By Marie Hughes, director of the Chambers County Museum at Wallisville
Robert Monroe White, son of James Taylor White II and Amanda Speights, was born in his parents’ home on Turtle Bayou, near the home of his grandfather, James Taylor White I, the Cattle King of Texas. Although he was born in the midst of cattle country and was well familiar with the cattle industry, great-grandson Bobby Edwards said being a cowboy was not Monroe’s passion, as Monroe had a heart for business. Monroe passed away before his great-grandchildren were born, so they came to know him only through stories passed down by family.
R. M. attended A&M University from 1876–1878 and was part of the first graduating class of Texas A&M, which consisted of forty-one students.
“A. & M., at the time, had two programs,” noted Bobby Edwards. “One was a three-year program, and one was four-years. They had an engineering degree, which was four years. I think he had the three-year option, so the first class will be staggered according to when they graduated.”
“The indications are he went there because there was talk of the end of the open range. They had been using open range for more than two generations, so this was a big deal for them, and a big problem too. His father didn’t know quite how to deal with it, so R. M. was sent to A & M to try and figure out the best way to handle it. They concluded the best solution was acquiring as much land as they could from the state and individuals. H. H. Jackson would buy land, then sell it to the Whites. R.M. handled all the transactions in the acquisition of land for the family. They ended up buying, I don’t know the exact figure, about 120,000 acres. I remember seeing a duck hunting lease for 120,000 acres, so I’m figuring that was the whole ranch,” Bobby said.
Regarding R. M.’s personal land purchases, Bobby added, “When people couldn’t pay back the money Monroe loaned them, he would let them pay in land. That’s why he ended up with so many parcels of land all over the county in odd places. It wasn’t necessarily land he would have bought for himself, like the swamp at Wallisville, I’m sure he didn’t buy that on purpose.”
“The brothers went duck hunting there a lot though,” Sandy Edwards pointed out. “We saw the remnants of where their blinds were. They were made out of cypress boards in between the cypress trees.”
On the Banks of Turtle Bayou
As the grandchildren continued sharing stories, Bobby explained that Monroe’s role on the ranch was less about horseback work and more about operations and logistics.
“R. M. was not involved in ranching so much at first [other than the acquisition of the land,]” said Bobby. “He was in the cattle business, but he approached it more from the business side, he just wasn’t much of a cowboy. He had a combination store, saloon and bank at the forks of White’s Bayou and Turtle Bayou, where Whites Park is today. He had his own sailboats to haul stuff. He couldn’t rely on anybody else, so he built his own boats to get supplies from Galveston to the store. One of them was for coal oil and the other was for food. You never wanted to put coal oil next to the food ‘cause everything would taste like coal oil.”
Once the sailboats crossed Trinity Bay, they lost wind at the mouth of the bayou.
“No one had motors at the time, and I mentioned to Nanny, ‘you still had another mile once you got to the mouth of the bayou, how did you get the sailboat up to the store?’ She said they had to tow it up the bayou from the bank, either with a couple of mules or a crew of people. I asked her how much they paid people back then to do something like that and she said either twenty-five cents or a chicken,” Bobby said with a laugh.
“You have to assume they had to clear the bank of any timber,” Sandy interjected.
“Yes,” Bobby responded, “I’m sure that bank was just slick from hauling loads, ‘cause there were other people who had boats, he wasn’t the only one. I’m estimating they had to haul the boats about a mile, could be a little more.”
“I remember Nanny saying they had a little wharf where they loaded stuff on and off,” Sandy said. “She said she was sitting there waiting with custard for the ice to make ice cream. The way she talked, that was a really big deal back then, to have ice during the summer to make ice cream. From what I understand, the ice came from Lake Michigan, or someplace like that, they cut it out of the lakes. They built barges and packed them with ice and shipped it down the Mississippi. It’s my understanding, when they got to New Orleans, the barges couldn’t go back so they tore them down and used the timber to build houses.”
As the group reflected on that story, curiosity arose around the table about how the ice survived the trip south. Tommy Edwards explained that when the barges were built, the sawdust created from cutting the timber was used as insulation around the ice. The ice was also stored below deck, allowing the surrounding water to provide additional insulation. It was shipped during the winter and stored in icehouses once it arrived.
“They let them make ice cream on the day the ice showed up,” Bobby said. “Other than that, they couldn’t use the ice to make ice cream because it was too valuable. They had a lot of medicinal purposes for the ice, when people had fever, it saved a lot of lives. Because it was so precious, you could only get it for ice cream the first day it showed up. After that, it would be the next ice shipment before you could make ice cream again.”
