The Rise and Fall of Robert T. Ervin

On March 15, 2023 By Rob RoehmIn Biography, Genealogy, Howard's World1 Comment

[By Rob Roehm; originally published in Onion Tops #83, REHupa mailing 286, Dec. 2020. This version updated and lightly edited.]

When the uncle for whom I was named—a prominent banker on the coast—was mixed up in the “round bale war,” he hired a private detective to guard his house and protect his family when he himself had to be absent, but he asked no man to protect him.

—Robert Ervin Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, ca. September 1932

After the Civil War, George W. Ervin (b. 1830), left Mississippi and headed west to Texas with his wife, Sarah Jane (1832), and seven children: Marilda C. (1850), Christena C. (1852), Christopher C. (1855), John P. (1856), William V. (1860), Georgia Alice (1862), and David D. (1865). Quickly settling in Hill County, Robert Thomas Ervin was born there on January 30, 1867. His brother John would die there the following year. In documents, Robert E. Howard’s namesake appears most often as “R. T. Ervin,” though sometimes the middle initial is wrong, and/or the last name is misspelled as Erwin, Irvin, Ervine and other guesses or mistakes. (Dark Valley Destiny has “Robert F. Ervin,” a likely transcription error.) I’ve retained these errors in my transcriptions throughout this article.

By the time of the 1870 Census, George Ervin had amassed more land in Hill County than most of his neighbors. Selling much of it, the family (which now included one Hester Jane, born that June) appears to have spent a little time early in 1872 in Shady Grove, Arkansas, before settling back in Texas. Operating as a real estate agent in Dallas by 1874, Ervin’s fortunes rose with his January 5 election to the Board of Directors of the Dallas & Wichita Railroad and his selling of parcels of property in a section of land called “Ervin’s Addition.” That year brought Ervin’s last child with Sarah Jane, Lizzie, but 1874 would also take its toll: Sarah and Lizzie both died in June, and nine-year-old David died in October.

On April 14, 1875, eight-year-old Robert Ervin got a step-mother, Alice Wynne, and not long after, a new home in Lewisville, in Denton County, as well as a new sister, Coralie (1876). While waiting for the railroad to arrive in town, George Ervin continued selling lots in Ervin’s Addition, ran a hotel in Lewisville, and invested in mineral rights—the family was quite comfortable. Other children were born: Jessie in 1880 and Annie in 1882. It is here in Lewisville, one supposes, that Robert Ervin first attended school and watched his older siblings move out and establish themselves. By the end of 1885, only three of the children born to Sarah Jane were still in the household: daughters Georgia Alice and Hester Jane, and son Robert Thomas. With his finances in very good shape, George Ervin decided to move the family to a more sophisticated community.

Before the rise of Mineral Wells, Lampasas was a hot spot for the well-to-do in Texas. “In 1882 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway was extended to Lampasas, ending the town’s cattle-trailing and gun-fighting era. As the western terminus of the line, Lampasas became a trading center for West Texas. New business houses were established, real estate prices rose, and the population soared to an estimated 3,500” (Handbook of Texas Online). When the Ervins arrived, late in 1885, the boomtown had moved on, but the town had other attractions: “By 1882 tourists discovered the mineral springs and Lampasas became a health resort. In that year a syndicate of railroad officials built the Park Hotel near Hancock Springs and ran a mule-drawn streetcar to the railroad station. Subsequently, the Hannah Springs Company built the Hannah Bath and Opera House, where the Democratic state convention was held in 1893” (Handbook of Texas Online). On January 9, 1886, G. W. Ervin dropped $1,500 (the equivalent of $40,000 today) for three lots in the “Lampasas Springs Company’s first addition to the town of Lampasas.” This was the first of many such transactions.

It is unknown what type of schooling or training Robert Ervin received before arriving in Lampasas at the age of nineteen, but it seems he must have been good at math. The December 1, 1888, Lampasas Leader reported that “R. T. Ervin has accepted a position as note clerk in the Galbraith Bank, taking the place of Geo. W. Rodgers, resigned.” The Galbraith Bank was in downtown Lampasas. R. T. Ervin had found his calling.

The next summer, in July 1889, Robert Ervin appears in several society articles, attending parties with the Lampasas elite—which sometimes included his sisters, Alice and Hester. On July 20, the Lampasas Leader ran a list of young men who were “organizing a military company”—R. T. Ervin was on that list. And while he earned advancement to assistant cashier at the bank, he wouldn’t remain in Lampasas for long; later that year he accepted a position as cashier at the First National Bank in Beeville, or possibly Bellville, Texas, closer to the Gulf (newspapers have conflicting reports, though Bellville makes more sense to me). The following year, 1890, George Ervin liquidated his holdings in Lampasas and moved the family to Exeter, Missouri. Robert Ervin was on his own.

On April 30, 1891, he “was at the Capitol,” according to the Galveston Daily News, and in July, he moved again. On July 23, 1891, the Galveston Daily News reported that “R. T. Ervin, cashier” had resigned from his post at the First National Bank at “Beeville.” His resignation must have been due to an opportunity to the east, in the newly established town of Velasco: “The new town of Velasco was surveyed and laid out in 1891, when a new Velasco post office was established. The port was officially opened by the United States secretary of the treasury on July 7, 1891” (Handbook of Texas Online). As early as September 19, 1891, Ervin is acquiring land in Brazoria County and, by November 14, 1891, the Velasco Times was mentioning him as one of the directors of the Velasco Commercial Club, running ads featuring “R. T. Ervin, Cashier,” and listing him as one of the Board of Directors of a new endeavor:

First National Bank of Velasco

The organization of the First National Bank of Velasco with a capital of $75,000 was completed on the 12th and the bank will open as such, December 1st, prox.

The directors are Messrs J. M. Moore late president of the First National Bank of Lampasas, R. T. Irvin late assistant cashier of same bank and late cashier of the First National Bank of Bellville, George W. Angle, of the Brazos River Channel and Dock Company, Texas Land and Immigration company etc. J. H. Shappard, of Shappard Stevens & Co., all wealthy men of this state with headquarters at Velasco, L. A. Abbot, of Abbot & Marmion, one of the city’s most financially solid firms, Louis R. Bryan, a well known lawyer and owner of much valuable unencumbered real estate in this and adjoining counties, and H. Kempner banker and merchant of Galveston and one of the richest men in that very rich city.

Officers elected were J. M. Moore, president; J. H. Shappard, vice-president, and R. L. Irvin, cashier.

From the above it will be seen that this is probably the strongest bank in the State if not in the whole Southwest. The aggregate wealth of the above mentioned gentlemen, in clear real estate alone, that is constantly rising in value, runs far up into the millions, and each one of them is known to be a first class thoroughly trained self made business man in every respect. Messrs J. M. Moore and R. L. Irvin are well and favorably known in financial circles all over the South and West and in the great money centers of the East. Of Mr. Moore, the Lampasas Leader, his home paper says editorially:

“Mr. Moore is one of our most substantial citizens, and is an exceedingly safe and conservative financier, with none of the elements of the miser in his make-up. [. . .]”

Once established in his new position, Ervin resumed the society life. “A Christmas Treat,” in the December 27, 1891 Velasco Daily Times, describes the celebration of the town’s first Christmas in sumptuous detail. The Hotel Velasco was “gaily decorated” for the assembled men. The bill of fare included oysters on the half shell, turtle soup, turkey with oyster sauce, saddle of venison, absinthe et cognac, and many other delicacies. Later, “Responding to toasts, short, pithy and appropriate speeches were made,” including “To Velasco’s financial prosperity,” delivered by Ervin. After the speeches, “the party then adjourned to enjoy their fifty cent Havanas in Mr. Crowe’s department of the hotel where they passed the evening in that serene and happy state of mind so frequently mentioned in scripture.”

The February 10, 1892 Velasco Daily Times has this:

One of the most intricate and artistic pieces of carving from a photograph was viewed last night by a TIMES reporter at the Palace of Beauty. It was a two dollar and fifty cent gold piece engraved, with an excellent photograph of R. T. Ervin, cashier of the Velasco National bank, and was executed by E. G. Schoeler. It is a splendid piece of work and well worth viewing.

In its “Political News” column for March 7, 1892, under “Velasco Politics” the Fort Worth Gazette describes a meeting of “planters, stockmen, sea coast captains, railroaders, laborers, merchants and professional men,” including Ervin. They are “all well-known citizens and property holders, are a committee to take future action in bringing Democracy to the front in Brazoria county under the motto, ‘Turn Texas Loose.’”

Ervin’s star was rising in the growing community and his popularity increased. The March 11, 1892 Velasco Daily Times described the Velasco National Bank as “one of the solid business institutions of Velasco of which she is proud. It began business here December 15th, and has been doing a large and increasing business ever since.” The same article describes Ervin and the other officials as “very popular among our business men.” There were plans to “erect a handsome two-story brick building [. . .] of pressed brick, with iron front trimmed with cut stone and plate glass doors.” The March 20, 1892 Velasco Daily Times reported, “R. T. Ervin, the popular cashier of the Velasco National bank, left yesterday for a short visit to Houston.” This was the first of several visits to the big city.

And banking wasn’t his only interest. Several court documents available online indicate that Ervin had a side gig dealing in real estate—like father, like son. The few records available indicate that he made more than $600 in land deals near Velasco in less than two years. That’d be around $20,000 in 2023 dollars. And he was just getting started.

With the Velasco bank booming, and his land speculation bringing in the coin, Ervin set his sights on the next opportunity, as reported in the January 25, 1893, edition of the Galveston Daily News under “Texas Banks”: “R. T. Ervin of Velasco and associates have applied for authority to establish the First national bank of Wharton.” This was also reported in The Banker’s Magazine and Statistical Register for February 1893. The March 7, 1893, Galveston Daily News had more details from Wharton: “Mr. R. T. Ervin of Velasco is in town making arrangements to establish a national bank at this place. The building which he will occupy is in course of construction and will be completed about the 1st of April. Immediately thereupon he will move in and begin business.”

On March 17, 1893, the Velasco Times bid farewell to one of its rising stars: “R. T. Ervin, ex-cashier of the Velasco National Bank, and who has organized a bank in Wharton, paid his Velasco friends a short visit this week and departed Wednesday for his new home. We wish him success.” Ervin was just 26, a successful business man with contacts in the financial world and a growing influence in his chosen sphere—things couldn’t get much better.

*Galveston Evening News*, April 27, 1893

Erwin-Clarke.

Last night Trinity church was crowded to its utmost capacity to witness the wedding ceremony of Mr. Robert Erwin and Miss Mary Clarke. The floral decorations were numerous and most attractive. There was a beautiful floral arch in front of the chancel, under which the happy couple stood during the ceremony.

Mr. Charles Clarke and Miss Gertrude Clarke, brother and sister of the bride, and Mr. Charles Kellner and Miss Lauve were the attendants, while Mr. Charles Artz and Dr. H. W. Lubben were the ushers.

After the ceremony at the church the bridal party and numerous friends repaired to the residence of the bride’s parents, corner of Strand and Tenth street, where a reception was held.

The bride is the daughter of Mr. Charles Clarke, the well known contractor of this city, while the groom is a young business man of great promise, at present engaged in the banking business at Wharton, Tex.

The newly married couple will leave for their future home, Wharton, Tex., this morning, followed by the good wishes of the bride’s host of friends in this city and welcomed there by those of the groom.

— Galveston Daily News, April 28, 1893

Marrying the daughter of a wealthy, prominent Galveston business man certainly had its benefits. It wasn’t long before Ervin and his father-in-law became business partners in a financial firm called “R. T. Ervin & Company.” And the banking business continued, as well. In its “Official Bulletin of New National Banks,” The Banker’s Magazine and Statistical Register for May 1893 lists “First National Bank, Wharton, Tex. R. T. Ervin” with assets totaling “50,000.” For Robert T. Ervin, life was good.

By all indications, the Ervins had it made. According to court papers, “R. T. Ervin and Charles Clarke, Sr., were partners engaged in running a private bank at Wharton, Texas. R. T. Ervin managed the business and acted as cashier.” He also continued his side hustle, purchasing his first real estate in Wharton County in November 1893, with more than 30 transactions recorded between 1893 and January 1899.

