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Writer recounts Brazoria County ‘boom’ times
Published October 19, 2009
In a tongue-in-cheek article called “Boom Comes to Town,” printed in the nationally distributed weekly Collier’s magazine for Dec. 28, 1940, J.D. Ratcliff featured the impact Dow’s arrival had at Freeport — which he describes as being 50 miles below Galveston on the Gulf Coast.
“Old residents are still slightly dazed about what has happened there,” he said, then quoted a fictional Freeport businessman, “Mr. Bearhunter Funderburk,” identified as the proprietor of Bearhunter’s Café.
“This solid, monolithic gentleman is a little less confused than most of the others,” Ratcliff said, explaining that Funderburk’s nickname was bestowed “when he set out on a fruitless journey to kick the wadding out of a bear that was annoying local citizens.”
According to Ratcliff’s story, Funderburk’s establishment had “a long counter — Texas doesn’t allow bars — garnished with jars of pickled pigs’ feet, wienies, hard-boiled eggs and other delicacies.”
He goes on to mention “a businesslike stockade of beer cases,” as well as tables and chairs and space for dancing.
The Bearhunter is quoted as saying back when the Freeport Sulphur Company shut off one of its two mines and laid off 300 employees, “things weren’t much good,” though a few Houston fishermen and a few sailors did visit.
But with the advent of the vast new Dow plant to make magnesium from seawater, he says, Freeport’s population shot up from 3,100 to 7,500 in just 90 days.
Because of the housing shortage, Ratcliff’s story continued, “Trailer parking space fetched seven dollars a month — almost as much as an acre of land was worth a month or so earlier.”
He added that “Alert residents found that a rented cot would enrich the family till at the rate of five dollars a week,” and claims the record for occupancy was 19 cots spread in the parlor, hallways, blanket closets and attic of one residence.
The magazine’s humorous take on what was happening in Freeport covered the addition of a movie house, tent photographers and “a skeet shooting pitch (that) started banging away.”
Do-it-yourself laundries in which the water was free and the machines rented at 40 cents an hour were also mentioned.
“Reverend J.P. Rutledge, tent revivalist, started a highly profitable session of soul saving, keeping the mourners’ bench sagging most of the time,” Ratcliff reported, adding, “And a tent skating rink did nicely, too.”
He claimed “furtive troupes of crap-shooters,” operating in what he described as “a boom town, 1940 model,” was something like those “of sourdough tradition” in such places as Nome, Dawson and Fairbanks, Alaska — “to about the same extent that a juke box is related to a wheezy phonograph with lilies painted on the horn.”
In case readers didn’t understand, he said this meant the new model was much more elegant and flashy.
The traditional mud of boom towns was being updated by loads of oyster shells scooped up from reefs lining the shore, making an excellent road surface.
In addition, he said, gun-toting in the modern boom town didn’t pay, because the bad guy couldn’t “hop a horse and ride for the hills safely ahead of the sheriff.”
Instead, he said, the shooter who jumped into a coupe would be picked up by the state police 3 miles out of town.
“The old-fashioned boom town is as dead as a fried fish on Beale Street,” Ratcliffe wrote in the Collier’s article. “But the new model is very much with us,” with people aware they would have to work hard for their “gold.”
Most of the newcomers, he said, were skilled mechanics, including pipefitters, steelworkers and masons, who arrived in expensive trailers, accompanied by their families.
After one job was completed, these construction workers moved on to the next, he said, allowing their children to see the country in the process.
“Only the rag, tag and bobtail of the construction gang … make a feeble attempt to uphold the boom-town tradition,” Ratcliff said.
He described this group as arriving “by freight with a couple of soggy dollars hidden in their shoes,” and spending the nights after payday trying to rid themselves of whatever they had earned, “by the quickest and most violent means available.”
The mythical Bearhunter’s take on that situation was the newcomers, as a whole, weren’t a bad bunch, though after they were paid on Fridays, they tended to “get itchy.”
His solution to staying in business was never to let one of them get the upper hand.
Pointing to a bit of local history, including the building of a bridge over dry land followed by diversion of the Brazos River in 1928, Ratcliff said Freeport had been in “a quiet rut until Dow engineers began casting appraising eyes on its resources.”
He credited the town for “doing its honest best to deliver satisfactorily for the $80,000 weekly payroll that has been dropped in its lap. …”
As to lawlessness, he quoted Chief Constable Hays as saying he had few complaints, and had advised café owners to keep the peace in their own establishments.
“Every night Constable Hays rounds up the drunks unable to get home and lodges them in his three-cell jail — Hays’ Hotel they call it,” Ratcliff said, noting Hays had told him he had 12 there one night, “stacked up just like cordwood.”
Summing up his impressions of Freeport in 1940, Ratcliff called it “a lusty, vigorous action picture of America going about the business of arming itself.”
Next week: Roads, entertainment in short supply.
Marie Beth Jones, a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton, is chairwoman of the Brazoria County Historical Commission.
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