The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 106, July 2002 - April, 2003 Page: 510
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Family accounts say Mary Jane was the prettiest of the five Matthews
girls. Though Brown was fifteen years older, they married on October 25,
188o, at the ranch home of the bride's parents. After their wedding trip
to Galveston, they returned to Brown's farm in Jack County, but, by the
birth of their first child, John, in 1882, they had moved to her ranch. In
1884, Brown became pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Albany and re-
located his family to town where a daughter, Mary, was born the next year.8
By his own admission, John was not a cowman, leading his wife to sell
her herd and buy sheep, but 1881 was a very dry year, and he recorded,
the "dreadful winter follow[ing] a long drouth ... melted the wooly flock
... away like snow in spring." When Congress reduced the wool tariff and
the cost of freight to Chicago increased, sheep men from all over the area
went broke. Drought conditions worsened in 1885, when it stopped rain-
ing altogether. The Browns leased their ranch of 2,080 acres to Mary
Jane's brother, J. A. (Bud) Matthews, in an agreement by which he paid
taxes and assumed a note for sixteen hundred dollars.'
The Texas Central Railway's construction to Albany, in 1881, encour-
aged county growth. Two years later, when the state of Texas offered
cheap school lands in western counties at two to five dollars an acre or
less, farmers thought they had found land to rival Kansas as a vast farming
area. Land agents and railroad promoters swarmed West Texas picturing
the land as "semi-tropical . . with exhaustless soil [of] ... perpetual ver-
dure." Thousands of acres were plowed. An indication of the virgin
prairie's fertility had occurred thirty years earlier when Indian agent Jesse
Stem came to the Clear Fork and planted corn and oats, which he sold
"on the ground" for forty-five hundred dollars. But, without official
weather records, little thought had been given to the long-term adapt-
ability of West Texas for dry-land farming-except by cattle raisers such as
Phin W. Reynolds who settled earlier and better understood climate pat-
terns. He recalled walking "up the dry bed of the Clear Fork for more
than half a mile hunting drinking water" in the years 1862 through 1864,
but new agrarian pioneers had no such memories, and when their
streams, springs, or underground cisterns went dry, they found them-
selves trekking miles for water.10
8JacksboroFrontzerEcho, Oct. 4, 1878; Fort Grffin Echo, Oct. 3, 1878, Oct. 30, 188o; Minutes of the
Session of the Presbyterian Church of Albany, Texas, July 2, 1884-Nov 4, 1887 (original at Pres-
byterian Board of Publication and Sabbath-School Work, Philadelphia), Myra Brown Robinson,
Family Records, Big Spring, Tex.
' Brown, Twenty-Five Years a Parson in the Wild West, 171 (quotation), Wilham Curry Holden, Al-
kali Trazls, Social and Economzc Movements of the Texas Frontier, 184 6-goo (Dallas: Southwest Press,
1930), 128; Fort Gnriffin Echo,July 23, 1881; lease agreement between John and Mary Brown andJ.
A. (Bud) Matthews, Throckmorton County Deed Records, Book 7, pp. 388-389; Matthews, Inter-
woven, A Pioneer Chronzcle (Houston: Anson Jones Press, 1936), 173-174
"0 A. A. Clarke Papers, Robert E. Nail Foundation Archives (Old Jail Art Center, Albany, Tex.);April
51o
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 106, July 2002 - April, 2003, periodical, 2003; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101223/m1/588/: accessed March 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.