He also partnered with his father, G. W. Ervin, on holdings in Barry County, Missouri, as reported under the headline, “THEY HAVE STRUCK OIL,” in the December 19, 1895, Cassville Republican:

When Col. G. W. Ervin of Exeter came to this county from Texas, his attention was attracted to the flattering prospect and, enlisting the interest of his son, R. T. Ervin, of Galveston, Tex., began leasing land in Washburn and Sugar Creek Townships. They have 1,500 acres now under lease and [are] taking more as fast as they can get it.

[. . .]

The extent of the oil field is, of course, yet unknown, but Messrs. Ervin & Son are confident that they have a rich thing and will proceed to put down other wells on the land leased. They believe that the field extends to the south into Arkansas and, as soon as practicable, they contemplate erecting a refinery to enable them to put the oil on the market ready for use.

Naturally, considerable excitement was created Friday when the discovery was made known and everybody congratulates the Colonel upon the success of his prospecting. The oil is of a heavy body and is said to be of excellent quality.

Ervin and his wife began having children: Robert Clarke Ervin in 1894; Mary Alice in 1896, possibly named after Ervin’s sister, Georgia Alice, both of whom went by “Alice”; and Evelyn Constance in 1898. The Galveston papers report various and growing investments throughout the mid-1890s. The April 7, 1897 Galveston Daily News reported on Ervin’s continuing good fortune: “Wharton, Tex., April 5.—Mr. R. T. Ervin of the banking firm of R. T. Ervin & Co. of this town has purchased the five corner lots of Mrs. M. E. Anderson on the corner of Rust and West Milam streets and will immediately begin the erection of five brick business houses, one of them to be used as a bank building. The bank will be a two-story structure.”

But things may not have been entirely rosy. Throughout the 1890s, a sometimes bitter dispute arose between cotton farmers regarding the method in which their crops were baled; the camps were divided into “the round bale people” and the “square bale people,” with each side accusing the other of “trying to secure control of the cotton fields” (Halletsville Herald, June 23, 1898). Robert T. Ervin may have been caught in the middle at some point. In a circa September 1932 letter to H. P. Lovecraft, Ervin’s nephew, Robert E. Howard, recalls a tale he must have heard from his mother:

When the uncle for whom I was named—a prominent banker on the coast—was mixed up in the “round bale war,” he hired a private detective to guard his house and protect his family when he himself had to be absent, but he asked no man to protect him. He wore his protection slung on his own right hip. Anyway, when one of his associates was shot down on the streets, the gang that did it ran the sheriff clean out of town. Even when my uncle learned of a plot to murder him as he got aboard the Galveston train, he didn’t ask for a police escort. He didn’t even ask his friends to help him, but they were there in force, and the would-be killers backed down. I’m not telling this to show how brave my uncle was; I don’t claim he was braver than anybody else. As far as that goes, he wasn’t afraid of anything between the devil and the moon. But it just shows that in those days men considered protecting themselves their own personal job, unless the odds against them were too overwhelming.

I have been unable to find documentary evidence for any of this. There is, however, one final drama to relate. The scandal played itself out in the small town newspapers of neighboring communities: Halletsville, La Grange, and El Campo. I have not found mention of it in the Velasco, Houston, or Galveston papers.

Page 1 of *La Grange Journal* for March 23, 1899

A shorter write-up appeared the same day in the Halletsville Herald: “Banker Ervin of Wharton has been arrested and jailed on the charge of improper conduct with his typewriter, a mere child. The girl’s father accepted a check for $5000 in settlement of the affair, but Ervin stopped payment of the check at a Houston bank and his arrest followed.”

The incident was still on people’s minds on March 23, when the La Grange Journal printed this note from the Halletsville Herald: “The Wharton man who accepted a check for $5,000 in payment of his daughter’s honor and virtue should be tarred and feathered and ordered to leave the state. Texas is no place for such people.”

At this late date, it is impossible to know what effect this scandal had on Ervin’s life, both public and private, though we can certainly hazard a guess. In 1899, was this sort of affair enough to ruin a man of Robert Ervin’s standing? What were the social consequences, not only for Robert, but also for his wife and children? Would there be damage to Charles Clarke’s reputation? After what must have been a terrible month of gossip and sideways glances, arguments and tears, Robert Thomas Ervin succumbed to the pressure and died. He was 32.

ERWIN—Wharton, Texas, March 28.—The sad news of the death of Banker R. T. Erwin reached here this morning and caused great sorrow to his many friends here. Mr. Erwin will be greatly missed in the business circles of Wharton, where he was known as a public spirited liberal man, wide-awake to the public interest and a warm friend to the public good. Mr. Erwin’s death took place in Galveston, where he went for medical attention.

—Houston Daily Post, March 29, 1899

The smaller papers were less kind: “R. T. Ervin, the Wharton banker who recently figured in a scandal case, died at Galveston a few days ago” (Halletsville Herald, April 6, 1899).

In Afloat on a Full Sea: the Clarke Family of Galveston Island (2014), Robert Ervin’s great-granddaughter, Evelyn Joann Russell, condenses all of the above into a few paragraphs; her focus is on the Clarke family, not Robert Ervin. While she does not mention the scandal, she does provide some interesting details of Ervin’s final moments: “Mary had lost her husband Robert to some sudden affliction that no one understood yet. What could cause an intelligent young businessman to start raving and screaming and go on like that for three days? They had taken him from his home in Wharton to the hospital in Galveston but no one there knew what to make of his illness. Finally, the poor man’s heart or brain or something vital to his existence just stopped and the father of three little children was pronounced dead.”

According to the death certificate and mortuary records obtained from the Rosenberg Library’s History Center in Galveston, R. T. Ervin died on March 27, 1899, at 2:00 a.m. at the John Sealy Hospital on the corner of 9th and Strand, a block away from the Clarke residence. The immediate cause of death is “cerebral effusion,” with a “remote cause of death” listed as “acute mania.” The scandal had indeed taken its toll.

Details of the funeral and its aftermath appear in Afloat on a Full Sea:

The minimal final services were held before a distraught family on March 28, 1899, the day after his death, at Grace Episcopal Church in Galveston. Burial took place in the Clarke’s large plot at Cahill’s Cemetery (since renamed Evergreen Cemetery) on Broadway. The widow was only twenty-nine years old. She had the immediate and sole responsibility of caring for her three small children. Her grief rendered her completely unable to cope with the ordinary daily tasks of life. Not knowing what else to do, she arranged to have all of her household goods and personal items moved from Wharton to her parents’ home on Strand.

Russell later says that Mary “led a reclusive life in the large house and turned over primary care of the children to the same servants who had raised her.” There are four servants living in the household during the 1900 Census. Russell also adds that Mary “would remain dependent on others for the rest of her life.”

Epilogue—

On March 31, 1899, G. G. Kelley, attorney-at-law, appeared before the honorable G. S. Gordon, judge of the county court at Wharton. He informed the judge of Ervin’s passing, the fact that he left behind a wife and three children, and that “he left considerable community property of himself and petitioner [Mary Ervin] the principal portion of which lies in Wharton County, Texas.” Kelly asked for an appraisal of the estate and that after the inventory, the judge “vest in [Mary Ervin] the rights and powers of survivor in community as provided by the statutes of this state.” It was all done by April 5, 1899, when Mary Ervin was “authorized and empowered to control, manage, and dispose of such community property” listed in the inventory. When it was all said and done, Mary was sitting on top of $28,911.00—that’s a cool million in 2023 dollars.

Not that she needed it: as we have seen, the Clarkes were very well off. In fact, they built what I’m tempted to call a mansion on Avenue I in Galveston shortly after Ervin’s death. In her book, Russell says that the Clarke family, including the bereaved Ervins, moved into the newly constructed home just before the famous hurricane hit Galveston early in September 1900: “It proved to be a formidable shelter for the family and strangers who assembled there to ride out the raging winds and torrents of rain. Among them were relatives of the late husband of Clarke’s daughter Mary Clarke Ervin. They had traveled from North Texas to see the Clarke residence and to enjoy a few days on the beach. After the storm, they found themselves stranded by a historic disaster.”

Who were these relatives? They are unnamed in the text, but also just before the hurricane, Robert Ervin’s sister, Hester Jane Ervin, was on the move. She had spent much of the 1890s traveling between her father’s home in Exeter, Missouri, and her siblings’ homes in Indian Territory and Texas. The June 30, 1899 Abilene Reporter ran this item: “Miss Ervin, of Missouri, who has been visiting in Galveston and Dallas, was due to arrive here this afternoon to visit her sister, Mrs. Cobb, at the California house.” It seems likely that Hester had gone to Galveston to pay her respects. Might she have returned in September?

How close Hester Ervin-Howard remained to her brother’s family is a mystery, but there is only one mention of the Galveston Ervins in Robert E. Howard’s correspondence, and it is not in relation to one of his visits there: “Relatives of mine were in Galveston when it was washed away in 1900, but fortunately all were saved, though many of their friends were drowned” (Letter to H. P. Lovecraft, ca. August 1931). Perhaps this quote is the source of Russell’s information and she was unaware that Howard was probably referring to Mary Ervin and her children, who were, after all, his relatives.

Mary Ervin never remarried. She died at the end of 1946, on New Year’s Eve.

Special thanks to Damon Sasser for getting the ball rolling on this back in March of 2014; to my parents, for going to Galveston in May 2017 and visiting the cemetery for me; and to Will Oliver, for visiting the courthouses and communities that I haven’t been to . . . yet.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

On August 19, 2021August 26, 2021 By Rob RoehmIn Contemporaries, Genealogy, Harold Preece, Lone Scouts1 Comment

[By Rob Roehm. Originally published in Onion Tops #62, Feb. 2015. A revised version was posted on March 17, 2015, at rehtwogunraconteur.com; this version slightly updated.]

Mary Ervin, aka “Maxine,” the youngest of her Ervin clan, was born at Big Spring, Texas, on October 12, 1906, to William Vinson Ervin, Sr. (Hester Howard’s brother) and Ida Ezzell Ervin (the sister of Hester Howard’s former heart-throb, Frank Ezzell). In January 1908, the Ervin family played host to William’s sister, Hester, her husband, Dr. I. M. Howard, and their baby boy, Robert. The Howards stayed a few weeks “due to illness” and then made their way to Seminole, up in Gaines County.

The 1910 US Census for Howard County, Texas, lists W. V. Ervin, age 48, as “Editor” for a “Paper” in Big Spring, with wife, Ida, 38; two sons, Vinson, 15, and Jessie, 13; and two daughters, Lesta, 8, and Maxine, 3. By the time of the 1920 Census, Jessie had flown the coop, W. V. was upgraded to “Publisher,” and everyone was 10 years older.

In 1921, Maxine participated in at least two declamation contests for the Big Spring high school, winning first place at one of them. She was on the Seventh Grade Exercises program with a “Reading” (sister Lesta performed a piano solo).

There is little evidence of the Ervins in the Big Spring High School yearbooks, the El Rodeo: only the senior photo of Lesta from 1919 and the “Irven” in the “Public Speaking Club” from 1922 that heads this post. My guess is that’s Maxine. She bears a striking resemblance to her Aunt Hester, if you ask me.

In the early 1920s, W. V. Ervin appears to have been starting newspapers in several small Texas towns, including Gail, Westbrook, and Putnam, all practically ghost towns today (yes, I’ve been to all of them). This caused him to be away from the family much of the time, but items in the newspapers show that he visited home frequently, and that his daughters often returned the favor—when they had a break from school. While working on the paper at Putnam, in Callahan County, the Ervins visited the Howards in Cross Plains:

The Misses Maxine and Lesta Erving [sic.], of Big Springs [sic.] were visiting their uncle, Dr. Howard and family, last week. They formerly were in the newspaper business, and for a time the two girls published a paper at Putnam, doing all the work themselves. They stated that they thought Cross Plains was a splendid town, and their visit here was a pleasant one.
Cross Plains Review – Oct. 5, 1923

In a letter dated the same day as the newspaper, Robert E. Howard told Tevis Clyde Smith a little more about the visit: “I’ve had two cousins visiting me, whom I hadn’t seen for fifteen years. They’d read the International Adventure Library and from what they said, Dracula is a hum-dinger. I’m going to order the set right away.”

