THIS WEEK IN TEXAS HISTORY
THIS WEEK IN TEXAS HISTORY
The post office at Thurber closed for good on Oct. 28, 1936. The once thriving mining town hardly had a pulse, and neighboring Mingus was on the critical list.
Separated by two miles and the Erath-Palo Pinto county line, the two shared a common prosperity during the boom times of the coalburning locomotive. The future was bright for the mining mecca and the rail center until the dawn of the oil age yanked the rug out from under both communities.
Mingus was a quiet, offthe- beaten-track village in 1886, when the coal digging operation began at an anonymous camp just over the hill. After the local owners failed to make payroll two years later, angry miners turned in their picks and shovels forcing the paralyzed enterprise to fold.
The shafts were reopened within a matter of months by the Texas and Pacific Coal Company, a subsidiary of the railroad by the same name. Texas Rangers were assigned the distasteful duty of keeping the lid on the labor powder keg, and the idle miners returned to work.
The makeshift camp became Thurber, a company town from head to toe, where every square foot of land and every building belonged to the Texas and Pacific. All able-bodied individuals including the sheriff, doctors and schoolteachers toiled for the T&P.
Thurber was never incorporated because the company brass, who intentionally excluded employees from the decision-making process, scorned city government as an unnecessary nuisance. Since the Texas and Pacific picked up the tab for public education, there was no call as well for a school board.
Besides, in the absence of private real estate, no one paid a cent in property tax.
In addition to free schooling for their children, the inhabitants of Thurber enjoyed other unusual benefits. At a time when very few Texans had more than part-time access to the wonders of electricity, Thurber was on full power around the clock. Also, the company’s opera house was the first public structure in the entire state to feature ceiling fans.
The T&P ran a tight ship, as the Knights of Labor, forerunner of the American Federation of Labor, soon discovered.
Clamping down on union agitation by the Knights in the late 1880’s, the company ringed the town with barbed wire and stationed armed guards at every entrance.
Unwelcomed visitors were turned away at gunpoint.
Despite these stringent precautions, organizers from the United Mine Workers ultimately slipped into Thurber.
UMW strikers brought the company to its knees in 1903 and compelled the stunned management to capitulate. The Texas and Pacific’s private domain was transformed into the very first union town in the world.
This dramatic change was taken in stride at Mingus, where all that mattered was the uninterrupted flow of coal. Thurber, with an exotic mixture of 20 nationalities, extracted the black fuel, and predominantly Anglo-Saxon Mingus shipped a hundred carloads a day down the line.
The union coup also made little difference at the Snake Saloon, famed for the largest horseshoe bar between Fort Worth and El Paso. Each afternoon a combat-ready crew of 25 bartenders quenched the thirst of the dust-caked miners selling seven freight cars of beer per week.
Thurber and Mingus savored the good life during the First World War, as their combined population surpassed 15,000. Who could have guessed that the oil bonanza 20 miles away at Ranger would bring it all to a screeching halt?
By 1920 the Texas and Pacific Railroad had converted to the more economical oil-powered locomotive. As a result, coal production at Thurber was drastically curtailed, and the company tore up the contract with the UMW.
The union retaliated with a walkout, and the T&P sealed the mines on May 1, 1921.
With their greatest concentration of duespaying members in the Thurber local, the United Mine Workers provided unprecedented support.
The national office rushed hundreds of surplus army tents to the strike site to shelter families evicted from their company homes and contributed $65,000 a month in relief over the next two years.
Oblivious to the fact that they too were expendable, the shop workers in the Mingus rail yard went on strike in July 1922. As the months dragged by, discouraged miners and railroad men gradually gave up on their lost causes. What started as a trickle mushroomed into a mass exodus as the two towns slid together into oblivion.
The final nail in the Thurber coffin came in 1933, when the Texas and Pacific headquarters moved to Fort Worth.
Not only was the place abandoned, but buildings were leveled or carted away and the gas and water mains were ripped out of the ground.
By 1993 Thurber qualified as a bona fide ghost town with eight residents, and Mingus was reduced to a comatose hamlet of 219.
The unlucky neighbors were casualties in the unstoppable march of progress.
“Murder Most Texan” is a must read for fans of true crime and Texas history.
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