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Justin F Kimball Alumni Board
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Memorial Day at JFK
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Re: Memorial Day at JFK
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dlmcneely
Scenic East Texas
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Jun 29 09 5:50 AM
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generally reaches its zenith in the area drained by the Angelina and middle Neches Rivers (my opionion), which would include the drive you mentioned. Alto is named, I have read, because it is at the high point of the divide between the two streams. At any rate, there is generally more topographic relief in that vicinity than in most of East Texas, and the landscape includes a diversity of woodlands, including extensive bottomland hardwood stands with some swamps, and all three native East Texas pines (though it is north of the longleaf pine barrens, no longer extant, of the area to the south). The Big Thicket is to the south, so the streams and valleys here lack the baygalls, hanging bogs, and savannahs that characterize that biotope, but the hills give a more open vista to the eye.
The Sam Rayburn dam does provide a broad view, but the reservoir drowned a marvelous valley and destroyed the last free flowing river in East Texas. Even better is the Davy Crocket National Forest recreation site called Neches Bluffs just to the south (near the tiny town of Weches), which looks out over the Neches River Valley (rather than the Angelina) from a more nearly natural setting.
For an interesting read about one family's history in the Angelina River lands prior to (and after to a lesser extent) Sam Rayburn Reservoir, get hold of a copy of Joe C. Truett's _Circling Back_ (1996 University of Iowa Press). Joe Truett is a consulting wildlife biologist educated at Texas A&M and University of Arizona whose family settled in the Angelina valley in the mid-nineteenth century.
An interesting aside on the value of labor in the early twentieth century versus now is the episode in the book where Truett relates how his then twenty year-old maternal grandfather spent six months working as a laborer in a turpentine camp, came home, and bought a 100 acre farm and built a new six room house with the money he'd earned in the camp. That was around 1915, and such a purchase today would run in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. Granted the house today would have considerable features that the young man's likely lacked (indoor plumbing, central heat and air conditioning), I expect that the house was what a middle-income family of the time hoped to have, and two generations of the family earned its living from the farm, before the college educated third generation gave up on living in rural East Texas in the sixties and seventies.
Truett also authored _Land of Bears and Honey_, a chronicle of Big Thicket history and lore. It is worth a read, too, for anyone interested in East Texas's natural and social history.
David McNeely
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