Southern Comfort Moves Home
“When the 1900 storm hit it flooded Monroe’s store,” Sandy said. “And it’s my understanding he rebuilt it up higher, but the original structure still stood, so he turned it into a saloon.”
Sandy shared one of the stories Nanny often told from her childhood.
“I remember Nanny telling me that as a little girl her mom, Mattie, told her not to ever go down there. She went down there, and she evidently knew the bartender, the guy who maintained it. He picked her up and sat her on top of the bar and gave her some iced lemonade to drink. There wasn’t anybody in there, that’s the only reason he put her up there like that. Someone came up to the saloon, in a wagon or on a horse, I don’t know which, and the bartender didn’t say a word. He just picked Nanny up, glass of lemonade and all and turned around, opened up the back door and set her on the back steps and closed the door. He didn’t say a word to her. When she finished her lemonade, she left the glass there and went back home.”
Bobby said that when Monroe moved to Stowell around 1900, he kept the store and saloon at Turtle Bayou but moved the banking business to Stowell. He hired someone to run the store and saloon, but the operation declined and continued at least until Prohibition.
During Prohibition, Bobby said Monroe could no longer sell whiskey and had a large number of barrels on hand.
“They loaded all those barrels of whiskey on wagons and hauled them to his house in Stowell and built a shed just for the whiskey barrels.”
Anna White later said they used some of that whiskey to make peach brandy and other things. Bobby continued, “So, they had an endless supply of whiskey there. His wife didn’t drink and she didn’t like people who drank too much.”
“Including her daughters,” Tommy added with a laugh.
As the grandchildren continued sharing stories, their memories turned to Monroe’s move to Stowell and the role the railroad played in shaping daily life.
R. M. White built his home in Stowell in close proximity to the train track.
“Someone told him he needed to build his house next to the railroad track,” stated Bobby. “They told him he didn’t want to build out in the middle of nowhere, but close to the railroad track so he could get things cheap and it would be much more reliable, and they were right,” Bobby agreed. “They would take the train to High Island and down the Bolivar peninsula. Then the train cars would be loaded on a barge and floated over to Galveston.”
“The barges are still sunk in there,” Tommy interjected.
“One time Anna and Lillie Mae were going to Galveston for some event,” Bobby said. “Anna had gone on ahead with Monroe and Lillie Mae was on a later train. They had loaded the train cars on the barge and were crossing the channel when a bad little storm came up. It got so bad that the guy running the tugboat got scared and cut ‘em loose. They drifted for a long time before they got over to the other side of the bay and then traveled to Galveston by the back way. When they got to the hotel, Nanny looked at Doodle and said, ‘You look like h3!!.’ Oh, they were mad at that guy for cuttin’ them loose,” Bobby remarked.
“I don’t know if that was the shopping trip or if it was another one,” added Sandy, “but Anna and Lillie Mae had bought corsets during their shopping spree, then went upstairs to rest or something when they got back to the hotel. They heard some barking and looked out the window to see what was going on. Jack and Cade were out there barking like dogs, the boys had gotten the corsets and put them on the hounds,” Sandy laughed, causing a ripple of laughter around the table.
“The girls didn’t like that too much,” Bobby added with a chuckle.
The conversation then turned back to Monroe’s keen attention to land boundaries and legal detail.
“Monroe mortgaged the railroad right-of-way at one time, while the trains were running,” Bobby said. “The reason I know it wasn’t an accident is because he didn’t mortgage the whole railroad track, he mortgaged it from the center of the track west. If it was an accident, you would just claim it all, but he was very specific, center of the tracks to the west. He saw that as the true boundary between him and maybe Josephine. He saw that as the true boundary even when the trains were running.”
The Old Home Place Still Whispers Its Stories
As the grandchildren’s conversation shifted from Monroe’s business dealings to family life, their memories settled on the Stowell home—its craftsmanship, its innovations, and the small details that made it unforgettable.
“R.M. built his house in Stowell shortly after 1900,” said Bobby, “they brought the carpenters from Louisiana to build it and Archie Middleton liked how they built it so much that he had them build his house.”
“It took them two years to build Monroe’s house,” interjected Tommy, “and Jamie said, according to the records, he spent $5,000 on it, which was a fortune back then.”
