The Age: Remembering Canada Ranch roots in Chambers County

By Marie Hughes, museum director of the Chambers County Museum at Wallisville

There is a serenity that envelopes you as you travel the Smith Point Road heading south of Anahuac, and a quietness floods your soul.  Far from the hustle and bustle of community life you will find nestled in the peaceful country quietude the Canada Ranch. The aged limbs of the massive oaks, standing guard since the 1880s, lock arms over the road, creating a shaded promenade at the entrance of the sprawling ranch.

Being Canadian born, the Canada Ranch sign caught my eye many years ago as I traveled to Smith Point; however, it wasn’t until much later I came to realize the name belonged to a family, not a country.  When Leroy Ezer agreed to chat with me about the history of the ranch, I was elated that I would finally learn more about the family behind the name and their place in Chambers County history.

George Raymond “Ray” Canada was born in Mexico, Audrain County, Mo., in 1880 to John Jefferson Canada and Georgia Phillips.  He lost his mother at the age of 10 and that same year his father relocated to Port Arthur, Texas.  Being among the first settlers in the area, he quickly rose to a position of prominence.  Ray joined his father in business there in 1900.

“Mr. Canada bought the Canada Ranch in partnership with Earl Cooper in 1927, which included all buildings, stock, and the brand,” said Leroy Ezer, current owner of the ranch. “He bought it from D. L. Broussard who had inherited it from the Whites.  Two or three years later, Mr. Cooper sold his portion to R. P. Smith.”

Smith and Canada ran the 11,000 acres together for several years, then divided the ranch.  Canada kept about 6,000 acres and Smith kept the lower land on East Bay, because he was interested in hunting. Later, Mr. Smith sold his portion of the ranch to Roy Dawson, second husband of Berta Mary Jackson Wilborn. After a time, Roy Dawson leased the land for several years to Brown & Root as a hunting lease and eventually sold it to them. 

“I now own the entire Canada Ranch and lease the grazing rights on the portion owned by Brown & Root,” said Ezer.   

Desire Louis Broussard, in 1881, married Sarah Bonetta White, daughter of James Taylor White II and Amanda Speights.  In 1889, he established a large cattle ranch on the Double Bayou land Sarah received from her father. There he built a beautiful stately home. 

Lumber for the home was brought by schooner from Lake Charles up Galveston Bay and into Double Bayou.  It was hauled from Double Bayou a distance of about five miles by 3-yoke of oxen.  Shingles for the building were made by a hand saw and were replaced in the latter part of 1927. 

Sarah died in 1899, either in childbirth or shortly after the death of their last child.  This grand old home was the one Ray Canada and his second wife, Winifred Adair Barrows Canada moved into in 1927.  The big oak trees on the property were planted around the early 1880s.

“The two magnificent magnolia trees that graced either side of the front view of the home were lost during Hurricane Carla along with 14 other trees,” Ezer sadly proclaimed. 

This grand old home burned to the ground in 1934. 

“A pilot light on a butane stove was the source of the ignition,” Ezer noted sadly. “There was no fire department at that time, and they lost it all.”

A newspaper article at the time reported, “At 3 a.m. Wednesday morning the colored folks living in the rear of the Canada home heard an explosion and an investigation found that the rear portion of the huge home was ablaze, and immediately hastened to notify Mr. and Mrs. Canada and little Jimmy, who were sleeping on the front upstairs porch and unaware of the fire.”

By the time they were awakened, the fire had gotten such a headway that it was only possible to save some of the furnishings in the front portion of the house.

Besides his cattle, Ray loved fine horses and his name was synonymous with good quarter horses in the Gulf Coast area. The walls of his home were lined with ribbons and trophies giving credence to his reputation.  Ray began raising quarter horses in 1935 when he obtained a registered thoroughbred stud named “Mr. Flowers” from the veterinarian department of Texas A & M college. The pride of the G. R. Canada ranch was his stud, “Texas Star,” who sired many of the top-quality quarter horses in the Gulf Coast area. 

