| While
most East Texans were planning Thanksgiving dinners in 1929, four old friends
in Frankston were sitting
down for a meal of possum and sweet potatoes.
W.W. Scarborough's decision
to invite Davis Gardner, Lee Jowell and Ralph Levassar for a possum dinner at
Scarborough Springs led to one of East Texas' most unusual culinary events during
the years of the Great Depression.
The four friends enjoyed their 1929
meal so much that they decided to invite everyone in Frankston
in 1930. Forty-seven people showed up. After that, the Frankston Possum Dinner
attracted people from all over East Texas, as well as several neighboring states.
Metropolitan newspapers and the wire services made the dinner a celebrity event
with stories appearing throughout the country.
Aunt Eugenia Carey, a
beloved Frankston cook, prepared the 1929 dinner and the others that followed
for ten years. The meal began with a simple menu, possums and sweet potatoes,
but it soon evolved into much more.
Successive dinners included beef,
pork, mutton, bear, elk and bison meat, ducks, chickens and turkeys and some things
the cooks were reluctant to identify. And, of course, there was plenty of fresh
possum meat.
Side dishes included crackling bread, sweet potato pies,
potato salad, gingerbread and other traditional dishes from East Texas.
Guests often brought possums to the dinner and awards were given to those who
brought the largest. A photograph sent around the country after one dinner showed
Blue Whitesides and Gaylon Halbert holding up two king-sized possums before they
became a meal.
The annual dinner continued for ten years during the depression, but in 1939,
following the death of founder W.W. Scarborough, his friends began looking for
a way to honor the Possum King. They decided the best way was to make the 1939
dinner the biggest ever--something Scarborough would have appreciated.
With only a month to set up the November dinner, Scarborough's fiends did their
job well. When the dinner began, the pits held 1,100 pounds of beef, 900 pounds
of pork, 600 pounds of mutton, and 140 fat possums.
Someone came up with
the idea of picking a grand marshal for the dinner by staging a pistol-shooting
contest between three East Texas sheriffs--Jess Sweeten of Henderson County, W.G
.Roden of Anderson County, and Mary Brunt, who had been appointed sheriff in Cherokee
County after her husband Bill was killed in a shootout with a bootlegger.
Out of courtesy, Sweeten and Roden allowed Mrs. Brunt to shoot first, and
she did so well that, in a chivalrous gesture, the two male sheriffs forfeited
the contest to the Cherokee County law woman.
J.A. Houston brought in
1939's biggest possum, weighing nearly ten pounds, and was awarded a suit of Dickey's
khakis as his prize.
Although plans were made to have 140 possums for
dinner, a half-dozen were released and scrambled up a sweetgum tree to watch the
crowd devour their cousins.
Some 3,500 men and women were served possum
(and the rest of the menu) on five long tables. However, there is no record of
how many of the guests declined possum servings. Although plans were made to have
a 1940 Possum Dinner, the country's preoccupation with the widening war in Europe
put a cloud over the event. There was not another Possum Dinner held in Frankston.
©
Bob Bowman
November 12, 2006
Column
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Forum:
Subject:
possum and sweet potatoes
Just read Mr. Bowman's column about the annual possum & sweet' taters dinner.
My mother had an American Woman's Home cookbook, circa early 1940's, which I still
have. Way in the back are recipes for cooking possum, armadillo, woodchuck, raccoon
and the more popular squirrel. In another old Louisiana cookbook I have from her,
there is a recipe for cooking nutria. I never thought of myself as a picky eater,
ever, but I must say, I would gladly declare myself a vegetarian on the spot if
presented with these critters. - Frances Giles, September 16, 2012 |