The group continued to reminisce about the old home, each remembering some special aspect that was memorable to them. They recalled it was built out of cypress cut from the river bottom in Wallisville. They had running water and lights when no one else had it. Before they got the Delco battery setup for power, they used carbide for lighting. They explained how they dripped acetone on the carbide to make the gas to light the lights. One memorable feature to all was the acetylene chandelier and acetylene fixtures on the walls, particularly in the kitchen.
They had two big cisterns on the porch. Sandy reminded the group there was a brass valve there where you could draw water.
“I drew water to drink one time,” Sandy said, “and Nanny chewed me out. She said don’t drink that nasty stuff.”
Bobby said he used to drink out of cisterns all the time and never got sick.
They remembered fondly the syrup mill at the house where they extracted the juice from the sugar cane to make syrup and molasses, and the old glass cylinder gas pump located underneath the sheds where they kept the vehicles.
“They had an old gas tank buried underground and they had a gas pump that was hand operated, and fuel was dripped into the gas tank by gravity flow,”
The group continued to recall features of the home that held so many fond memories for them. They marveled at how self-sufficient the entire setup was—with carriage house, gas pump, syrup mill, and smoke house—and remembering the essential old whiskey house drew laughter from all of them. Their cousin Dinah White especially relished the memory of all the bluebonnets in the front yard. Tommy added his memory of the Indian paintbrushes, recalling how Mattie was big into the wildflowers.
Although Monroe’s great-grandchildren never knew him, they all remembered and loved their great-grandmother, Martha “Mattie” White, affectionately called GaGa.
“Every Christmas we went to the Stowell house,” Bobby recalled. “The Hamiltons, Heberts, the Edwards, the Dunns, it was a big crowd. It was mostly for the kids, but we’d always have a great time.”
“She would have all those little stockings hung on the mantle,” Dinah said. “She’d put five dollars in them and I thought, oh my gosh, I’m in the money now.”
“Oh, and the pretty little sandwiches and she broke out the sterling silver,” Susan added.
“Alison’s been polishing on a lot of that silver,” Tommy said. “And we’ve had the two-family Bibles redone. The lady who re-bound them said it’s rare to see Bibles with the kind of paper they were printed on. It is like cotton fabric paper.”
As the stories continued around the table, memories shifted to everyday moments and the people Monroe interacted with beyond his immediate family.
“They used to put dad on a little white horse named Mike with the mail bag and send him to the post office to get the mail,” said Susan, referring to her father, Billy Edwards.
“The horse just knew where to go,” explained Bobby. “He would get to the post office and the postal lady would come out and put all the stuff in the bag and the horse would just come back. Out of habit, the horse just knew what to do, you could just set a kid on him and let him go, and that’s what they did.”
As the conversation turned to Monroe’s relationships outside the family, Bobby recalled stories passed down through Anna and Nanny.
“I remember Anna and Nanny saying O.C. Jackson used to go to Monroe’s house a lot,” commented Bobby. “He didn’t trust too many people because many had taken advantage of him, but he trusted Monroe. Monroe was kind of his mentor and when he had a problem, he’d come and see Monroe. Shortly after the beginning of the oil boom and long before oil was discovered at Oyster Bayou, somebody went by O’C,’s house and told his wife he was selling vacuum cleaners or something and got her to sign a paper, signing away the mineral rights to Oyster Bayou. O.C. went to see Monroe to find out what could be done about it and Monroe got hold of the guy. Monroe, much after the fashion of the Godfather, made him a deal he couldn’t refuse, and he got the mineral rights back for O.C. Monroe decided the way he handled it would be the quickest and more reliable method. Monroe and O.C. were already friends but they became bigger friends after that.”
Cattle Drives & Cowpokes
“I remember Nanny saying Monroe made a cattle shipment out of southeast Texas, by rail from White’s Ranch. It was several trains,” stated Bobby. “It was a big deal,” he continued. “There were so many cattle one engine couldn’t pull all the cars, they had to use two. He had contracted these cattle and when they gathered everything up, he didn’t have enough. He had to go around buying cattle from other people in the county to meet his contract. They shipped them straight from White’s Ranch to Kansas, I believe.”
Sandy mentioned it was a long rail ride, and Bobby added, “Yes, they had to stop every so often and unload them and get them water and what not, and people were in charge of four to six cars.”
“They had to poke them with sticks to make them stand up,” interjected Tommy, “that’s why they got the name cowpokes.”