Constantly close at hand were Ray’s beloved ranch dogs who were always eager to work the range with their master.  

“The Wilborns and Canadas also used to raise 75-100 sheep. They got rid of them in the 60s” said Ezer.  “The Canadas kept a large garden, which was very beneficial as they would have had to travel a long way to get fresh vegetables. In the fall, when they were working their cattle, they would put the sheep in the garden spot to fertilize it.  By spring it would have dried out and made good fertilizer.  When it was time to shear the sheep, shearers came from West Texas. They had shearing equipment mounted on a trailer and were able to shear several sheep at one time. Some of the wool was sold and some used to make saddle pads.”

The sheep kept them in food as they could keep it easily without spoilage due to their smaller size. 

“The sheep were plagued with ticks in their ears and screwworms were a problem. I wasn’t fond of them. Their meat was oily and their thick wool would get covered in grass burrs. I wasn’t sad to see them leave,” Ezer said.

Ezer’s grandfather, John Ezer, was a carpenter, and he is the one who built the new house. Leroy’s grandfather, a 31-year-old fair-haired, blue-eyed Austrian young man, had emigrated from Austria along with his bride, Ernestina, and 17-month-old son, George “Charlie,” arriving at the Port of Galveston in August of 1911.  He listed his profession as carpenter on his U.S. Declaration of Intention.  Charlie was the father of Leroy and Russell Ezer.  John and Ernestine had six more children after their arrival in Texas:  Joe Alexander “Alex,” Antonia “Tony,” Annie, Rosa “Rosie,” John “Johnny” Jr., and Ernest Fredes “Sonny.”

“My dad, as a young man, helped my grandfather build the house. He would saw rafters under the shade of the tree,” said Ezer.  “When they brought in the Middleton Oil field, my dad went to work for Brown & Root and worked for them for 40-plus years.” 

The property had a tall windmill above the trees with a cistern because they needed the gravity flow to get the water into the two-story house. They boarded in the area below the windmill and put a shower in it. The oldest building on the ranch, according to Mr. Canada, was the chicken house, which is still there, along with another little house called the Delco House.

“It was originally where they stored their wagons and the buggies that the ladies rode in.  Later in the 30s or 40s they turned it into the Delco House, so called because they had a Delco generator in there with a bunch of dry cell batteries.  That was their power source before Gulf States Electric came to the area.  They ran lines from the Delco House over to the house they lived in.  They just ran the lines over the oak limbs.  They had the old glass spools with a nail through them and that’s how they ran the power to the house,” said Ezer.

“Ray and Winnie Canada had no children together, but they raised Winnie’s first cousin, Jimmy.  Ray also had one son from his first marriage who lived with Ray’s ex-wife.  The father of James Nathan “Jimmy” Barrows was Robert Fletcher Barrows, brother of Winnie’s dad, John Appleton Barrows. When Jimmy was 4 years old, his mother, Alice “Allie” Mary Mills Barrows, died.  After her death, Jimmy was raised by Winnie and Ray Canada at the ranch.  On his 1945 draft card, he listed G. R. Canada as his next of kin and his place of residence as the 7HL Ranch,” according to Ezer.

When Smith Point Road was put in, landowners were given a right-of-way for the road (the Canada Ranch lies on both sides of the Smith Point Rd.)  The land was not purchased by the State and that was testified in court by Joe Lagow when they were trying to put a pipeline in the county right-of-way. 

“They wanted to cut more trees down, but Mr. Canada only let them cut down the trees where the road would be.  They left the four beautiful trees you see today near the entrance to the Canada Ranch.  I’ve been told several times by the State that these trees are untouchable. To remove them they would have to go through the Historical Commission. How long that will last, I do not know,” said Ezer. 

Mr. Canada and Elwood A. Wilborn were the first directors of the Port City Stock Yards in Houston in 1931.  At that time, the Anahuac Road was still dirt, so they had to go through Devers whenever they shipped cattle. 

