Eagle Lake, Texas

Everything Eagle Lake is known for

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Music in Eagle Lake

Songs About Eagle Lake

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Artists From Eagle Lake

D
Darrel Appelt
country

Rivers & Roads in Song near Eagle Lake

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Eagle Lake.

Texas Colorado River 6 songs Texas State Highway 71 2 songs US Route 90 9 songs Interstate 10 36 songs Brazos River 42 songs U.S. Route 59 9 songs

Musical Heritage

Western Swing Has a Founder, and He Was Born Right Here RoadyGoat

Shelly Lee Alley was born in Alleyton on July 6, 1894, to John Ross and Eliza Alley, which is to say he was born into the family the town is named for. He learned music as a child. During the First World War the Army stationed him in San Antonio and he led the base orchestra. Through the 1920s he conducted orchestras playing pop and jazz and got in early on a brand new thing called radio, broadcasting on Texas stations including KRLD in Dallas. Then in 1931 Jimmie Rodgers, the most famous country singer alive, recorded a song Alley wrote called Travelin Blues, with Alley and his brother Alvin playing twin fiddles behind him. More than twenty artists have cut that song since, Ernest Tubb and Merle Haggard among them. In 1936 Alley put together the Alley Cats out of Houston and Beaumont, and the roster reads like a directory of everybody who mattered in Texas music for the next thirty years: Leon Pappy Selph, Ted Daffan, Cliff Bruner, Floyd Tillman, and his own stepson Clyde Brewer. They recorded fifty-four sides, mostly for Vocalion. His own records never sold like they should have. He died in Houston in 1964 and was buried in the Alley family cemetery a short drive from where he was born, and thirty years after that they put him in the Western Swing Hall of Fame.

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History of Eagle Lake

Two Sugar Barons, One Train, One Pistol RoadyGoat

The rice and goose country around Eagle Lake was once sugarcane country, and the two men who built that empire ended it with a murder. Captain William Dunovant, a one-armed Confederate veteran, planted thousands of acres of cane south of town and erected the Lakeside sugar mill, which could process around 1,000 tons of cane a day. To get the crop to market, a circle of Eagle Lake businessmen chartered the Cane Belt Railroad in 1898, with Dunovant as president and William T. Eldridge as vice president. The partnership soured into a bitter feud over money and control of the line. On August 11, 1902, Dunovant boarded a San Antonio and Aransas Pass train at nearby Simonton. Eldridge was already aboard, and he emptied his revolver into Dunovant, then beat him with the empty pistol. Dunovant, who had reportedly threatened Eldridge first, died. Eldridge was tried for murder in 1904, pleaded self-defense, and was acquitted, then went on to help build the city of Sugar Land. The cane is gone, but the railbed and the grudge are part of this town's bones. (Source: Handbook of Texas; Cane Belt Railroad history.)

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The Eagle Lake Editor Who Got a Dam Named for Him RoadyGoat

One of the most consequential people ever to live in this town arrived as a young lawyer in 1886. Joseph Jefferson Mansfield started Eagle Lake's first newspaper in 1888 and was elected its mayor in 1889, then served as county judge before winning a seat in Congress in 1916. There he eventually chaired the powerful House Committee on Rivers and Harbors, the body that decided which dams, ports, and waterways got federal money. In 1921 an illness left him paralyzed, and Mansfield spent the next 25 years working the floor of the U.S. Capitol from a wheelchair, never giving up his seat, which he held until his death in 1947. His signature fight was funding the big dam on the Colorado River upstream near Austin, originally called Marshall Ford Dam. In 1941 it was renamed Mansfield Dam in his honor, and it still holds back Lake Travis today. Not bad for a small-town prairie editor who learned politics in a town of a few hundred people. (Source: Handbook of Texas; Wikipedia.)

