while watching The Secret Life of....,a show on the food network,they had an episode about chili and the origins of chili.during the show they mentioned that jesse james decided against robbing a bank in my old hometown of mckinney,texas because his favorite chili parlor was there.
well,that got me to thinking about another reason he might not have robbed it,you see he had a cousin named tucker hill who lived in town and if my memory serves me right he was successful financially,i just don't remember by what means.there was a nice older house just west of downtown,which is where most of the expensive older homes had been built,which was called the tuck hill house,but i only learned this after i was grown.
i historical story has it that william quantrell was up in around bonham, texas helping citizens with problems that were common with what they called bush whackers,these were men who lived in thickets along creek areas who were either avoiding service in the civil war or were just thieves and they would rob people and create problems and he came down to clear them out.
he was asked to come to mckinney to clear out some locally and the story goes that he hung so many men on the square that it tainted the cistern on the square.since hanging usually doesn't produce much blood,i assume he must of just shot most of them to produce that much blood,most of you know how legends are born.
there were many confederate veterans in my hometown who made money after the war and made a nice living,most of then off cotton but i remember a house called the bingham house that some of my running buddies would throw horse apples at on the way home from a night on the town,at the time the name didn't ring a bell.
the bingham who had the house built had served as a printers devil(typesetter)at a dallas newspaper before the civil war and upon his return he bought the local mckinney paper and moved there.i believe he served as an officer in the confederate army.
well my granddad went to work in the mckinney cotton mill not long after it opened when he was a teenager,he told me a story that when he would get a haircut the person he referred to as old man bingham would stop in at the barbershop and get his haircut too.he said old man bingham would still carry a pistol at his side even though there were laws against because he had a lot of pull in the city.
as i got older and remembered the names of some of the people i went to school with and their last names i realized they were decendants of some of the original settlers and founding fathers of the city and alot of the city streets had their last names on them.funny how these things don't make an impression on you when your a kid, but later on you put things together.
there's history all around you,sometimes it just takes a television show to stir your memory.
well,that got me to thinking about another reason he might not have robbed it,you see he had a cousin named tucker hill who lived in town and if my memory serves me right he was successful financially,i just don't remember by what means.there was a nice older house just west of downtown,which is where most of the expensive older homes had been built,which was called the tuck hill house,but i only learned this after i was grown.
i historical story has it that william quantrell was up in around bonham, texas helping citizens with problems that were common with what they called bush whackers,these were men who lived in thickets along creek areas who were either avoiding service in the civil war or were just thieves and they would rob people and create problems and he came down to clear them out.
he was asked to come to mckinney to clear out some locally and the story goes that he hung so many men on the square that it tainted the cistern on the square.since hanging usually doesn't produce much blood,i assume he must of just shot most of them to produce that much blood,most of you know how legends are born.
there were many confederate veterans in my hometown who made money after the war and made a nice living,most of then off cotton but i remember a house called the bingham house that some of my running buddies would throw horse apples at on the way home from a night on the town,at the time the name didn't ring a bell.
the bingham who had the house built had served as a printers devil(typesetter)at a dallas newspaper before the civil war and upon his return he bought the local mckinney paper and moved there.i believe he served as an officer in the confederate army.
well my granddad went to work in the mckinney cotton mill not long after it opened when he was a teenager,he told me a story that when he would get a haircut the person he referred to as old man bingham would stop in at the barbershop and get his haircut too.he said old man bingham would still carry a pistol at his side even though there were laws against because he had a lot of pull in the city.
as i got older and remembered the names of some of the people i went to school with and their last names i realized they were decendants of some of the original settlers and founding fathers of the city and alot of the city streets had their last names on them.funny how these things don't make an impression on you when your a kid, but later on you put things together.
there's history all around you,sometimes it just takes a television show to stir your memory.
