“My little brother was just ten years old When we hit bad weather and hid in the hole We could see Texas was only a mile And oh, little brother, I remember your smile At Indianola”
– Indianola, by Charlie Robison
How old is Austin College? Your typical Texas college will share “Way Back When” articles ABOUT the year 1922.
Not AC though. We share “Way Back When” articles DURING the year 1922. This March 31, 1922, article references the student body of 1886.
And yes, some “colorful” characters in this group.
John Wharton came from North Carolina and was the first faculty member on the new AC campus in Sherman. That first Wharton class took place on October 2, 1876, two days before the grand opening of Texas A&M. John Edmonds came from Virginia after founding VMI baseball in 1867; Edmonds started AC baseball around the time this photo was taken. Edmonds later became the highest-ranking member of the Corps of Cadets at A&M, before losing his life in a gun fight on Main Street in Bastrop, TX.
Both Wharton & Edmonds have Confederate Civil War pasts that are as interesting as they are controversial and occasionally sordid. Edmonds fought with Lee at Richmond, before the capital’s surrender to Grant in 1865. Wharton surrendered at Dinwiddie Courthouse in Virginia, just before the war’s end at Appomattox. He was briefly a POW in Washington, D.C, around the time of Lincoln’s assassination.
By 1886, both Wharton & Edmonds were in Sherman. It was a decade in which, according to Dr. Light Cummins and his excellent book “Austin College: A Sesquicentennial History,” AC finally overcame its nearly 40-year precarious existence due to natural disasters, war, and poverty. These men and their checkered past “finally brought to Austin College the financial stability that it had lacked from its founding in 1849.”
I wrote a Roo Tale about a member of the AC Board of Trustees who survived the Great Galveston hurricane of 1900. Texas hurricane buffs know, however, that the REAL big one took place in the year this photo was taken…….1886. That year, a hurricane completely wiped out the town of Indianola, at the time a candidate to become the largest port in Texas. The town never recovered from that storm and no longer exists.
AC has weathered its own crises over nearly 200 years. I still think it is a small miracle that AC is even still around, unlike Charlie Robison’s 1886 town of Indianola. And I think it is pretty cool that this 1886 pic may very well be the oldest collection of Roos ever assembled for a photograph.
“But it’s fifty years later and nobody cares About some old city that ain’t even there…. And I’ll take his ashes and throw from my boat As they crossed that ocean I’m going to float To find me another Indianola”
