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    FREER, TEXAS

    Twice an Oil Boom Town

    Duval County, South Texas
    US 59, Hwy 16 and Hwy 44
    25 miles W of San Diego
    35 miles W of Alice
    77 miles W of Corpus Christi
    61 miles E of Laredo

    Population: 3,241

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    Freer, Texas Points of Interest:

  • History/Story by Mike Cox
  • Freer, Texas Today Photos by Gerald Massey

    Book Hotel > Alice Hotels
  • Pump Jack, and plaque in memory of Hap Holcomb
    Photo courtesy Gerald Massey, 2010
    Freer by Mike Cox
    J. Frank Dobie had an opinion on just about anything.

    In 1941, the noted Texas storyteller and University of Texas faculty member pondered the literature of two distinctly Texan industries – cattle and oil. “Compared with the literature and art reflective of cattle, cowboys, trail driving, horses and other factors of life on the range,” Dobie wrote in his weekly newspaper column, “the literature and art reflective of the oil business…are slender.”

    For the most part, that’s held up, at least in terms of fiction. The trail driving era has Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lonesome Dove,” but the Texas oil patch has yet to be the setting for any novel likely to become a classic.

    Not that writers have not recognized the romantic in the muddy, greasy, stinky world of oil production. Three years before Dobie lamented the literary dry hole of the energy industry, a weekly newspaper in South Texas was peddling a little book of oil field verse called “Bell-Bottoms to Boots” by a sailor-turned-roughneck named Joe “Blackie” Wilson.

    Dobie liked poetry, but likely would have dismissed Wilson’s effort as so much doggerel. Still, the poems have a ring of truth.

    In rhyme, Wilson tried to distill life in and around the Duval County town of Freer, the state’s last truly wild and wooly oil boom town. The first boom came in the late 1920s, but a second boom that began in 1932 for all practical purposes suspended the Great Depression in that part of the state.

    C.L. Day started a weekly newspaper, the Freer Enterprise, as the second boom gathered momentum in 1933. At some point, “Blackie” Wilson came to the area to work in the fields. Soon he began submitting poems to the newspaper.

    The poems proved to be a popular and Day decided to capitalize on that.

    “Hundreds of subscribers,” he wrote, “have been so well pleased with ‘Rod Tailin’ Blackie’s’ poems that they have preserved them in scrap books. In order to gratify your desire for a book of poems by your favorite author, we have gone to considerable trouble and expense to publish Bell-Bottoms to Boots so that you may be able to secure your favorite poems bound in a beautiful book, without extra cost.”

    Of course, a person did have to pay $2 for a subscription to the Enterprise to obtain a “free” copy.

    From this distant perspective, it’s hard to imagine that the oil patch workers spent much time pondering poetry. But they couldn’t work and raise hell all the time. Nor could the boom that lured them to South Texas last.

    Freer is still on the map, but the boom finally played out. As Wilson wrote:
    “Well, boys, the boom is over—they’re throwing drunks in jail
    “The dealers and the dolls are on the lam.
    “If you do any serious drinking be sure to arrange for bail.
    “Or you’ll face the morning after in a jam.
    “Freer is on her good behavior and will never be the same.
    “Remember Borger and Mexia before the rangers came?

    “O somewhere surely there’s another rag town booming
    “Where it’s no crime for roughnecks to throw a jag.”

    The Freer Enterprise went out of business in 1972 and these days Wilson’s book of poetry is as scarce as sissies on a drilling rig.

    So what was Wilson’s story? As the title of his book suggests, Wilson had been a sailor. One of his poems offers strong evidence he was born and raised around Normangee in Leon County.

    “There is something about an oilfield that always calls you back,
    And you can say the same thing of the sea,” he wrote.
    “I guess I should be sorry that I listened to their calls,
    For the two of them have made a tramp of me.”

    The book contains no author’s blurb, but the author hints at further autobiography in “The Chronic Urge.”

    Wilson wrote: “Life gave me a sledge [hammer] when I wanted a pen
    And rock when I looked for a rose.
    I slaved a while, got drunk on gin
    And wrote verses of my woes.”

    The booze overrode the muse until, “I begged of Life for a place in the shade
    That I might write.
    —And she put me to work with a pick and spade
    And gave me a Baptist wife.”

    That apparently cured Blackie’s boozing as sure as big-hatted rangers tamed Freer and the other boom towns.

    © Mike Cox
    "Texas Tales"
    - May 1, 2005 column
    Mike Cox
    Freer, Texas Today
    Freer TX - mileage sign, 62 miles to Laredo
    1 mile to Freer, 62 miles to Laredo
    Photo courtesy Gerald Massey, 2010
    Freer TX - St. Mary's Catholic Church
    St. Mary's Catholic Church
    Photo courtesy Gerald Massey, 2010
    Freer TX - United Methodist Church

    United Methodist Church
    Photo courtesy Gerald Massey, 2010
    More Texas Churches

    Freer TX Fire Dept
    Freer Fire Dept.
    Photo courtesy Gerald Massey, 2010
    Freer TX Old Bldg
    Photo courtesy Gerald Massey, 2010
    Freer TX Closed Store
    Closed Store
    Photo courtesy Gerald Massey, 2010
    Freer TX Rattlesnake Round Up
    Freer - "Home of Texas' Official Rattlesnake Round Up"
    Photo courtesy Gerald Massey, 2010
    Freer TX - Hap Holcomb Memorial Plaque
    Hap Holcomb Memorial Plaque
    Photo courtesy Gerald Massey, 2010
    Texas Escapes, in its purpose to preserve historic, endangered and vanishing Texas, asks that anyone wishing to share their local history, stories, and vintage/historic photos of their town, please contact us.
    Freer, Texas
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