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Laguna del Aguila: The Lake That Named a Town RoadyGoat

The lake just east of where you're rolling gave this town its name long before there was a town. In 1821, two of Stephen F. Austin's scouts, William W. Little and James Beard, camped here and one of them shot an eagle over the water. They called it Laguna del Aguila, Spanish for lake of the eagle, and the name stuck to early Texas maps. There's an older story too, told as a Native American legend, in which a young woman made two suitors prove themselves by crossing the lake, climbing a tree, and bringing back a live eaglet. Whichever you prefer, the eagle came first. The settlement that grew up beside it was platted as a railroad station after Gamaliel Good and railway director DeWitt Clinton Harris planned a stop here; the rails reached Eagle Lake in 1859. The town finally incorporated in 1888 with Captain J.W. McCarty as its first mayor, a working prairie town wrapped around a lake named for a bird. (Source: Handbook of Texas.)

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Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge

1937

The Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge is seven miles northeast of Eagle Lake in eastern Colorado County. Attwater's prairie chicken, a subspecies of the heath hen named for Henry P. Attwater , was once one of the most abundant prairie residents of Texas and Louisiana. It inhabited eight million acres from the Coastal Plains to the Mississippi River. The bird's natural range now covers only 46,000 acres, and populations are scattered. The chicken was a popular game bird in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and hunting parties occasionally killed 200 to 300 birds per trip. The prairie chicken became extinct in Louisiana in 1919, and its population in Texas dwindled badly. The state of Texas banned hunting of the bird in 1937, at which time its population was counted at 8,618; in 1967 the number of Attwater prairie chickens had fallen to 1,070, and the bird became an official endangered species. In the mid-1960s the Nature Conservancy of Texas and the World Wildlife Fund purchased 3,500 acres in Colorado County as a preserve for the bird. At that time, the prairie chicken population at the refuge was twenty-five; by the mid-1980s it had risen to more than 200. The United States government acquired the property in 1972 and made it a national wildlife refuge. Through additional land acquisition, the refuge grew to include 8,000 acres by 1990. The entire Attwater's prairie chicken population of Texas was reported at 900 in 1986 and at 456 in 1992. Additional measures to save the prairie chicken from extinction have included a captive breeding program initiated in 1992 by researchers at Texas A&M University, plans to lease thousands of additional acres of suitable land in Austin and Victoria counties, and efforts to encourage area farmers and ranchers to manage their land in ways that will encourage the chicken's survival. The Attwater Prairie Chicken Refuge is one of the few preserves managed specifically for an endangered species; controlled grazing and burning, strip row cropping, mowing, pest plant control, and predator control are among the management techniques used to improve the habitat. Visitors are permitted to observe the grounds from an automobile tour route and designated walking paths, but no picnicking facilities are provided, and no hunting, fishing, canoeing, or camping is allowed. Access to some areas is tightly controlled during the birds' mating season. Although the refuge is dedicated to the preservation of the Attwater's prairie chicken, many other birds and animals take advantage of the area. Birds common to the refuge include the white-tailed hawk, the roseate spoonbill, the white ibis, the tricolored heron, and the fulvous whistling duck. Other animals include white-tailed deer, armadillos, coyotes, the endangered Houston toad , water moccasins, and king snakes. More than 250 different flowering plants have also been identified within the refuge. See also PRAIRIE CHICKENS .

