The Campaign Update: Rediscovering Home Country

It’s funny how a place gets into your blood, isn’t it? I think each of us is, in part, where we were born and raised. We don’t all have that opportunity, obviously. Some families move around constantly and their kids don’t really get much chance to develop this deep tie to one geographical place.

I was not one of those kids, and I feel lucky for it. I’m an 8th generation Texan, and my distant ancestors, a native of Ireland named Thomas Pugh and his wife Margaret, settled in what is now San Patricio County just north and west of Corpus Christi in the 1820s as a part of Stephen F. Austin’s original land grant program with the government of Mexico. That is my Dad’s side of the family, and my mother’s side first entered Texas just a few years later.

For the most part, my family has remained not just in Texas, but concentrated in the four county area of South Texas made up by San Patricio, Live Oak, Bee and Goliad counties. So, Texas is literally in my blood, but more specifically, so is that small geographical part of South Texas.

The reason I bring this all up is that my wife, Terri and I drove 702 miles (round trip) on Saturday from our home just south of Fort Worth down to the Gussettville Cemetery outside of George West, the county seat of Live Oak County, to help place a headstone at he grave of my Dad, George Blackmon, Jr. It was a long drive - more miles than I’ve ever driven in a single day in my life, but an interesting one.

First, thank God and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry for Texas Highway 130, the toll road that bypasses Austin to the East and ultimately connects with Interstate 10 near Seguin. Hwy. 130 and its sister road, Texas Hwy. 45, were built as a part of Perry’s Trans-Texas Corridor plan for using private contractors to build a high-speed toll road network across the state. That program didn’t come to full fruition, but at least these roads ended up getting done.

Texas Highway 130 bypass from Georgetown to Seguin.

Highway 130, with its’ 80-85 mph speed limits and limited traffic, cuts at least half an hour off of the drive down to South Texas. Given that Saturday was a college football game day in Texas, including a Texas Longhorns’ game in Austin, it likely cut an hour off each way. I’m not sure I’d have survived the trip back home if I’d had to sit in I-35 traffic through Austin, where it turns into essentially a 10 mile-long parking lot on game days.

Highway 130 is expensive from a tolls perspective, but dang if it isn’t quick.

I haven’t really lived in Beeville since I was 29 years old, when Terri and I pulled up stakes and moved to Austin. A year later, we moved to Fort Worth, where I went to work for what was then called Meridian Oil and later became Burlington Resources. I somehow managed to remain employed by BR for 19 years, until the company was sold to ConocoPhillips. We raised our own kids in the Fort Worth area, which to them no doubt feels like their home country, as it should. Not coincidentally, it’s where they’ve decided to live and raise their own families.

Terri and I first lived in Tarrant County from 1987 through 2003, when BR wanted me to relocate to the company headquarters in Houston. After 13 wonderful years in Houston, we again moved to Tarrant County in 2016 to be close to family. In all, we’ve been in North Texas for 22 years, almost as long as I lived in Beeville, but this has never really felt like my home country to me.

I noticed it again on Saturday. I realized as we got south of San Antonio on Interstate 37 into first Atascosa County, then into McMullen and finally into Live Oak County, that I was starting to get that reconnected feeling again. It’s the nature of the countryside as much as anything else. The long expanses of South Texas brush country characterized by stands of live oaks amid a thorny landscape otherwise filled with mesquite, huisache and prickly pear cactus. It’s a harsh countryside, but beautiful in its own way.

And it’s really where Texas was born when you think about it. In Stephen F. Austin’s time, the Nueces river, which flows through Live Oak County down to Corpus Christi Bay, was in fact the formal border between Tejas and Mexico. Austin’s initial round of land grant rights authorized by the Mexican government were issued in that part of the world. Thomas Pugh was one of those grantees.

It was a hot son-of-a-gun at the Gussettville Cemetery on Saturday, literally 100 degrees in the shade. It’s a kind of primitive place, filled with history and graves of Texans whose birthdays date back to the 18th century (Thomas Pugh was born in 1798). There is a small but well-maintained Catholic Church on the grounds, which are a little overrun with South Texas sticker burrs right now. It’s where Dad wanted to be buried, and where we interred his ashes in May in a slightly disorganized, informal ceremony that is kind of typical of our family.

The first time Dad brought me there when I was a kid - probably around 1970 or so - the little church was in a state of disrepair and the cemetery itself had kind of gone to seed. He walked me around the grounds and showed me the graves of all of these family ancestors, no doubt hoping to convey a sense of family history to me. But I was very young and immature and really had no appreciation of it at the time.

We buried Dad’s father there in 1976, and it was only then that the amount of family history - and the histories of a lot of other South Texas families - buried in this little spot off a rural road in remote Live Oak County began to dawn on me.

So it was only appropriate that my own Dad’s ashes end up there, and equally appropriate that he be buried in the same plot with his own father, grandfather, grandmother - a tiny, feisty woman named Orie who was Thomas Pugh’s great-granddaughter - and several other ancestors.

Orie and her husband, William Blackmon, were tough and hardy people. They were both likely in their 60s before they had electricity in their home, as Live Oak County didn’t become fully electrified until the late 1930s. Today, with all the modern luxuries we now enjoy, it really is hard to imagine life in this part of the world without them. Think about this: I was born in 1956, a year that is much closer to the advent of electricity in rural parts of South Texas than to the invention of the fax machine. Hard to believe.

A small group of us - including my brother-in-law Keith, uncle Bobby, longtime family friend Buddy, me and Terri - met up late morning in the parking lot of a gas station at the intersection of Highway 59 and I-37. It’s kind of an impressive crossroads, really, with huge gas station/convenience store operations on 3 of the 4 corners, and an out-of-business similar facility on the southeast corner, servicing traffic coming up from Laredo on Hwy. 59 and cross-traffic between Corpus Christi and San Antonio on I-37. They were all packed with people and families of all classes and races on this very busy day.

That’s Keith setting the headstone, with Buddy supervising.

The drive to the cemetery, just a few miles away, took about 5 minutes, and the process of setting the headstone - Keith, the youngest among us, did most of the work - took only about an hour. We were all busy chattering away about family history and dove hunting and how damn hot it was when Terri looked around at all these sweating old men and realized we had better get us all out of the sun and into air-conditioned vehicles headed back to our various homes.

My and Terri’s home now is in Tarrant County, and hopefully will be until we die. We live here by choice, in order to be close to family, and we feel very lucky to be counted among those human beings who have the luxury of making such a choice.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. But Saturday reminded me that this little part of South Texas is literally in my blood, and that it always has been and I guess always will be my home country.

It was Dad’s home country, too, and he is now finally at rest in it, for good.

Rest in peace, Dad.

That is all.