In 1924, Maxine ran an ad in the Big Spring paper: “I am prepared to take a few pupils in expression. Maxine Ervin.” Also in 1924, sister Lesta moved to the big city and landed a job with the Dallas News; by 1927, Maxine had joined her as both appear in that year’s Dallas City Directory at 2515 Maple Avenue. Early in 1927, Lesta switched from the newspaper game to Etna Insurance. In November, their father William died.

In his essay, “The Last Celt,” Harold Preece reports on Maxine’s activities at the time: “During 1927, while I was enrolled at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, I was introduced by a fellow student to a visiting Dallas girl named Maxine Ervin. Maxine was employed as a clerk by a Dallas newspaper, though she shared my then very incipient literary ambitions. She was a remarkably intelligent woman, and a friendship of some years would follow.”

In another of Preece’s essays, “Robert’s Lady Cousin,” he describes Maxine as handsome and conservative, and says that she once described her cousin Robert as “a Tristan” from Celtic legendry. That essay also describes a 1927 Lone Scout convention that gave rise to a group called The Junto. Maxine was responsible for a photo of those Lone Scouts that appeared in the paper (an alternate shot appears above), was mentioned in the 1927 Texicoma Yearbook (a copy is here), and ended up being a member of The Junto, as well, but not many of her contributions have surfaced.

In 1928, Maxine is listed as a “journalist” with her sister at 4933 Victor Street in the city directory, but she wasn’t in Dallas for the whole year; on September 21, 1928, the Big Spring Herald reported the following: “Miss Maxine Ervin arrived from Dallas to accept a position with the West Texan, the new weekly publication, which is to make its advent here in the near future.” By 1929, Maxine appears to have moved back to Dallas. Both she and Lesta are at 2505 Maple in the city directory. Maxine again listed as “journalist.”

In March 1928, The Junto began its circulation. The first contribution by Maxine that survives is a comment on a previous issue that appeared in the October 1928 mailing:

Good Lord! What are we, cut throats? Have we lost sight of our treasured philosophy, our staunch independence, etc., etc? Did somebody accidentally drop a bomb that wasn’t a dud? I feel like I’d just been in a volcano or something after all this. The Junto is very good. Who is A.M.Y.? No fair hiding behind an alias. Anyway, what he or she said about Truett isn’t quite fair. As for “Our Beloved Barbarian” he can take care of himself.

Her only contribution to the December 1928 issue is this short comment about the November issue: “Not as good as usual.”

Around this time, Junto editor Booth Mooney was asking for biographies of the members. Robert E. Howard was less than enthusiastic about this, telling Clyde Smith in a letter that “I’ve decided I don’t care to have mine appear in the Junto. There are several reasons, the main one being that as several of my cousins receive it, my mother would be pretty near bound to hear about it and there are a good many things in my life that I don’t want her to know about.”

By July 1929, Maxine was back in Big Spring again; on The Junto’s mailing list for that month, Maxine had crossed out the Maple Avenue address and written “Box 1224, Big Spring, Texas.” She also had this comment about the mailing: “The best issue we have had in a long time, and it still has plenty of room for improvement.”

The August 1929 Junto contains a rather sexist piece on women by Harold Preece. Maxine wrote the following on the mailing list: “This issue is very good. I agree with Schultze that Harold is all off about women. Fact is, all men are.” She followed this short comment up with a longer one in the September mailing:

More about Mr. Preece
by Maxine Ervin
I may be putting my foot into it, but I feel like Harold has rather flung a challenge at some of “us girls” and that it should be taken up.
Don’t misunderstand me—I’m not defending womanhood against any mere male’s implications, accusations, attacks, satires, or what not for the simple reason that it isn’t necessary and it isn’t needed. Woman stands alone. She doesn’t give two “whoops and a holler” (quoting hill slang) what the world thinks of her; not if she is all genuine woman, she doesn’t; she may pretend she does, but deep down in her heart, she knows it isn’t so, and that she is going to go her own sweet way and enjoy herself.
The trouble is that women are just now beginning to find themselves. They have been so hampered and fettered by these generations past of strong men that they haven’t had the time nor the opportunity to find out what they really and truly do want. They are just now beginning to understand what life is all about and the vital part that they can play in it. They are learning that they have rights and the power to assert those same rights.
Pistols and horse whips have played a large part in woman’s emancipation, for she has learned that she, too, can meet brute force with brute force when it becomes necessary. If more women would shoot and horse-whip men who insult them and try this cave-man stuff, there’d be less of it, believe it or not.
The fact of the business is that men don’t like to see their chattels, toys, buffoons, slaves and what-not getting on an equal footing with them, economically, socially, or otherwise. It doesn’t suit his male desire for supremacy, for bullying, and brow-beating. He is denied having a meek, helpless something on which to vent the rage and other emotions that he is not man enough to control.
Oh, be fair. I think that all of this double-standard business is the most asinine, insane, and idiotic rot that ever was. I also think the same thing about this constant war of the sexes. We are human; we have human desires, aspirations, and hopes; we have our peculiarities, but first, last, and all the time we are HUMAN. Why can’t we behave as such and live and let live? Of course, there are some men who are unspeakable and some women who are unspeakable, but there are so many, many times their number who are real that I think it is silly to think of the few misfits and rotters when there are so many wonderful ones to think about.
Perhaps women haven’t yet become artists and musicians to rank with their brothers, but give them time. There never has been anything yet that women haven’t been able to attain once they set themselves to it. Anything within reason and that can be accomplished without a great deal of force as wars, for instance.
This is the way I feel about the subject. But I agree with Schultze that Harold should study his subject more. I am inclined to think that for some reason Harold is prejudiced and has not yet been able to re-assume an open minded attitude on the subject. Yet he swears he’s a genuine socialist!

This was the last of Maxine’s contributions to The Junto, as far as we know. The mailing list for the February 1930 issue has her address as “Maxine Ervin, c/o Beaumont Enterprise, Beaumont.” The US Census for that year has her there with her sister Lesta B., lodgers in the hotel of William Martin; Maxine’s occupation is listed as “newspaper work.”

By 1934 she’d moved to Longview, where she appears in the city directory with her mother and brother, William Vinson, Jr. In 1935 she had a short story, “They Die by Night,” published in Murder Mysteries. She appears to have spent some time writing radio scripts in Texas and California after this. In 1937, her first novel appeared, Death in the Yew Alley. I found a copy of this and can’t recommend it, nor its digest release, retitled If I Die, It’s Murder (1945). An October 30, 1938 article in the Wichita Daily Times (click here) has Maxine living in Wichita Falls, but the 1940 Census has her back in Longview, working as a reporter, with two years of college under her belt. Her mother Ida died in November of that year; the obituary reports Maxine’s address as Houston. On August 14, 1945, Maxine was the “informant” on sister Lesta’s death certificate. Her residence is reported as Fort Worth, profession is “writer.”

On July 27, 1948, the Breckenridge American had this: “Mary Ervin has come up from Mineral Wells to help out with society a while, telephone her your news.” Two days later, they ran a follow up:

Miss Mary Ervin has come as a relief worker on society to the Breckenridge American. She is away from California about three years. We asked today to give us her first impression of Breckenridge. She wrote:
“A gradual descent extending over more than three years has taken me from San Francisco’s forty-five degree hills to Mineral Wells’ not-so-steep hills, to the smooth, level prairie that is Breckenridge. My notion was Breckenridge leaned more to hills and woodlands than to prairie, so I had a surprise. It is all one piece of that long West Texas stretch which reaches from Fort Worth to El Paso. Breckenridge is a nice place to be in and part of, even if it hasn’t an up and down side to it.”

This didn’t last long though. The August 10 issue has this: “Miss Mary Ervin, who has been helping out in American office, in hospital in Mineral Wells—Society news will be printed as sent in until successor arrives.”

The early 1950s has Mary working the Society column for the Liberty Vindicator, out of Liberty, Texas. An introductory piece, “Mary Ervin New Editor of Page,” appeared on August 30, 1951. Her pieces appeared until at least mid-1952.

On July 25, 1963, Mary “Maxine” Ervin died of heart failure at the Wichita Falls State Hospital. Her residence at the time was the Jerome Hotel in Mineral Wells. Her profession was recorded as “reporter.” She is buried in an unmarked grave at the Riverside Cemetery in Wichita Falls.

The empty space between the headstone on the right and the two headstones on the left is the unmarked grave of Mary “Maxine” Ervin.

Updates

On July 15, 2021 By Rob RoehmIn Genealogy, Publishing2 Comments

For those following along, I found a few land records on a recent trip to Lexington, Georgia, and have added the information to “The Howard Family Tree” in part 3 and part 4. There’s nothing too interesting there, except that one of the documents might help pinpoint when Henry Howard moved from Oglethorpe County to Upson County. Maybe.

I’ve also updated “The Texas Spur.” During my perusal of that newspaper, I managed to miss a fairly significant notice regarding REH’s parents (pictured below), as well as a couple of mentions in other newspapers. Thankfully, Patrice Lounet is more thorough than I.

Lastly, a new edition of Robert Weinberg’s The Weird Tales Story is available from Pulp Hero Press (or Amazon). This “Expanded and Enhanced” version has lots of new material, including “Robert E. Howard and the Early Weird Tales (1923-1925)” by Bobby Derie, and “Robert E. Howard and the Later Weird Tales” by yours truly.

My Name Is Earl

On February 4, 2021 By Rob RoehmIn Biography, Contemporaries, GenealogyLeave a comment

Earl Lee Comer was one of Robert E. Howard’s first cousins. When his mother died in 1915, he left his home in Big Spring, Texas, to live with the Howard family in Cross Cut. Just 17, he attended the Cross Cut school for at least one year, earning a spot on the basketball team. Whether he was a “big brother” or a “big bother” is not known, but there are a couple of “cousins” mentioned in Howard’s correspondence that could refer to Comer. In 1918, the Howards moved to the nearby town of Burkett (where Robert tried out for the basketball team). Whether or not Comer accompanied them on this move is not known: he may have returned to Big Spring before joining the military on May 25, 1918. Comer visited the Howards many times over the years and may have corresponded with his Cousin Robert. Most of this was not known in 1983 when Comer was introduced, as follows, in L. Sprague de Camp’s biography of Howard, Dark Valley Destiny:

Robert Howard was thirteen years old when his family bought their home in Cross Plains. Although Robert had not outgrown the Burkett school system, which lacked high-school facilities, we surmise that Mrs. Howard’s nephew, Earl Lee Comer, who had come to live with them, had already reached high school age. Very little is known about this nephew, except that he shared the Howards’ house for several years. Robert, in his later letters to Lovecraft, never once mentions the slightly older lad whose presence must have affected him in one way or another. Since the two boys shared the sleeping porch, ate at the same table, and even attended the same high school, it is indeed curious that no mention of him appears in the correspondence of either Robert or his father.
Queries to former teachers at the Cross Plains school and to others who lived in the neighborhood have revealed nothing. All we know is that after completing his high-school courses, Lee Comer left Cross Plains to work for one of the oil companies in Dallas. Perhaps no one will ever know what Robert thought of this interloper in his home or what this orphaned youth thought of his thirteen-year-old cousin. [pg. 133-34]

The second edition of Mark Finn’s Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard (2011) corrects the timing above (which was inaccurate in the first edition), but doesn’t add anything new:

It was at this time [while living in Cross Cut] that Robert had to endure the first of many boarders. His orphaned cousin, Earl Lee Comer, was staying at the Howard house, and attended the Cross Cut High School. Robert was forced to share the sleeping porch with this older boy, who came to them though Hester’s side of the family. Comer stayed for at least a year, presumably until he graduated, and then enlisted in the military. Robert never discussed his cousin to anyone. [pg. 37-8]

I’m not sure how I feel about calling an orphaned cousin “a boarder,” but I’ll leave that alone. What both of these biographies suggest is that Comer’s stay with the Howards was less than ideal, and that Robert E. Howard didn’t talk about it later. So, which is it? Was Comer’s presence in the house something to be endured, or was it welcomed? Did Robert Howard never talk about this cousin, or simply not use his name? Besides the fact that Earl Lee Comer lived with the Howards, what do we really know about him? His story begins in Tennessee . . .

