John Graves, the great Texas writer of Goodbye to a River, just died at his farm, Hard Scrabble, outside Glenn Rose. In a 1997 special issue of Cite called Texas Places, Graves talks about the farm, how it came to be and how it changed. It is a beautiful read you can download as a pdf. Here's a little excerpt:
Graves Ranch "Hard Scrabble," Glen Rose. Photo by Bill Wittliff.
Graves Ranch. Photo by Bill Wittliff.
Booker Hole, Graves Ranch. Photo by Bill Wittliff.
Glen Rose, the county's seat and its only real community then and still, enjoyed a degree of profit from its reputation as a spa, based on some fine stinky artesian wells whose sulfurous flow was said to have therapeutic virtue when bathed in or imbibed. But a good share of the imbibing done by patrons of the local sanitariums, operated by "rubbing doctors," seems to have involved not sulfur water but moonshine spirits smuggled down from the hills in jugs and Mason jars...
In that special little world, which I first glimpsed in the late 1940s when I started going to the area to hunt and fish, a sort of undemoralized poverty remained the norm even after wartime and postwar booms had rejuvenated cities not far away and had sucked away more hill people. The stubborn survivors liked it where they were, despite agricultural and pastoral devastation. They knew from experience that they could subsist on this land and, more importantly, they belonged, hanging onto dignity and wholeness. They knew the hills' private wrinkles, and who had what quirks of character and who lived where in valleys drained by clear running streams, and ancestral shades stood beside them as they labored for small return. When I bought the first part of my own place in I960, locals would still work hard at building fences or digging foundations or any other task you needed done, for a fat two dollars a day...