“Regardless of the time of year, when they shipped to Houston, Mr. Canada always had a man ride in the back with the cattle to make sure they didn’t get down.  After the cattle were loaded, he would clean up and ride over in his car and spend the night. He had a commission company that worked at the stock yards. There was a gentleman by the name of Scott of Scott Commission Company.  That’s who all of the people here assigned their cattle to sell them. Mr. Scott’s son is Dave Scott, whom we’re really close friends with. Dave was the president of the Texas Southwest Cattle Ranchers Association,” Ezer said.

“It’s my understanding that in the mid-40, my dad worked out a deal with Mr. Canada where he put some cows on the ranch, their relationship grew from there. I can remember driving cows from Anahuac, about where Russell lives now, to the Canada Ranch.  They began hauling the cattle by truck in the 30s. The same truck was used to haul cedar.  In the wintertime, they would peel the bark off the posts to keep them from burning so badly when they burned the pastures to promote new growth.  Later on, at the Ranch, because of Daddy’s connection with Brown & Root, he would get old creosote pilings and split them to make fence posts.  It was cheap, but they were worse than the cedar posts about burning,” Ezer said.  “The only place I know where any of these posts are still standing is at Russell’s.  We bought cotton seed meal in burlap sacks which we preserved and sold back to the feed company.  Those we couldn’t we cut into strips, wrapped sticks with them, then soaked them in diesel or oil to make torches to burn the pastures, carrying extra strips on the back of our saddles to rewrap torches when needed.”

When Ezer’s grandfather worked on the ranch, he made about $5 a day while the other ranch hands made $1.50 a day.

“The cowboys didn’t just ride a horse, although, you rode a horse a bunch,” Ezer said.  “You built fence, baled hay, and much more.  I can barely remember, but back then they had a pipe sticking up in the air and they would stack hay around it.  I remember the ‘old ones’ talking about there being a special way to stack it and a special way to walk it down so that it would shed water.”

Grover Gill worked at the ranch for 54 years.  He rode a horse back and forth to his home located about a mile away.  Working at the ranch, besides longtime employees Grover Gill and Cary Dangerfield were great ranch hands from lots of good families back then – the Johnson, Rivers, North, Carrington, Humphrey, Lewis, Mayes, Drew, Tyler and Holmes families.  

“Ralph Holmes and I were close. He had a brother named Buck who was an outstanding ranch hand and cowboy.  Harvey Haynes was moving cattle to the back side of Barrows, the Robertson Mueller tract, in the 40s.  They drove the cattle down to the Intracoastal and then they would follow the Intracoastal around to the pasture.  A cow swam out into the canal and wouldn’t come back.  They had a wooden row bow and went out to get her.  Buck was dressed in his chaps and everything and he fell overboard and never came back up,” said Ezer. ” As close as Ralph and I were, he never talked about it. The other cowboys said Buck was every bit the man that Ralph was.  Ralph was a very intelligent man and built like a statue, lean and strong with no belly.  Most of them were back then.”

The Stock Law passed in 1967, which ruled that you could not run cattle loose on the road. 

“During that time all our cattle on the ranch were dehorned,” explained Leroy.  “A few years later, a cow showed up on the bayou that had horns and it definitely wasn’t ours and no one wanted to claim her.  I went to the courthouse and checked the brands.  There was a man by the name of McKinley Johnson. This heifer disappeared shortly before the stock law passed.”

Screw worms became a real problem in the 1960s for local ranchers. Riders had to check the cattle all the time, because if they got a cut or a calf born that wasn’t cleaned up good, the screw worm flies would get on it and lay their eggs in the raw flesh.  They still fly a barrier down in Mexico, releasing sterile flies that decrease their population, to keep the flies from coming up here, he said.

“There was a dipping vat at the ranch. The concrete slab is still there where the drain pen was.  We had some neighbors close by and the government brought their cattle to dip every two weeks.  Joe Whitehead told me, a couple years before he died, his daddy worked for the government doing dipping at that time.  He had a notebook listing all the cows you were supposed to have, and he had to count the cows you dipped.  It was a government sponsored program and everybody had to dip their cattle,” Ezer said.