Hester Ann Perry was born in Tennessee in March 1835. Around 1854 she married a gentleman named Good. That union produced three children and ended in 1860—cause unknown. Only Sarah, the youngest child, accompanied Hester when she moved to Illinois. Shortly thereafter, Illinois native John Fletcher Comer came calling. Born in 1837, he too had a child from a previous entanglement, but that son was living with his mother, so John Fletcher wooed and married Hester Ann in 1862. In September 1865, they had their first child together: John Frank Comer. At the time of the 1870 Census, the Comers were living in Massac County, in southern Illinois, and had been joined by another son: James A. Comer. John Fletcher was a farmer; his wife kept house.

By 1880, the family had moved north to the tiny town of Leef, in Madison County. John Fletcher still farmed, but he had a lot of new help: his first child, Jacob W, had returned to live with his father’s family, and one of Hester’s other sons, Thomas S. Good, had come to live with his mother; both boys were in their early twenties. The family laid down its roots in Madison County and had ties there into the mid-20th century.

Between 1880 and 1887, information is scarce, but by the end of 1888 the family had packed up and moved to Missouri—Saint Louis, to be precise. There are several Comers listed in the city directory starting at least as early as 1867, so perhaps they moved to be closer to family. Whatever the reason, in 1889 the Comer men are all listed: “John F” Senior, is an “agent” of some kind; his sons “James K” and “John F, Jr.” are carpenters. The information in the 1890 directory is the same, except that John Sr. is now listed as a salesman, and John Jr. is now going by his middle name, Frank.

The 1891 directory has Frank Comer listed as a collector for the Moffitt-West Insurance Company; in 1893, he is listed as a solicitor. The 1894 and ’95 city directories have the whole Comer clan living together, presumably at John F’s home, with one exception: Frank. During this period Frank had moved south to Commerce and become a reverend. The October 12, 1895 edition of The News Boy (Benton, Scott Co., MO) announced his arrival:

FROM COMMERCE
Quite a crowd was out Sunday night to hear the new preacher, Rev. J. F. Comer, for the first time.

The same paper mentions a few weddings that Rev. J. F. Comer officiated at Commerce later in 1895, but after a January 25, 1896 mention, Rev. Comer drops out of sight. His next appearance is on March 4, 1896, over in Exeter, Barry County, where he married Alice Ervin. The March 12, 1896 Muskogee Phoenix has a few more details:

The friends of Miss Alice Ervin, formerly a resident of Muskogee, and a sister of Mrs. J. 0. Cobb [aka Christena Ervin], will be interested in learning that Miss Ervin was married on Wednesday of last week to Rev. J. Frank Comer, of St. Louis, Mo., at the home of the bride’s parents at Commerce [sic: they lived at Exeter], Mo. The many friends of Miss Ervin in Muskogee join the friends at her home in wishing the wedded couple all the peace, joy and contentment that life affords.

I have found no other mention of J. Frank Comer or his bride in 1896. There is an 1897 Land Ownership map of Richmond, Missouri (Ray County) that has a “J. F. Comer” owning a lot next to a cemetery (below). This could be our man, but the 1897 Saint Louis directory has another candidate, a “John F” Comer listed as a teacher. All the other familiar Comers are sharing a house on Marceau Avenue, but this John F. has “bds” at 3922 N. 20th Street. Whatever the case, by July 13, 1898, both Mr. and Mrs. John Frank Comer were in Saint Louis attending the birth of their only child, Earl Lee. They were not together for long.

The 1899 Saint Louis directory lists “Comer, John F. Jr. Rev” at home with his father at 3113 N. 20th. As wives are not listed in the directories, it is not known if Alice and Earl were living with the Comers, but by 1900, the answer is clear. On June 6, 1900, in the city of Saint Louis, John A. Casserly arrived at the Comer home to enumerate the U.S. Census. He recorded the following: Comer, John F, head of household, age 62, born June 1837, salesman; Comer, Hester A, wife, age 65, born March 1835; and Comer, John F, son, age 34, born September 1865, collector, insurance. In the box for Jr.’s marital status, Mr. Casserly marked “widowed.” Where Alice Comer and her son had gone is a mystery. They do not appear to have been recorded on the 1900 Census.

As for Frank, life went on. He is listed as Rev. John F. Comer, Jr., living with his father, in the 1901 and 1903 Saint Louis directories. He does not appear in the 1904 directory, probably because he was elsewhere, meeting his next wife, Sarah R. They were married in 1905 and were back in Saint Louis by 1908, where Frank is listed in the directory as a clerk at the Saint Louis Times. The 1910 Census shows Frank and Sarah in Saint Louis. Frank is a salesman at a retail store. This second marriage doesn’t appear to have lasted long, either, as the 1920 Census has Comer as a single lodger in the home of Edward McCaslin and family. The 55-year-old Frank Comer reported his profession as Life Insurance Agent. In 1928, John Frank Comer was hit by a car and died. He was buried back at the Comer plot in Edwardsville, Madison County, Illinois.

Following the breakup of the Comer marriage circa 1899, Alice and Earl Lee appear to have sought out the comfort of family in Big Spring, Howard County, Texas, where Alice’s older brother, W.V. Ervin, ran the local newspaper and raised a family. The Comers may have been in Big Spring when the Howards visited there for several weeks around the turn of the New Year in January 1908. The Comers appear on the 1910 Census, there in Big Spring, with Alice listed as a widowed dressmaker (18 years before the death of Frank Comer). In 1911, Earl Lee took part in the formation of Texas’s Troop No. 1, the so-called “oldest Boy Scout troop in Texas,” which began in Big Spring that year. How long he was involved with the Boy Scouts is unknown. On July 14, 1915—the day after his seventeenth birthday—Earl’s mother died, cause unknown. He was shuffled off to a tiny town in Brown County to finish up his schooling. He moved in with his mother’s sister—his aunt Hester Howard—and her family, Uncle Isaac (or perhaps Uncle Cue) and a cousin, one Robert E. Howard, who was just nine years old.

Comer was almost eight years older than his cousin, but the two young men appear to have engaged in behavior typical of teenage boys. Comer joined the basketball squad at the Cross Cut school and was described in a December 10, 1915 Cross Plains Review item as a “goal thrower.” In a May 24, 1932 letter to H.P. Lovecraft, Howard described a scene that seems to include Comer, a known Boy Scout:

Another thing that discourages me is the absolute unreliability of human senses. If a hunting hound’s nose fooled him as often as a human’s faculties betray him, the hound wouldn’t be worth a damn. The first time this fact was brought to my mind was when I was quite small, and hearing a cousin relate the details of a camping trip, on which one Boy Scout shot another through the heart with a .22 calibre target rifle. I was never a Boy Scout, but I understand that they are trained to be keen observers. Well, there were about twenty looking on, and no two of them told the same story in court. And each insisted that his version was the correct one, and stuck to it. And I understand that this is common among all witnesses.

More shenanigans are described in Howard’s circa December 1933 letter to August Derleth:

One of the damndest falls I ever got in my life was on a frozen pool—or tank, as we call them in these parts. I was just a kid, and wrestling with my cousin who was much older and larger. Eventually our feet went from under us, and we both came down on my head.

Both of the incidents that Howard describes could be remembrances of his time in Cross Cut, when his cousin Earl lived with them. Of course, this is just speculation; perhaps Earl’s stay was as bad as de Camp thought it was. Either way, by May 25, 1918, Comer was gone.

Sometime before his departure, Earl had enlisted in the United States Navy, probably at Abilene. His start date was May 25, 1918. Perhaps as part of his enlistment, he ended up in Milwaukie, Wisconsin. At the time of the 1920 Census, enumerated on January 23, he was recorded as a lodger (on a page full of lodgers). A 1920 city directory has “Earl Comer” living at the YMCA. But he was “home” for the holidays that December:

E. L. Comer of Big Spring is here to spend the holidays with his aunt, Mrs. I. M. Howard. He is helping W. E. Butler, grocerman, during the holiday rush.
Cross Plains Review, December 17, 1920

It appears that his discharge from the Navy was completed on September 30, 1921, but given his arrangements in 1920, it seems he was out of the service before then. A January 7, 1921 note from the Big Spring Herald seems to confirm this:

Earl Lee Comer who recently returned from Milwaukee, Wis., where he had been to take a course in mechanical drawing, after spending the holidays with friends and relatives in this city left for Cross Plains where he will make his home.

Earl didn’t stay long in Cross Plains the second time, certainly not long enough to cause the family much trouble. He arrived sometime after January 7, 1921, and was off to Dallas in time to be included in the 1922 city directory. His profession is listed as “draftsman.” He would remain in Dallas until at least mid-1924, possibly into 1925, but by the summer of that year he was way out west. California! He shows up in the 1925 Los Angeles city directory as a draftsman. And, while living in the Golden State, he kept in touch with his relatives in Cross Plains.

In Howard’s Post Oaks and Sand Roughs, his semi-autobiographical novel, the character that represents Howard says that a letter “boosting” his first-published story appeared in Bizarre Stories (aka Weird Tales), and that the “letter had been written by a cousin in California, at [his] special request.” For a couple of cousins who supposedly didn’t get along, a request like that would be unusual. Comer’s letter appeared in the September 1925 issue of Weird Tales and said, in part, “I ran across ‘Spear and Fang’ by Robert E. Howard—a good story of our remote ancestors before the dawn of civilization and intelligence, when man’s reasoning powers were in the formative state. Your July issue affords thrilling entertainment for those who enjoy the unusual. And if you continue to publish such appealing stories, then the well-deserved popularity of Weird Tales is certain to grow.” The addressee’s name was transcribed as “Earl C. Comer of Los Angeles.” But Earl wouldn’t stay there for long.

The September 10, 1926 edition of the Big Spring Herald told of Comer’s return to Texas:

Earl Comer, en route from Los Angeles to Dallas, where he has accepted a position, visited friends in this city this week, leaving Thursday morning for Dallas.

Once he was back in Dallas, Earl Comer’s trips to visit his family and friends in Big Spring and Cross Plains resumed. The November 23, 1928 edition of the Cross Plains Review informed its readers that “E. L. Comer of Dallas, nephew of Dr. and Mrs. Howard, spent past weekend here.” It is shortly after this visit that Robert Howard probably prepared two strange documents. One is just a list of three names: Truett Vinson, Clyde Smith, and Earl Lee Comer; toward the bottom of that page, the word “life” has been added. The other sheet has the same names, with Booth Mooney added after Smith; this sheet includes the cities where these people lived (except for Mooney, who lived in Decatur, not Brownwood) and a few couplets of verse—more indication that relations between Comer and Howard were not strained.

From 1929 to 1933, Comer appears as a draftsman in the Dallas city directories. On April 3, 1930, he was enumerated on the U.S. Census as a draftsman lodger in the city of Dallas. And then things start to get spotty. There is an Earl Comer living in Dennison, Texas, in 1934, but this probably isn’t our man as Lindsey Tyson remembered Comer attending the Howards’ funeral in 1936 and thought that he lived in Dallas.* A 1938 city directory has him still in Dallas. Also in 1938, on December 10 Earl got married to Ruby Nell Poe. His wife accompanied him on at least two visits to Big Spring, one during Christmas 1938 and another in 1939, but after that she disappears. Earl’s 1941 visit to Howard County was taken alone and his death certificate indicates that he was divorced.

[* Here’s what Tyson told de Camp in an October 10, 1977 letter:

There was one relative of the Howards that no one seems to remember much about. His name was Earl Lee Comer. Earl Lee was a nephew of Mrs. Howard’s, he came to live with the Howards while they were still in Burkett. He was an orphan.
Earl Lee left here in the early twenties, went to Dallas, and Bob told me went to work for the Mobile Oil Co. Earl Lee was I think four or five years older than Bob. He came back here to the funeral service and I talked to him for a few minutes before the services, but I did not get to ask some things I was interested in. I was one of the pall bearers, thought I would talk to him some more later, but he left as soon as the service was over and I have never seen him again.]

The few Dallas directories I’ve seen from the 1940s and ’50s all have the same old thing: Comer as a draftsman. After the 1960 directory, which has Earl working for the U.S. Geological Survey, the record goes blank. There is an Earl Comer being brought up on charges of child desertion in Rusk, Texas, in 1963; whether or not this Earl is our Earl, we’ll probably never know. The earliest mention of a Mrs. Earl Lee is December 1938. It seems odd that the couple would have a child young enough to be “deserted” in 1963. I’m guessing this was someone else.