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Eagle Lake, TX

1821

Eagle Lake is on Highway 90A east of the Colorado River and fifty miles southwest of Houston in southeast Colorado County. The town is beside a lake of some 1,400 acres, also known as Eagle Lake. Below the lake is the Lower Lake. Both lakes are privately owned and are leased for hunting and fishing. As early as 1835, Gideon Lincecum studied the numerous fish in the lake and the fauna of the surrounding land; in 1990 snowy egrets, roseate spoonbills, great blue herons, white pelicans, coots, cormorants, and alligators were still common sights. North of the town is the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wild Life Refuge . Eagle Lake is marked on early Texas maps. The name was probably given in 1821 by William W. Little and James Beard , two of Austin's scouts, when one of them killed an eagle on the lake and called the water Laguna del Águila. On March 22, 1838, Patrick Reels was granted 13½ labores of land (2,391 acres) on the shores of the lake, adjoining land grants owned by A. L. McLain and James McNair . In 1848 this grant was patented to the heirs of P. Reels by the state. In 1856 Gamaliel Good purchased most of the land from the heirs of Patrick Reels. It was divided among Good and his sons. Good subsequently deeded half interest in 600 acres to DeWitt Clinton Harris , a director of the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway. Together they planned the town to be a station on a new railroad between Harrisburg and Austin. The rails reached Eagle Lake in 1859. Later the Southern Pacific, the Cane Belt, the San Antonio and Aransas Pass, and the Santa Fe railroads all made Eagle Lake accessible for shipment of crops and, later, of gravel. In 1888 the town was incorporated, and Capt. J. W. McCarty was elected the first mayor. After the Civil War , Capt. William Dunovant started raising sugarcane and built a sugar mill at Lakeside, on the eastern shore of the lake. In 1913 the mill was sold and moved to Jamaica. Dunovant also introduced the cultivation of rice irrigated by lake water in 1896. John Linderholm of Chesterville expanded the rice industry, irrigated by wells, to the prairie north of Eagle Lake. Rice mills were also established in Eagle Lake. In the 1980s the mills were gone, though rice culture was still one of the major local industries. Huge sand and gravel deposits were mined west of the lake, leaving stretches of water for fishing and waterskiing and bringing the manufacture of concrete products to Eagle Lake. Numerous bones of ancient animals were found in the gravel mines. Production of both oil and natural gas in the area also contributed to the economy. In the 1960s Eagle Lake became a recreational center for hunting geese and ducks that wintered on the prairies in the rice stubble and around the lake. In the 1980s the planting and harvesting of hundreds of acres of wildflowers brought new interest to Eagle Lake. In 1990 the population of the town was 3,551. In 2000 it was 3,664.

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Henry, Eugene Herbert, Sr.

1929

Eugene Herbert Henry, Sr., educator and namesake for the African-American high school in Eagle Lake, Texas, was born on November 15, 1894, in Flatonia, Fayette County, Texas, to James Henry II and Eliza Mountain Henry. Eugene had ten siblings. Eugene Henry attended the public schools in Armstrong Colony, a freedmen's settlement in Fayette County, eight miles west of Flatonia. He and his brothers and sisters were required by their family to perform many chores, so they took turns attending school. As a result, Eugene was twenty-one years old when he graduated from the eighth grade. However, he distinguished himself as an honors student. In 1915 he took an examination for teachers conducted by the county school board and was certified to teach, although he did not begin teaching at that time. In 1917 Henry began college at Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College (now Prairie View A&M University), where he earned a B. A. degree. While an undergraduate there, he worked for fifteen cents an hour to pay his college expenses. Upon graduation, he was awarded a scholarship by the YMCA to attend graduate school at Howard University in Washington, D.C. During World War I , Henry served as a second lieutenant in the United States Army. In August 1921 Eugene Henry married Mamie Althea Jackson. They had met at Prairie View. The couple had six children, five of whom (three sons and two daughters) survived to adulthood. Their marriage lasted until Henry's death more than sixty-two years later. Henry began his teaching career in the Waelder Community in Gonzales County, where he taught all subjects for grades one through eight. Then he taught in Fort Bend County. Later he taught school and became the principal of the school for Blacks in Eagle Lake in Colorado County and served there for more than a quarter century. Over the years, Eagle Lake has produced a number of outstanding African-American artisans, musicians, athletes, politicians, law officers, educators, religious leaders, and business people, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The Black schools in Colorado County have produced students who went on to later earn Ph.D.s and become lawyers, engineers, and registered nurses; they also have produced a graduate who became a college president and one who became an assistant superintendent of schools. By 1917 a number of Black school teachers were employed in Eagle Lake's Black school. In 1929 Professor Henry applied to the Julius Rosenwald Foundation for a grant to build a new school for Blacks in Eagle Lake ( see ROSENWALD SCHOOLS ). The following year, the Rosenwald Foundation awarded Eagle Lake $7,000 for construction of the school. Henry then helped raise money for the three and a half acres of land on which to build the school. Encouraged by Professor Henry, community leaders and parents of students sold pies, cakes, ice cream, and eggs to raise money for the land. Henry also asked Black business owners for donations and took up special collections from local churches as well. Within six months, the required $1,365 for the land was raised. The Department of Education in Austin was very instrumental in the naming of Eagle Lake's new Black school for its energetic and optimistic principal. Henry never gave a student a grade of 100. In explanation, he once said, "No matter if a student gets every problem correct, no one is perfect in anything he does." The E. H. Henry High School continued to serve the community until Eagle Lake schools were racially integrated. After that, the building became the Eagle Lake Primary School. In 1952 Henry contacted Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson in an effort to secure jobs for his students; his effort was successful. In 1976 Henry was able to obtain bus transportation for disabled senior citizens in Wharton County. Henry was a faithful member of the Elm Grove Baptist Church. He was a Thirty-third degree Mason, a member of the Knights of Pythias , and commander of Camp No. 132 of Woodmen of th