“Yount Oil Company wanted fresh water for High Island,” said Bobby, “because they were having to haul water in by train for this boiler and it cost a lot of money. They identified an area where they could build an enclosure and pipe water down the side of the railroad to High Island. That’s what the Stanolind Reservoir was. Frank Yount asked Monroe, who owned the land, what he wanted for his land and Monroe said he wanted one of his dairy bulls. Frank Yount had a dairy herd with fine animals around Beaumont and Monroe knew it. So that’s what was paid for the Stanolind Reservoir.”
“They pumped out of it to Smith Lake,” added Sandy, “that’s where they stored it and drew out as they needed fresh water, and Smith Lake still exists there. It’s the Audubon Bird Sanctuary now.”
“After partition of the land, Monroe got into some financial problems,” stated Bobby. “He had a bank and during the depression a lot of the banks had real problems and his was no exception. To get right with everybody, he had to sell a lot of land to make sure everybody got what they were owed. Some of that land was purchased by W.P.H. McFaddin and J.M. Hebert.”
“He liked the banking business, he really did,” remarked Bobby. “He was the director of the American National Bank in Beaumont plus he had his own bank, I believe it was in Stowell. His bank was more like a private bank. There were a lot of five-dollar gold pieces always laying around Nanny’s house. Nanny said every time they had a meeting in Beaumont, they would give him a five-dollar gold piece.”
“Whites Ranch would hire Brooks to stop cattle rustling. Being a Texas Ranger and already killing a lot of people, he was no one to mess with. He stopped the cattle rustling, but the Whites got scared they were going to get in trouble with him killing people while he was working for them. So, they slowly retired him and he went back to where he lived in West Texas. In fact, they named a county after him there. He was a rough rough character. When the Whites hired him, he put the fear of God in the cattle rustlers,” noted Bobby emphatically.
“I remember Nanny saying when they heard that the State wanted to build a road from Stowell to High Island they got really enthused about it ‘cause it would go right through Whites Ranch,” said Bobby. “Getting around back then was such a hassle,” he continued. “They were just jumping up and down, ‘Yeah, yeah, we need a road down there, we really do. We’ll give you the land to build the road, just build the road,’ but the State told them they couldn’t accept gifts. They said, ‘Okay, we’ll sell it to you for a nickel an acre,’ and so they did. They sold it for a nickel an acre just so the State could say it wasn’t gifted to them. They were just cash poor and land rich,” Bobby noted.
First and foremost a cowman
The disastrous freeze of 1935 dealt a cold, hard blow to the coastal cattlemen of Texas, and Monroe White was not spared from the devastation. A cold wave swept into the area in January of 1935, plummeting temperatures to a frigid 17 degrees.
In a previous interview, Bill White of the White Ranch spoke candidly of the freeze. “The great freeze of 1935 was devastating to cattle ranches,” Bill recalled. “They said you could walk on dead carcasses from High Island to Sabine Pass. It put a lot of people out of business,” Bill said.
Bob Kahla added, “My grandpa’s cattle were in Bolivar, and they walked across the Bay, which was frozen because a norther blew the tide out. The water level was low, and it was fresh water brought in by the storm, which freezes at a higher temperature. The cows got over in Smith Point and they had to go all the way around across Mud Bayou in High Island to get the cattle and bring them all the way back around, 50–60 miles, once it thawed out.”
“Where the Anahuac Refuge is, is what they call Frozen Point,” Bill clarified. “It’s the furthest south point of land. The Jackson’s cattle went out into the Bay because it was warmer than the air temperature and they were trying to warm up. They did the same thing in the Gulf and everywhere else. They would come out of the water, and they’d freeze right there on the coastline. I remember folks talking about the carcasses that ended up across the bay, like where Kemah is now, I don’t know what they called it then. It was a tremendous problem; you could smell it for a long way.”
It is estimated that as many as 8,000 head of cattle froze to death. This catastrophic loss was sure to have taken a toll on Monroe. He fell ill in June of 1935 and died two months later, on August 24, one month after his Mason and McCarty White No. 1 well came in. What a comfort it must have been to Monroe to know that, despite the overwhelming cattle losses during the great freeze, he was able to ensure the financial security of his family before he drew his final breath.
Although R. M. “Monroe” White’s business pursuits were multi-faceted, make no mistake—like all the Whites who came before him, he was first and foremost a cowman, and his ranching legacy continues to this day.