The last definitive sighting of Earl is from the Galveston Daily News for Sept. 16, 1970:

Earl Lee Comer, 72, a retired Galveston draftsman, was found dead in his room at Moody House Tuesday. Funeral services will be held at 2 p.m. Wednesday at Brookside Memorial Park in Houston, the Rev. William C. Webb Jr. officiating. Cremation will follow under the director of J. Levy and Bro. Funeral Home of Galveston. Born in St. Louis, Mo., Comer worked as a draftsman for the U.S. Bureau of Mines prior to his retirement. No survivors were reported.

His death certificate indicates that he was a retired draftsman from the U.S. Bureau of Mines. Cause of death was acute myocardial failure. He is honored as a veteran at the Houston National Cemetery in Texas.

Thanks to Damon Sasser for the photo of Earl’s grave.

[By Rob Roehm. Originally published in Onion Tops #40, REHupa mailing #229, June 2011, and expanded for posting online at the now defunct Two-Gun Raconteur blog, July 8, 2012, where it won the second place Cimmerian Award for online articles from the Robert E Howard Foundation. The current version incorporates all of the information acquired since then, some of which appeared in “An Earl Addendum” (July 21, 2012) and “Another Earl Addendum” (November 18, 2012) posted at the Two-Gun Raconteur blog, and “The Comer Connection” in Onion Tops #51, REHupa mailing #240, April 2013. With any luck, this will be my last word on Earl Lee Comer.]

Squire James Henry

On December 3, 2020December 4, 2020 By Rob RoehmIn Biography, Genealogy2 Comments

According to family legend, James Henry, Sr., was born on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He married Anna Terrell Grimes in South Carolina in 1796 and died in Bibb County, Alabama, in 1845, having produced eight offspring. His youngest son, James Jr., was the great grandfather of Robert E. Howard.

I don’t know just what year my people moved into the state of Alabama, but it was long ago. My great-grandfather, Squire James Henry, was born in South Carolina in 1811, and he was a small boy when they went into Alabama, so you see it was pretty far back, anyway. The Henrys and a family named Walser from Georgia settled in what is now the counties of Bibb and Tuscaloosa, near the Black Warrior River. James Henry married a Walser woman and most of their children were born in Alabama. In 1847 they moved to Choctaw County, Mississippi [William H. Henry was born in Oktibbeha County, Mississippi, in 1850], and settled near the upper reaches of the Big Black River, immortalized in the legends of John Henry, the mythical black giant. Both the Henrys and the Walsers made the move. The Walsers remained in Mississippi until a year or so after the Civil War, and then moved to Texas and settled on what was then the western frontier. But the Henrys moved to southwestern Arkansas [. . .]
Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, circa January 1935

Unlike the Howard line, the Henrys appear to have been financially stable. The 1850 census lists Henry’s real estate vale at “800”; the slave schedule lists five enslaved people aged 31 down to 2. The Walsers are next on the slave schedule with two slaves. It seems unlikely, though, that the Henrys were as well off as REH says they were, below. Sometime after the census was taken, one William B. Howard arrived at the Henry farm seeking employment. He secured a job and later married Henry’s oldest daughter and started producing children. And, it appears, when James Henry grew restless, the young Howard family hit the trail with him and the rest of the Henry family.

When my great-grandfather Squire Jim Henry started west he traveled in a regular caravan of great wagons, loaded with supplies, implements and furnishings, and negro slaves, and he took with him herds of oxen, steers, cows and horses, and a buckskin bag plump with gold coins. He was no broken man, seeking a place to hide. He was an adventurous soul, looking for new, unbroken and uncrowded land, because the wilds had more attraction for him than the teeming countries of men. And there were thousands and thousands like him.
Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, circa July 1933

On September 20, 1860 the United States Census crew hit south-central Arkansas. There they enumerated the townsfolk of Carrol, Union, and Freeo townships in Ouachita County. One of the residents, James Henry, had only recently arrived, moving there in 1858 with his wife and nine children from Mississippi. Born in South Carolina, married in Alabama, a Mississippi resident for ten years, James Henry had been around. The Howard clan settled just over the Ouachita County line in Holly Springs, Dallas County, about three miles away.

Squire Henry was a typical pioneer. When the country about him began to settle up and grow tame, he grew restless and moved on. He was a man of great natural abilities, and managed to acquire considerable education. In his old age he had what was probably the most extensive private library in southern Arkansas, and would have been considered a well-read man, even in this day and age. In hewing homes out of the wilderness, he hewed out a fortune for himself that was considered large in those days. He had not even the proverbial shoe-string to start on, in the beginning, but he was well fixed financially even before he left Alabama. But he had recognized what few today realize; that the ever westward-receding frontier offered unparalleled resources, and that any man of guts and intelligence had the best chance in the world of building a successful career, or making a fortune.
Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, circa January 1935

The 1860 Census reports that Henry’s assets had grown from “800” in real estate in 1850 to “3000” in 1860, with a “personal estate” estimated at “9350.” In 1860 he had seven slaves. While some might have been content watching their grandchildren grow up around them, not James Henry. After the Confederate Army seized weapons in Little Rock early in 1861, both the 50-year-old and his 23-year-old son, David T., enlisted that summer. [Side note: David T. Henry was promoted to Corporal, and even Lieutenant, before being killed in action in 1864, perhaps in Tennessee. I am tempted to say that the “T” stands for Terrell, after his mother, Anna Terrell Grimes, and that Louisa Henry Howard named her second son—David Terrell Howard, born in 1866—after this fallen brother.]

James was discharged on November 24—no reason is given on his paperwork, but in a short, 1890 biography of another of his sons, William Harrison, it is attributed to “ill health”:

Here [in Holly Springs, Arkansas] the father passed the remainder of his days, with the exception of two years during the war that he spent in Texas [. . .]. He was formerly a farmer, but the latter part of his days was spent in merchandising, at Holly Springs. He was justice of the peace for many years, and, during the late war, was in the Confederate army a short time, but was discharged, on account of ill health. He was in the Third Arkansas Cavalry.
Biographies & Historical Memoirs of Southern Arkansas (Goodspeed Publishing Co., 1890)

What Henry did in Texas is unknown, but his great-grandson Robert E. Howard thought that he went to raise cotton:

[James Henry’s] last venture was to the Texas frontier. Having been forced to retire from the Confederate Army in 1862 because of a wound, he took his slaves and went to Texas where he raised cotton until the end of the war, hiding the bales so cleverly that even the carpet-baggers couldn’t find them. Then he hauled them to Jefferson by ox-wagon and sold them at a tidy price — he was the only Southerner I ever heard of who had more money at the close of the Civil War than he had at the beginning. But he earned it, by three years of hard work, constantly threatened on one hand by a revolt of the slaves, and on the other by Indian attack.
Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, circa January 1935

By the end of the war, James Henry was back in Arkansas. The 1870 U. S. Census has him farming in Freeo Township, with four of his children still living at home. Contrary to Robert E. Howard’s claims, Henry’s assets appear to have taken a hit after the war with his real estate value dropping from 3000 to 2000, and his personal estate from 9350 to 4000.

The Howards appear to have had some money problems later in the decade. On February 2, 1877, William Howard was in a pickle and had to borrow money from his brother-in-law, W. H. Henry. Howard owed M. A. Hairston $115 and convinced his brother-in-law to pay it off, in return for “three bales of cotton weighing 500 lbs each.” And this wasn’t just a gentleman’s agreement, the whole thing was written up in a Deed of Conveyance and filed for record at the county courthouse. A month later, March 9, 1877, Howard is back at it with another Deed of Conveyance. This time he owes $50 to Block & Feibleman and agrees to hand over “one spotted horse about ten years old and four head of cattle and ten head of hogs and marked as follows smooth crop and over bit in each ear.”

By the time of the 1880 Census, James Henry’s daughter Martha was the widowed mother of Lucy Chandler and was living back home with her parents. Daughter Mary had married a merchant, William J. Proctor, and lived nearby. Another daughter, Georgia, had married Cadmus Patterson, a clerk, and lived next to the Proctors. Just across town, daughter Caroline was married to Silas Drake, and daughter Missouri was married to William Elliot, all farmers. The youngest offspring, Ellen, had married physician John Hodge and moved over to Jackson, still in Dallas County.

While James Henry had moved to Holly Springs from Freeo, his oldest daughter, Louisa Elizabeth, did the opposite, moving with husband William B. Howard from Holly Springs down to Freeo. Of James’ remaining sons, William Harrison Henry was a successful merchant in Holly Springs, Dallas County; and James T. Henry was a doctor over in Union, Ouachita County. The family was flourishing and sticking pretty closely together. All of that changed on June 26, 1884.

James Henry’s death, and the terms of his 1877 will, appears to have provided the impetus for several changes in the family structure. When the dust had settled, by 1885 William Henry and his sister Georgia’s husband, Cadmus Patterson, had used their inheritance to go into the mercantile trade “with annual sales that equal about $10,000”; other Henrys and in-laws included in Biographies & Historical Memoirs of Southern Arkansas have similar good fortune. But what of the Howards?

They went to Texas.

[Originally published in Onion Tops #82, REHupa mailing #285, October 2020.]

Training Dr. Howard

On September 17, 2020October 6, 2020 By Rob RoehmIn Biography, Dr. Isaac M. Howard, Genealogy1 Comment

[by Rob Roehm. Originally posted May 14, 2015 at rehtwogunraconteur.com. This version updated and expanded.]

When researching Robert E. Howard’s father, Doctor Isaac Mordecai Howard (seen above circa 1908), the devil is in the details. He almost always used only his initials when registering somewhere: Dr. I. M. Howard. The problem here is that his handwriting was terrible. His “I. M.” was often transcribed as “J. M.” or “S. M.” or some other scribble. And, there were a lot of Doctor Howards practicing medicine in the late 1800s and early 1900s. There was a D. M. Howard in Mineral Wells at the same time I. M. Howard was in the county, and another Dr. Howard in Cornish, Indian Territory, around the same time that our man was registered in Petersburg, Indian Territory, just to name two.

I am not the only researcher to follow the wrong Dr. Howard down a rabbit hole:

When Isaac Howard decided to study medicine, he was following a family precedent. His uncle J. T. Henry, a great favorite of Isaac’s mother, Eliza Howard, was a distinguished physician who was graduated from the University of Nashville in Tennessee in 1883 [sic: 1873]. In practice near the Arkansas-Missouri line, Dr. Henry became a role model for his nephew Isaac, who doubtless sought Dr. Henry’s advice and may have studied under him.
Physicians of that day often welcomed their kin as medical students. Such associations with older physicians afforded young would-be doctors opportunities for observation, access to medical books, and such didactic sessions as the preceptor thought necessary in exchange for the apprentice’s help in maintaining the dispensary, cleaning the office, and tending the horse and buggy if there was one. After a few years, when the older man deemed his candidate worthy, he would issue him a certificate to practice medicine. For an ethical man with strong family ties, the certification by a kinsman would be a real throwing of the torch.
Polk’s Medical and Surgical Register gives its first listing of “I. Howard” in 1896 as practicing in Forsyth, Missouri, in Taney County, just over the Missouri line, a short distance from his uncle’s home in Bentonville, Arkansas. It is unclear whether Isaac Howard apprenticed himself to his uncle or whether Dr. Henry had passed him on to another doctor in Forsyth. The dates suggest the former. If Isaac Howard had left Texas in the early nineties, when he turned twenty-one, he could have finished his training and been ready to set up his own practice by 1896.
The young physician did not long remain in Missouri. Perhaps he was homesick. Whatever his reasons, on April 19, 1899, Isaac M. Howard of Limestone County, Texas, was examined by the State Board of Medical Examiners in Texarkana, Texas, and awarded a certificate of qualification to practice medicine. Then he went home.
—L. Sprague de Camp, Dark Valley Destiny

I did a little digging and found an Isaac Howard on the 1860 US Census in Webster County, Missouri. He’s 41, married to Esther, born in Rhode Island, and has “M.D.” listed under “Profession.” After the Civil War, the 1870 Census has the same Isaac as a “Farmer” in Swan Township, Taney County; the post office is listed as Forsyth and Isaac Howard appears to have been the enumerator—his name is signed at the top of the document as “Ass’t Marshal.” In 1880, he’s listed as a “Physician” in Oliver Township, Taney County. He’s 62 years old here. The 1886 edition of Polk’s Medical and Surgical Register shows him in Forsyth, Taney Co. Most of the 1890 Census was destroyed in a fire, so no help there. All this would make Isaac 78 at the time of the 1896 edition of Polk’s Medical and Surgical Register. Seems pretty clear that the “I. Howard” de Camp found in that early edition of Polk’s is not our man.

