The entire area is rife with springs and has been for a long time. During this wetter-than-normal year, the springs have sometimes spilled out of the ground and spread across the land as in the days of yore. That’s where the name of Mud Springs originated.
H.H. Wright, 83, grew up around Rogers and has a more-than-passing familiarity with Mud Springs, Joe Lee and McMillan.
“It’s easy to see why people settled here,” Wright said last week during a visit to the site of the old McMillan community. “There are springs here that have never gone dry.”
McMillan has gone the way of a lot of those old communities. Presumably, the town’s population dwindled to nonexistence after the Gulf Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad went through Rogers a few miles to the north.
But it was once a thriving community with at least one store, a hotel and possibly even a stagecoach stop.
“There was what I guess was a general store. Judging from the foundations there was probably more than one store,” Wright said. “This was a township so there was no doubt some houses here too. You used to could see evidence of the old houses and buildings, but they’re mostly gone now.”
Nearly everything having to do with McMillan is gone now except for memories and stories. Wright tells the story that was told to him of George Underwood and his wife Ida, whom George called “Ider.” The couple spent their wedding night at a hotel in McMillan.
Wright also took Bell County historians Mike and Nancy Kelsey to the site a few weeks ago. The Kelseys had compiled some information on the old community through old newspaper clippings but weren’t sure where McMillan was located until Wright showed them.
An account in the “Story of Bell County,” published in 1988 by the Bell County Historical Commission has this to say about the old community:
“John Reed settled at Reed’s Lake, and Jeff Reed at Indian Hill and Mud Springs, which was originally known as McMillan, where a grog shop was operated in the early days.”
By Wright’s account, and from what the Kelseys have uncovered, McMillan was separate from Mud Springs, though the communities were close enough to be twin cities.
An old newspaper clipping from the Dec. 18, 1879, issue of the Belton Journal foreshadows the eventual fate of McMillan and makes clear that the day of the “grog” shop had long since passed from the community.
“Railroad prospects seem to be favorable, as I understand one survey of the G.C. & S.F. company runs three miles north of McMillan. There are plenty of schools and churches and the people are hospitable and social, and down on king alcohol and in favor of laws restricting the sale and use of it, almost to a man.
“A good temperance council has been organized and is in a flourishing condition. In fact all the evidence of general improvement and prosperity are very noticeable in the last four years.”
Wright became familiar with the four acres where McMillan used to be when his brother-in-law bought the land in the early 1950s. Wright, a World War II veteran who retired from the Temple VA several years ago, used to run cattle on the land.
In a lifetime of knocking around the old townsite he has seen evidence of the old town not only in the form of the old foundations and ruins but at an old dumpsite where he found dozens of old snuff bottles.
“I’m safe in saying there was 300 snuff bottles in that ditch,” he said. “The bottles had the little dots on the bottom that told you how strong the snuff was. A four-dot sniffer was the strongest stuff they made.”
The people who lived in the old community were pretty strong too. Wright tells the story, passed down through the years, of the 1921 flood, which lives in Central Texas history as perhaps the most dramatic flood of all time. In a storm that produced the world’s record for most rainfall in a 24-hour period - 48 inches at Thrall - Wright said it rained 23 inches in 24 hours at McMillan.
He told the story of a family trapped by rising floodwaters of the Little River less than a mile away.
“George Underwood and another man built a boat out of a smokehouse and used a lantern to get in there and get those people,” he said. “They had to row in a mile, mile-and-a-half or so to get the family. By the time they got there the family was up in the second floor of the house.
“All they had was that lantern and the boat they made. It took them three or four trips but they rescued all of them. The house eventually washed up against some pecan trees. It didn’t wash away, but it washed up against those pecan trees and just lodged there.”
The place is quiet now and Knob Creek and Little River are, for the moment, behaving themselves. But this part of the county breathes history, especially in the company of someone like H.H. Wright who knows the history that history otherwise forgot.
ccoppedge@temple-telegram.com
