repair things, build new trailers and furniture and such. I would get kids that were doing poorly in their other classes and get out there in the shop and just do great with the hands-on work. It made them feel successful,” Leslie said.
“We were one of the few schools that had a meat processing plant, it was put in in ’57. It was a shame when they redid our curriculum and did away with the class about 2006 or ’07. At the end of the six weeks, I always let them bring meat out of their freezer and cook. I’d see kids I’d never seen before in my life because that south wind would be blowing, and the smell would just draw them in to get something good to eat. I would tell the kids, if you don’t have your stuff done you can’t cook. There might be someone who’d been piddlin’ around not getting his work done and I’d let him know, if you’re not finished, we don’t cook. There were kids helping other kids ‘cause they wanted to make sure everything got done so they could cook and the one who’d been dragging his feet would work harder that last week than he had the whole six weeks. Things like that were a lot of fun. I began teaching in ’97 and retired in 2013. I finally had to let it go, even though I enjoyed it, because standing on the concrete floor all day wore my knees out. The boys I taught were a great help to me on the farm, I paid them to help me while I was teaching and there is one who began working for me when he was a sophomore in high school who still works for me today,” Leslie continued.
It’s been a good life
“President J. F. Kennedy said, ‘The farmer is the only one in our economy who buys retail, sells wholesale, and pays the freight both ways,’” said Leslie with a laugh. “He was so right, but I do it because I love it and I’ve been doing it for 50 years. I think I’m the next to the oldest rice farmer in Chambers County. Butch Joseph from the west side is the oldest. It’s been a good life.”
What a beautiful story. Love these history articles!