With the only piece of evidence that might place our Isaac M. Howard near his Uncle J. T. Henry at that time removed, his actual whereabouts are a complete mystery. It’s still possible that he received his medical training there; in fact, this has pretty much become an accepted part of the biography. To wit:

By 1891, Isaac Howard had decided that he was not cut out to be a farmer. He left the family farm, sold his share in the property to his brother, and decided to practice frontier medicine.
Isaac’s medical education, a combination of on-the-job training, apprenticeship to his uncle, himself a doctor, and attendance at a variety of schools, lectures, and courses, would spread out over the next four decades. His initial training took four or five years, and allowed him to practice medicine as early as 1896. From that time on, Dr. Isaac Howard moved frequently from place to place, venturing as far out as Missouri and back to the family farm in Limestone County again.
—Mark Finn, Blood and Thunder

That J. T. Henry (above) was a doctor is well established; that Isaac M. Howard apprenticed under him, not so much. While I am not a fan of speculation, I recently ran across not one but two doctors who, in my opinion, make more sense as possible trainers of Dr. Howard. So, as long as there’s no proof either way, I’ll throw my speculations out there too.

Robert E. Howard said that his family moved to Texas in 1885. The earliest I can place them there is 1889. According to a “Widow’s Application for Pension” filled out by Isaac’s mother in 1910, Isaac’s father, William B., died “near Mt. Calm, Texas, on 3rd day of August in year of 1889” [possibly 1888]. While William’s death in Texas contradicts de Camp’s version, it agrees with Robert E. Howard’s account in an October 1930 letter to Lovecraft:

My branch of the Howards came to America with Oglethorpe 1733 and lived in various parts of Georgia for over a hundred years. In ’49 three brothers started for California. On the Arkansas River they split up, one went on to California where he lived the rest of his life, one went back to Georgia and one, William Benjamin Howard, went to Mississippi where he became an overseer on the plantations of Squire James Harrison Henry, whose daughter he married. In 1858 he moved, with the Henry’s, to southwestern Arkansas where he lived until 1885, when he moved to Texas. He was my grandfather.

There is a document dated 1885, but it wasn’t recorded until 1898, so I’m a tad skeptical. The document is basically a contract between Isaac Howard and his brother David Terrell Howard of Prairie Hill, Texas, in Limestone County. Dave agrees to purchase Isaac’s land in the county and has ten years to pay for it, starting in 1885. How a 13-year-old Isaac managed to possess that land is a mystery. De Camp speculates that it was Grandpa James Henry’s originally, and James did die in 1884, a fairly prosperous guy, so that’s reasonable, but there’s no mention of Texas land in his Arkansas will.

On November 6, 1893, Isaac’s sister Willie married William Oscar McClung in Limestone County. They moved to Indian Territory shortly thereafter, but probably not before attending brother Dave’s wedding on November 12 (or possibly December 12). This is where things get interesting.

Dave’s bride was Fannie Elizabeth Wortham (seen above quite some time after her marriage). From 1894 to 1919, the couple would produce 12 children. This isn’t so unusual when you figure that Dave had eight siblings and Fannie had seven. We’ll get back to one of Fannie’s siblings in a minute, but first, let’s look at her dad, Mortier (or Mortimer) LaFayette Wortham.
Born in Tennessee in 1822, Wortham moved to Texas while in his early 20s. He shows up on an 1846 tax list in Harrison County, east Texas. He appears to have hooked up with an unknown lady and had at least one child, John, before she died or left. The 1850 Census has an “L. M. Wortham” who is farming with the Martin family in Harrison County. He has with him “J. Wortham,” who is 2 years old. No wife is mentioned.

The 1860 Census of Anderson County has the now 12-year-old John, with father “L. Wortham,” joined by wife “E. Wortham” (the former Elizabeth Chaffin). The senior Wortham’s profession is listed as “Doctor.” On a pension application, Elizabeth says that she married Mortier in 1855. Her family had been in Texas since at least 1843, in Anderson County, which is two counties east of Limestone, with Freestone County in-between.

On March 6, 1862, “M. L. Wortham,” of Palestine, Anderson County, reported for infantry duty in the Confederate Army, Company K, 22nd Regiment, under Colonel R. B. Hubbard. It looks like he served all over the place, doing some time in Louisiana and Arkansas, before returning to Anderson County. He shows up on an 1868 voter registration list there.

“M. L. Wortham” appears on the Anderson County tax rolls for 1861, 1865, 1867, 1869, and 1870. While there are several Worthams on the lists throughout the 1880s, our guy doesn’t appear; this is probably because he had moved to Limestone County, where he and the family appear on the 1880 Census. His profession there is listed as “Farming.” The 1890 Census was mostly destroyed by fire, but in 1891 Mortier is back on the tax lists in Anderson County, appearing as “Dr. M. L. Wortham.” So, Dave Howard’s soon-to-be father-in-law went back to medicine (if he ever left) just before his daughter’s marriage. How convenient for Dave’s younger brother, who just happened to be interested in the medical profession.

[A quick, non-chronological note: On Fannie Wortham Howard’s 1960 death certificate, her father is identified as “Dr. W. M. Wortham”; on another daughter’s 1932 death certificate, he is identified simply as “Dr. Wortham.”]

And there’s more. When the Howards arrived in Texas they settled in around Mount Calm, which is in Hill County, but right on the line with Limestone County. They soon spread into Limestone, in the little community of Delia, which is close to Prairie Hill. The 1900 Census has Dave Howard’s growing clan listed with the Prairie Hill inhabitants. One of those was John C. Clark, who was married to another of Mortier Wortham’s daughters and happened to be, you guessed it, a doctor.

Born in 1847 in Jamaica to English parents, Clark was living in Texas by the end of the Civil War. He married Louisa E. Wortham in 1877 and was living in rural Limestone County at the time of the 1880 Census, where he is listed as a “Physician.” The 1890 edition of Polk’s Medical and Surgical Registry has him as the only doctor in Prairie Hill, with no report received in answer to their inquiry regarding his graduation from medical school. This probably means that he didn’t attend a school, but was trained by another doctor . . . perhaps his father-in-law?

So, in the early 1890s we’ve got a young Isaac Howard, purportedly not interested in the family business of farming. He’s got a doctor uncle in far-off Arkansas who seems to be doing pretty well for himself, and his older brother Dave marries into a family with at least two doctors, one of whom is practicing in the very town in which they live, the other in a nearby county. [I say “at least two” because one of Mortier’s sons, James Franklin Wortham, is identified as a doctor on an ancestry.com family tree, but there is no documentation provided to support that claim and I haven’t looked into it yet.] And right around this time, the mid-1890s, Dave is paying for Isaac’s land. Hmm, I wonder what Isaac was doing with the cash?

Meanwhile, brother Dave purchased some more land in 1897 from Gussbaum and Morris, whoever they were. Then, the 1885 document was filed for record on January 15, 1898, and on February 12, 1898, Isaac Howard filed a quit claim, closing the land deal with his brother. The next time Isaac M. Howard appears on paper it is as a doctor:

The Medical Board of Examiners, Fifth Judicial District, State of Texas, done at Texarkana, Texas, April 19, 1899, I.M. Howard of Limestone County received his Certificate of Qualification to Practice Medicine in any or all of its branches throughout the State of Texas.

The first place he appears is Freestone County, where he registered his new credentials on July 20, 1899. Right next door to Limestone, this makes sense, but, as long as I’m speculating, let me go a step further. On a recent trip to Groesbeck, the county seat of Limestone, I asked about their Medical Register—the book that lists the doctors who had registered their credentials in the county. Isaac M. Howard was not listed in that book, but the book only went back to 1907. Turns out the older records were destroyed by fire. So I’ll bet Isaac did indeed go home—right back to Limestone County, then to Freestone. But again, that’s just speculation.

Dr. Howard next appears up north near Indian Territory in Montague County, where his uncle, George Walser, was living. I have no idea if the two had any contact at this time, though I would think it odd if they didn’t. Dr. Howard registered in the county on May 30, 1901. This appears to be just before Isaac started practicing in Petersburg, just across the Red River in Indian Territory, and not far from where his sister Willie had moved after marrying Oscar McClung. The doctor couldn’t have spent too much time in Indian Territory, though, he had a date with destiny back in Texas, Palo Pinto County, where a certain lady named Hester was spending time with her siblings in Mineral Wells.

William Benjamin Howard

On August 23, 2020December 4, 2020 By Rob RoehmIn Biography, Dr. Isaac M. Howard, Genealogy1 Comment

In 1849, Henry Howard, my great-grandfather, a planter and a school teacher, was living on a farm in Oglethorpe County, in what I would describe as the middle northeastern part of the state, no great distance from the Savannah River. As far as I know, my grandfather, William Benjamin Howard, was born on that plantation.
Robert E. Howard, “The Wandering Years”

Given the state of Henry Howard’s finances, it is doubtful that he owned a “plantation.” And, while William Benjamin Howard was, in fact, born in Oglethorpe County, by 1849 Henry Howard had relocated to Upson County. The 1830 US Census for Oglethorpe County, Captain Lumpkin’s District, lists Henry (aged 30-40) in a household with two boys aged five years or less (Isaac M. and William B.); one boy between 5 and 10 (Charles H.); one girl between 5 and 10 (Rebecca J.); one woman between 30 and 40 (wife Betsy); and one female slave between 10 and 24 years old. Later that year, July 6, his son, John Hubbard Howard was born. By the time of the 1840 Census, the whole family, with additional children, were over in Upson County.

Henry Howard was down on his luck in 1845, when he filled out a stack of notices to more than a dozen people, including his brother-in-law Charles V. Collier, proclaiming his intent to “avail myself of the benefit of the Act entitled an Act for the Relief of Honest Debtors” in court that April. And things don’t appear to get a whole lot better, which could account for his sons hitting the road a few years later:

In 1849 [W. B.] started for California with two of his brothers. At Pine Bluff, Arkansas, cholera struck the party, wiped out most of them, and so weakened my grandfather that he was forced to turn back. One of his brothers went on to California [Isaac M.] and the other returned to Georgia [probably John Hubbard Howard]. William Howard did neither. He turned southward, into Mississippi, and obtained the position of overseer on the plantations of Squire James Henry, whose daughter, Louisa, he married in 18–.
Robert E. Howard, “The Wandering Years”

All of which sounds like family legend, passed along by word of mouth. We do know that W. B. was in Mississippi by January 1855 when he is said to be “of the State of Mississippi” in an “Indenture Made in Upson County, Georgia” between his family members. The family Bible says that W. B. married L. E. Henry on December 6 (possibly 16), 1856. From this point forward, William Howard’s fortunes were tied to the Henry family.

The newlyweds got to work and their first child, Mary Elizabeth, was born in Mississippi on November 27, 1857. In 1858, according to an REH letter, the Mississippi Howards and Henrys moved to southwestern Arkansas. And it is there, on December 18, 1858, that William’s first son, James H. “Jim” Howard, was born. Daughter Martha Rebecca came along in 1860 and son David N. in 1862, neither of whom lived longer than a few months.

The 1860 US Census has William Howard (born GA, 33, farmer, value of personal estate: 600, no real estate), Louisa (born AL, 25), Mary E (3, born MISS), James H. (1, born ARK); all living at Holly Springs, Dallas Co., ARK. There appears to have been close contact between the Henrys and Howards in Arkansas. The two families lived close to each other, on either side of the Dallas-Ouachita County line. The Henrys prospered; the Howards not so much, though it does appear that W. B. was able to procure some public land due to an 1820 Act of Congress. And then the Civil War came calling.

In a letter to Lovecraft published as circa December 1930 (which should be circa November 1930), Howard says “both my grandfathers rode for four years with Bedford Forrest.” As with many things Howard says in letters, this is either the product of family legend or an exaggeration.