In 2011 the ranch went through Bangs elimination, all the ranchers did.

“We had to test our cattle and lots of good cattle died because the test was not that good.  One time we were testing at the ranch and there was 3 or 4 veterinarians there working for the state.  We were waiting for more cattle to be brought in and they got to talking and said this test and killing cattle was not going to eliminate the Bangs.  Finally, after a few years, they came up with a vaccine and Bangs is now more or less history,” he said.

According to Ezer, from the time he got into ranching up to the 90s, there were lots of cattle on the roadway because they weren’t hauled down the highway; they were driven.

“Locals who lived around here were used to driving through cattle.  Because of Loin disease we had to rotate the cattle every two weeks, which was a good practice,” Ezer said.  “Loin disease would cause cattle to get down in their back end and you couldn’t get them up.  There was nothing you could do for them.  We always had a pasture resting and once the grass had grown sufficiently in the resting pasture, we would move the cows and calves into it so they would have the best grass.  They needed good nutrition because the cow was nursing a calf.   You would follow behind with your dry cows and that was kind of your rotation.”

The Wilborns drove a lot of cattle down the highway because their fields were spread out the most. 

“We drove ours about 23 miles to a pasture I got from Harvey Haynes.  We drove mostly on the highway, then through the Barrows on the back end.  Jett Hankamer of Hankamer and Harvey Haynes of Monroe City drove their cattle to the marsh just like the Whites, Barrows, and Mayes [ranches],” Ezer said.  “The Jacksons had a pasture south of us and they drove their cattle from Oyster Bayou through our place.”

From the 30s through the 50s, there were four major ranches in that area of Double Bayou: the Jackson Brothers, Elwood Wilborn, the Canada Ranch, and Roy Dawson Ranch.  They would all work together.  Every spring and summer if they had something really big to do, they would help each other. 

“I was told back before they had the trailers, the ranchers would put their stock horses together.  A day or two before the cattle work was to begin, they would drive them out to Jacksons and put them in a trap where they could easily get them.  They kept them there in a group until they finished working at Jacksons.  After a week or two, when they got through there, they would go to the Wilborns and work the Wilborn cattle.  Then they would go to Mr. Canada’s [ranch] and then Roy Dawson’s [ranch], not necessarily in that order,” Ezer said.

“An interesting thing that we still try to do, whatever ranch they were working at, the wives cooked a full meal, and it was not sandwiches, it was a roast dinner or something similar and a dessert.  Norma always cooks a full meal to this day whenever we need extra help.  That helps me to get people to come and work, because of her cooking,” he said with a smile.

“The Wilborns had a pasture that would go through us down about 11 miles from the highway on East Bay.  They would take the horses down there the day before the cattle work.  There wasn’t a road. They would leave early that morning and drive them through the marsh to get down there to work the cattle and bring them out.”

A twinkle gleamed in Ezer’s eye when he said, “The old timers told me, ‘If you want something to eat, you better get a boiled egg, salt, and pepper, and wrap it up in foil ‘cause that’s all you’re gonna get ‘cause it’s impossible for them to get a meal to you.’  If it was a very wet winter, they had to go way around to Smith Point to bring the cattle out.  It was quite an ordeal.”

When asked how long he intends to continue ranching, Ezer said, “I hope to go from ‘can-to-can’t.’  I’m fortunate to be able to work at my hobby – it’s a serious hobby. My only problem is I’m 82 and I can’t do what I used to do.”

As the interview wrapped up with this soft-spoken rancher, whose stature and carriage spoke of years of hard work and personal discipline, it was suggested that Lord willing, he still has many good years left in him. With his strong work ethic and commitment to excellence, Ezer can probably work circles around most young men of today.  His brother, Russell added, “When the good Lord decides it’s time to call Leroy home, hopefully a long time from now, I hope He takes him right there at the ranch, because that’s where his heart is.”