There is a 34-year-old William B. Howard in the 16th Arkansas Infantry from 1861 to June 1862 when he was “sent to hospital,” but I’m not sure that is our Howard as he was enlisted way up north in Fayetteville. On January 10, 1863, our W. B. Howard enlisted in Company G, 3rd Arkansas Cavalry much closer to home in Camden. The available documents have him present through 1863, but no mention is made again until he is paroled “at Chesterville, South Carolina, May 5, 1865.” His home is listed in “Remarks”: “Ouachita County, Ark.” If the birth of a daughter, Willie Price Howard, on June, 2, 1864, is any indication, he must have been home from time to time. Also in 1864, William’s brother, Charles H. Howard, died at Walthal Junction, Chesterfield, VA.

When L. Sprague de Camp interviewed Fanny McClung Adamson (one of REH’s first cousins), she claimed to have a relic of W. B.’s: “I have his billfold. He carried it in the Civil War.” She added that there was a message inside, “written in his own blood, you know, on the inside of course. It’s so ragged and all. There’s a message he wrote and it’s all dried. It’s so dim. I can’t read it. Somebody might could with good eyes, a magnifying glass.” Where it is now is not known. Adamson also told de Camp that the family used to sing, “We’re gonna hang Abe Lincoln to a sour apple tree.”

In a September 9, 1978 telephone conversation with de Camp, another of Robert E. Howard’s cousins, Ollie Lorene Davis, commented on her grandfather, William Benjamin Howard. De Camp noted, “Her Howard grandfather fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War, was wounded, and was an invalid through the latter part of his life.”

Invalid or no, the Howards continued to reproduce upon William’s return from the war. David Terrell Howard was born in March 1866 and Alfonzo T. Howard in 1869. They all appear on the 1870 US Census for Ouachita Co., Freeo township. W.B. is 43, a farmer with real estate valued at 800, and personal estate at 100; under “Is the person [on the day of the Enumerator’s visit] sick or temporarily disabled, so as to be unable to ordinary business or duties? If so, what is the sickness or disability?” “chronic rheumatism” is written. I think. Isaac Mordecai Howard was born two years later, in 1872. His brother Alfonzo would die a year later at the age of four. In December that same year, 1873, Susan Aimee Howard was born.

[9/8/2020 Update] On February 2, 1877, it seems William Howard was in a pickle and had to borrow some cash from his brother-in-law, W. H. Henry. Howard owed M. A. Hairston $115 and convinced his brother-in-law to pay it off, in return for “three bales of cotton weighing 500 lbs each.” And this wasn’t just a gentleman’s agreement, the whole thing was written up in a Deed of Conveyance and filed for record at the county courthouse. A month later, March 9, 1877, Howard is back at it with another Deed of Conveyance. This time he owes $50 to Block & Feibleman and agrees to hand over “one spotted horse about ten years old and four head of cattle and ten head of hogs and marked as follows smooth crop and over bit in each ear.”

Few other details about William Howard survive. REH told Lovecraft in a 1931 letter that both of his grandfathers were “six feet two inches tall.” A little more information appears in Howard’s other correspondence:

The only one of my recent masculine ancestors I can think of who didn’t drink was my grandfather William Benjamin Howard. When I see some sappy youngster sneering at some one for not drinking, as if abstinence were unmanly, I think of my grandfather, who stood six feet two in his socks, and weighed two hundred pounds, was a pioneer, a ’49er, and a soldier, and who never drank. The others of the family, Ervins, Henrys, and the like, drank regularly but never got drunk.
Letter to August Derleth, circa October 1933

Beside these things, one must rely on official documents. The 1880 Census lists him as “maimed or crippled.” On January 19, 1883, he and his siblings picked up $50 each from a land sale in his mother’s estate. Two years later, he was dead—according to de Camp. Both of the Howard cousins mentioned above told de Camp that W. B. died in Arkansas in 1885. There are better sources.

Robert E. Howard said that in 1885, far from dying, W. B. and family packed up and moved to Texas. This must have come from REH’s father, who would certainly know. The Howards landed in the nexus of Hill and Limestone Counties and it is there, in 1887, that William’s oldest son, Jim, died. His father didn’t last much longer: the family Bible says William Benjamin Howard died on August 2, 1888. A Civil War Pension application filed by his wife, Louisa, in 1910 states that William died in Texas on August 3, 1889, “near Mt. Calm.” I’d go with the Bible.

REH’s cousins agree that Jim and his mother are buried under an old cedar tree in Mount Antioch Cemetery, ” their grave is just a plain marker…. it don’t have a thing on it.” The tree is surrounded by other Howards and, it seems to me, is the most likely resting place for William B. Howard; after all, Mount Antioch is also “near Mt. Calm.”

[Originally published in Onion Tops #81, REHupa mailing #283, June 2020.]

The Lost Ervin Mine

On October 18, 2019October 18, 2019 By Rob RoehmIn Biography, Contemporaries, Genealogy, LocationsLeave a comment

[By Rob Roehm. Originally published in Onion Tops #65, Aug. 2015. A revised version was posted Sept. 26, 2015, at twogunraconteur.com. The current version has been expanded to include information from Onion Tops #76, Dec. 2018.]

IMG_8426web

Despite an abundance of newspapers that are available online, there are still several collections that can only be accessed in the old-school fashion: ass-in-seat in front of a microfiche reader. [Update: The Lampasas Leader is now available online, here] As I prepared for Howard Days this year, I called around to the local libraries in the towns I was going to visit to see if they had any. Two libraries said they had what I was looking for, though when I actually showed up at the Mount Calm library, I learned that my phone contact had been mistaken. So, I wasn’t expecting much when I arrived at the second location: Lampasas.

Why Lampasas? Well, I’d already been there when researching Howard’s stay in the “old rock hotel” that was “as much fort as hotel” (REH to HPL, ca. May 1935; see my piece in The Cimmerian, vol. 5, no. 5, Oct. 2008), but that was before my slide into genealogy and minutia. In the same 1935 letter, Howard also says that Lampasas is “where my mother spent her girlhood.” And then there’s this, from his December 5, 1935 letter to HPL, “my grandfather had owned a sheep-ranch in the adjoining county of Lampasas in those days [post-Civil War].”

Add to the above the following bit from Howard’s family history, “The Wandering Years”:

A boom was on in Texas; cities were growing. The Colonel [Howard’s grandfather, G. W. Ervin] went into the real estate business [in Dallas], and was successful. But the low Trinity River lands were unhealthful, and, in 1884 [sic.], he moved again, this time southwestward to Lampasas, in the cattle country. Lampasas had been a frontier town in the early ’70s. It was still a cow town, as well, on account of its mineral springs, a health and pleasure resort, the foremost of its sort in the state, before the rise of Mineral Wells.

[. . .]

My grandfather possessed the restlessness of the age. He loaned money, dealt some in cattle; he bought a sheep ranch, but, in the midst of a cattle country, with hired men running it, it was not a success. He wandered over into western New Mexico and worked a silver mine not far from the Arizona line.

That last part about the silver mine has never been verified (until now), but Howard also mentions it in a couple of letters: circa December 1930, to Lovecraft, “Colonel George Ervin came into Texas when it was wild and raw, and he went into New Mexico, too, long before it was a state, and worked a silver mine—and once he rode like a bat out of Hell for the Texas line with old Geronimo’s turbaned Apaches on his trail”; and again in a circa January 1933 letter to August Derleth: “Geronimo once stole a bunch of my grandfather’s horses, and chased him away from the silver mine he was working; chased him with the aid of a mob of his turbaned warriors, of course, that being a job that took a goodly gang of men, whether red or white.” Most of which sounds like family legend, but the Lampasas connection definitely required a visit, especially since the local librarian indicated that they had copies of the Lampasas Leader from the 1880s—only available on-site.

The Roehm party arrived Monday afternoon and got to work. We hit the courthouse first and found several land documents; then we headed over to the library. I gathered the available fiche and parked in front of the reader. I was there until closing time and continued the search when they opened the next morning. What follows is a summary of the Ervins’ time in that fair city [supplemented with information found recently online].

The earliest document I found is dated January 9, 1886, when Robert E. Howard’s mother, Hester Jane Ervin, would have been 15-years-old. On that day, her father, G. W. Ervin, “of the County of Lampasas,” purchased three lots in that “portion of the town of Lampasas known as the Lampasas Springs Company’s first addition to the town of Lampasas.” He appears to have purchased these lots outright for the tidy sum of “fifteen hundred dollars to us in hand paid”—there is no indication of any installment payments due at a later time. The Ervins had arrived.

The next document is another land purchase, dated May 31, 1886. This one appears to be an investment, with $1,500 as down payment, another $1,000 due on June 1, 1887, and “the further sum of six hundred and fifty dollars to be paid on the first day of May A.D. 1892,” not including interest. For this, Ervin picked up “an individual one half interest” in “part of a three league survey” that included a pile of lots in Lampasas.

Next up is a December 23, 1886 document in which Ervin and a partner, L. J. Amos, sell part of the May 31 purchase for $2,156, in installments. That same day, Ervin purchased two more lots in the Lampasas Springs Company’s addition from the said Amos for $1,000, “in hand paid.”

Next on the timeline is an obituary found online from the Galveston Daily News:

MRS. JANE ERVIN

LAMPASAS, Tex., August 11.—Mrs. Jane Ervin, the mother of G. W. Ervin, died here yesterday and was buried today. Mrs. Ervin was born in North Carolina eighty-one years ago, and has been a resident of Texas for twenty-eight years. She was an exemplary Christian and lived an honored and happy life.

On December 3, 1887, over in Temple, Texas, the Temple Daily Times (also found online) had the following item: “G. W. Ervin, of Lampasas is in the city.” What his business there was is a mystery. I guess I’ll have to go back to Temple at some point and have another look.

Another land document was filed in Lampasas on March 6, 1888. In this one, G. W. and wife Alice, “for and in consideration of an individual half interest in six hundred and forty acres of land” in Palo Pinto County, sell the two lots he had purchased from Amos on December 23, 1886.

The library’s collection of newspapers is full of holes, as far as dates are concerned, so there may have been notices concerning the Ervins before this November 24, 1888 item from the Lampasas Leader: “Col. G. W. Ervin left Monday on a business trip to Dallas, Denton and other points in North Texas.”

The Leader for December 29, 1888, confirms the mining claim:

1888 12-29 Lampasas Leader NEW

The April 20, 1889, paper has more: “Col. G. W. Ervin left here Tuesday for Stein’s Pass, New Mexico, to look after his mining interests at that point.” The May 25, 1889 paper announced his return: “Col. Ervin returned Wednesday from Stein’s Pass, New Mexico, where he has been for the past six weeks looking after his mining interests and brings good reports of the mines.”

1889 is also the year that Ervin’s children begin appearing in Lampasas society, starting with Robert E. Howard’s future mother, Hester Ervin, in that same April 20 paper:

1889 04-20 Lampasas Leader-sm

And again on May 25, this time with sister (Georgia) Alice Ervin:

1889 05-25 Lampasas Leader

The July 6, 1889 edition has more news: “Col. G. W. Ervin left here Thursday on a business trip to North Texas and will go on to Oklahoma before returning.” Several of Ervin’s children by his first wife lived or had lived in the Indian Territory at that time. The July 13 paper announces his return: “Col. Ervin returned Wednesday from Oklahoma and reports the boom in that country as about ‘busted.'”

Later that month, as reported on July 27, 1889, some of Ervin’s grown sons were in town and attended a social with their younger sisters:

1889 07-27 Lampasas Leader

And there are other appearances throughout the year. But business also continued. A Mr. Amos, who is listed as being from Oklahoma City, sold G. W. Ervin more land in Lampasas on December 7, 1889.

A month later—January 16, 1890—G. W. sells a bunch of land for $2,000, “in hand paid by my wife Alice Ervin, the same having been paid out of the separate estate of my said wife received by her from her father.” Said father, Joel Echols Wynn, had died on January 1, 1885, in Arkansas. I’ve got a copy of his will around here somewhere.

That fall, it appears that G. W. had had enough of Lampasas. On October 20, 1890, he sold his original land purchase to a lady from Ohio for the sum of $2,500, to be paid in installments. Here ends the Lampasas paper trail, but I wasn’t quite finished with this mine business. After all, I had to drive through New Mexico to get home.

But before the road trip home, I did a little digging online and found an article in the El Paso Times that had somehow escaped my frequent searches. Dated July 17, 1888, it provided a helpful date for the upcoming courthouse dig:

1888 07-17 GWE in ElPasoTimes p1b

With all of this information in hand, the Roehm party stopped in Lordsburg, New Mexico, on the return trip. We visited the site of Stein’s Pass (now a ghost town called, simply, Steins) and the courthouse, where the following document was discovered.

1888 06-05 GWE in NMa

1888 06-05 GWE in NMb

I have been unable to confirm the “chased by Geronimo” claim.

The First Isaac M. Howard

On October 10, 2019December 13, 2019 By Rob RoehmIn Biography, Dr. Isaac M. Howard, GenealogyLeave a comment

[by Rob Roehm; originally posted March 3, 2013 at rehtwogunraconteur.com. This version updated and lightly edited.]

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In [18]49 three brothers started for California. On the Arkansas River they split up, one went on to California where he lived the rest of his life, one went back to Georgia and one, William Benjamin Howard, went to Mississippi . . .

—Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. October 1930

Those three brothers were all sons of Henry Howard; William Benjamin was Robert E. Howard’s grandfather, Isaac Mordecai Howard’s father. We all know that story, but what about the Howard who came to California? In a December 1930 letter to Lovecraft, Robert Howard elaborated a bit, saying that his grand-uncle “settled in Sonora,” as good a starting place as any.

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Using various online genealogy websites, I found the names of Henry Howard’s other children; the oldest son was Charles Henry Howard (1821-1864), who appears to have lived most of his life in Georgia, but died in Virginia. Perhaps he is the brother who returned to Georgia from the Arkansas River. In other letters, Robert Howard explains the reason for the group splitting up: cholera:

Had not cholera struck the camp of William Benjamin Howard and his band of ’49ers on the Arkansas River, reducing their number from nineteen to seven, and weakening their leader so he was forced to turn back, I, his grandson, would have undoubtedly been born in California instead of Texas (REH to HPL, ca. June 1931).

Whether or not William Benjamin was the “leader” of the group is arguable, but Robert Howard clearly believed that at least one of the brothers made it all the way to California; if not the oldest brother, perhaps it was the second oldest, one Isaac Mordecai Howard.

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The first I. M. Howard was born in Georgia on October 3, 1825. If Robert Howard’s family legend is true, he headed west with his brothers in 1849. California voter registration documents found online have an “Isaac Mordecai Howard” living in Blanket Creek, Tuolumne County, California, in 1866. Blanket Creek is fewer than five miles southeast of Sonora and in the same county. He is listed as a 40-year-old farmer, born in Georgia. The California connection was more than I could stand, so I convinced my father and partner-in-research, to load up the Lincoln and make the six-hour trek to Gold Rush Country.

1869 10-18 Quartz Claim

At the Tuolumne County courthouse, we uncovered a few documents that tell a bit of Isaac Howard’s story. While listed as a farmer on the 1866 voter registration document, that clearly wasn’t all he was interested in. An October 18, 1869 Quartz Claim indicates that he was at least trying to strike it rich. His claim, the “Howard Vein,” was shared with eight others—including three with the last name of Berger— and was located “about 1½ miles North East of Ward’s Ferry.” A bridge has taken the place of the ferry today, and can only be reached via a treacherous, one-lane road that zigzags down a steep mountain face. Must have been fun on a horse or mule, and it appears that the claim didn’t pan out (pun intended).

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At the time of the 1870 U.S. Census, those same Bergers mentioned above are running a farm. Right below the Bergers, the Census has Isaac Howard, unmarried, working as a farm laborer in Tuolumne County. The post office listed is Sonora. Ten years later, the 1880 Census of “Sonora Precinct” has Isaac M. Howard as a single Farmer, age 54. Schedule 2 of that Census, “Productions of Agriculture” in Blanket Creek, gives more detail: Isaac is the owner of 160 acres, 30 “improved” and 130 “Woodland and Forest”; he valued his land at 800, his equipment at 30, and his livestock at 100; he spent 50 on building and repairing in 1879; the value of “all farm productions” for 1879 is listed as 30; and he had three horses. Just up the road is a John Hawkins; remember that name.

And now, a history lesson (note that Howard had 160 acres in 1880):

In 1862, the Homestead Act was passed and signed into law. The new law established a three-fold homestead acquisition process: filing an application, improving the land, and filing for deed of title. Any U.S. citizen, or intended citizen, who had never borne arms against the U.S. Government could file an application and lay claim to 160 acres of surveyed Government land. For the next 5 years, the homesteader had to live on the land and improve it by building a 12-by-14 dwelling and growing crops. After 5 years, the homesteader could file for his patent (or deed of title) by submitting proof of residency and the required improvements to a local land office.*

* Potter, Lee Ann and Wynell Schamel. “The Homestead Act of 1862.” Social Education 61, 6 (October 1997): 361.

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It is unclear exactly when Isaac Howard settled on his 160 acres, but it was sometime between 1870 and 1880 (the year his mother, Elizabeth Howard, died back home in Georgia). An 1881 county directory lists Howard as a “farmer,” and by February 1, 1882, he had met all of the Homestead requirements and his patent was approved. Part of his land is seen below.

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Late in 1882, back in Georgia, a chunk of his mother’s land was sold for $505. The transaction was finalized on January 19, 1883. After court fees, a total of $479.75 was divided up between her heirs, including Isaac M. Howard, who received $50.

Later that year, on September 22, 1883, Howard appeared at the Tuolumne County courthouse. His first order of business was to enter the deed to his land into the record; his second was to sell that land. “For the consideration of five hundred and seventy five dollars,” I. M. Howard sold his 160 acres in section 24 to one J. Hawkins, perhaps his 1870 neighbor. A 1948 topographical map shows a “Hawkins Ranch” east of where Isaac Howard’s property was located, about seven miles southeast of Sonora proper.

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With all of the above information in hand, we took the evening off and went downtown to meet up with Barbara Barrett, who had driven in for a visit. In the morning, we hit the genealogy library. We quickly added the 1881 listing from the city directory to our stack of documents, but we were unable to find the one piece of information that still eluded us: Isaac Mordecai Howard’s death date.

So, where did he go? The 1890 Census was destroyed by fire, so no help there, but California’s voter registrations for 1890 have been transcribed and are available in The California 1890 Great Register of Voters Index; unfortunately, Isaac M. Howard either didn’t register that year, had moved out of state, or was dead. Robert E. Howard said that Isaac “lived the rest of his life in California,” but where? At the end of September 1883 he was 58, living near Sonora, a single man with no property, but his wallet bulged with what would today be about $14,000. What would you have done?

Family Legend

On August 30, 2019October 6, 2020 By Rob RoehmIn Biography, Genealogy1 Comment

As we have seen, the Howard branch of Robert E. Howard’s family tree passed through Virginia and became intertwined with the Henry family tree in Mississippi. Not much is known about this line of Henrys, especially the earliest arrivals to the United States. In Goodspeed’s 1890 Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Southern Arkansas, a short biography of Robert E. Howard’s great uncle, Dr. J. T. Henry, says only that his grandfather, James Henry, “was of Irish descent, a farmer by occupation, and died in Bibb County, Ala.” (pg. 674). Other family members’ biographies in the tome provide little else.

The Howard family Bible, in the possession of David Terrell Howard’s family (Robert E. Howard’s uncle), has only one mention of James Henry, Sr.: “James Henry, Sr. and Anna Henry was married Jan. the 4th 1796.” The Bible also lists all of the couple’s children.

There are a lot of James Henrys running around in the early 1800s, but I did find ones in Bibb County for the 1830 and 1840 Censuses. Unfortunately, those early Census documents only name the head of the household; all others are only listed by their gender, age, and race. The family members on the 1840 form are the wrong ages, so I believe this to be a different line of Henrys; the James Henry on the 1830 Census of Bibb County, though, has the numbers I have come to expect, so I think that one is the correct family. In 1830, the household of our James Henry has one “Free White” male between 15 and 19 and one between 60 and 69. There are three “Free White” females: one aged 10 to 14, one 20-29, and one 50-59. No slaves are present.

Robert E. Howard himself had little knowledge of the earliest Henrys in his tree. What he did know at first, probably came from his father and consisted of little but family legend. Howard told H. P. Lovecraft ca. October 1930:

The Henry’s were the last of my various lines to arrive in the New World, being deported from Ireland a few years before the Revolutionary War because of rebellious actions against the English government. My great-greatgrandfather, James Henry, was born on the Atlantic Ocean on the way over.

In a July 1932 letter to Wilfred Blanch Talman, he filled in a few details:

Noting that the Holland society is made up of people whose ancestors came to America before 1675 makes me feel almost like a recent immigrant. The Howards didn’t come till 1733 — with Oglethorpe to Georgia — and one branch, the MacHenrys, didn’t come until about 1770; although the Eiarbhins, or Ervins, to Anglicize it, were well established in the Carolinas in the latter part of the 17th century. The MacHenrys, incidentally, landed in New York, but they didn’t stay there long; they dropped the Mac, and drifted southwestward. I said landed; I should have said, thrown off the boat by the English.

By the time he wrote his unfinished genealogical essay “The Wandering Years” (ca. 1933) he had little to add:

Of all the branches of my line, the pioneer flame burned in none so brightly as in the Henrys. Shamus McHenry was born in a ship on the Atlantic Ocean. His family landed in New York, but without pause moved southward. The name was Americanized, and it was as plain Jim Henry that my great-great-grandfather grew to manhood on the western borders of South Carolina, and married Anna O’Tyrrell, fresh from the hills of Connaught. There his son, James Henry, was born.
The echoes of the War of 1812 were scarcely done reverberating when Jim Henry was pushing westward. Before Alabama was a state, he came there. It was a southern frontier—sparsely settled, thickly timbered, swarming with game; Indians still dwelt there.

I have been unable to find any documentary evidence—actual government documents, newspaper items, etc.—for any of this. There is, however, a family tree posted at Ancestry.com that features one Séamus MacEnruig who died in Bibb County on May 1, 1845. He was born on May 7, 1765 and, it is noted, was born “Aboard ship to America from Ireland to SC.” He was married to Anna Terrell Grimes in South Carolina in 1796. They are listed as the parents of all the same Henry children that appear in the Howard family Bible; unfortunately, there are no documents provided or source citations—more family legends. And the tree’s branches do not go far enough to include any Howards.

Similarly, a genealogy report submitted by members of the Henry family to the Daughters of the American Revolution has the same birth and death dates for their James Henry as the MacEnruig, above, and mentions that his birth was “shipboard.” Several descendants of Dr. J. T. Henry filed D.A.R. applications with James Henry born “at sea” and married to either Anna or Anne, but, other than a transcription of Dr. Henry’s family Bible, there are no documents provided. And, while there was a James Henry involved in the Revolutionary War, it appears that it wasn’t our James Henry; the proof of service used to establish him as serving in the war “belongs to another person of the same name.”

Another source with no citations comes from Our East Tennessee Kinsmen by Aurelia Cate Dawson (1962). This volume lists the same birth and death information, the same wife and offspring, but adds James Henry’s marriage location: “Married in S. C. Jan. 4, 1796 to Anna or Anne.”

While most of these “sources” don’t have a last name for James’s wife, Robert E. Howard’s “O’Tyrrell” and Ancestry.com’s “Terrell Grimes” seem to support the fact. This would help to explain where Howard’s uncle, David Terrell Howard’s, middle name originated.

So, using the scant reference material and what appears to be family knowledge we’ll say that James Henry Sr. was born on May 7, 1765 on board a ship bound for the Colonies. On January 4, 1796, in South Carolina, James married Ann, Anne, or Anna, maiden name something like O’Tyrrell or Terrell Grimes. In 1811, the year “Squire James Henry” was born, the family was still living in South Carolina, according to the Goodspeed biography mentioned above. At some point between then and the 1830 Census, the family moved to Bibb County, Alabama. And, apparently, James Henry died there on May 7, 1845.

More to come.

Howard History

Category: Genealogy