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Rice Culture in Colorado County

1898

The rice industry did not spread into the coastal plains region west of Houston until the very end of the 19th century. In 1898, Captain William Dunovant (1845-1902), a local plantation owner and entrepreneur, planted 40 acres of rice at the southeast corner of Eagle Lake (2.5 miles south) as an experiment, using convict labor from a nearby prison farm to construct levees and harvest the new crop. The small tract produced such encouraging results that in 1899 Dunovant built a pumping plant on the lake and irrigated 250-300 acres. The second venture proved so successful that over 30,000 acres of rice were under cultivation in the Colorado River Valley in 1900, and over 56,000 acres in 1901, mostly in Colorado County. Rice quickly replaced cotton and sugar cane as the primary cash crop in Colorado County. That the crop had a widespread economic impact was reflected in the increase in property values, the influx of new families, the reclamation of abandoned croplands, the rise in new railroad construction, and the rapid development of allied service industries, such as rice mills and irrigation and canal companies. Rice and the culture it supports continue to be a major economic factor in Colorado County.

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E. H. Henry Rosenwald School

1929

Before a school existed in Eagle Lake, African Americans were educated at home or in small churches, with some classes held in a local blacksmith shop. The first school for African-American children was located on Main Street in a room on the first floor of the old United Brotherhood of Friendship Hall. The school was later relocated to C Street. In the late 1920s, a visionary young professor, Eugene H. Henry (b. 1896), came to Eagle Lake to teach. Born in Flatonia, Henry was educated at Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College, received a scholarship to Howard University and served in the U.S. Army during World War I. Henry, along with others, saw the need for an African-American school in Eagle Lake. Beginning in 1917, Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears Roebuck Company, began to provide matching funds for African-American schools in the South. In 1929, Eugene Henry and his supporters sought an application for a Rosenwald grant for Eagle Lake. Parents, children, churches, businesses in the black community and others responded with fundraisers and contributions. With these contributions, three and a half acres were purchased and construction of the school began in 1930 when the Rosenwald grant was received. The school was a center for African-American activities, cultural programs, sports and events. When public schools integrated in the 1960s, the school became the Eagle Lake Middle School until a new middle school was built. The E. H. Henry High School was the only Rosenwald school in Colorado County and was a symbol of vision and progress for the community and the nation during the early 1900s.(2012)

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Masonic Cemetery

1867

In 1880, the Eagle Lake Masonic Lodge No. 366, established in 1872, purchased this burial ground. Also known as Eagle Lake Masonic Cemetery, the earliest known burial here occurred in 1867. Others buried here include Eagle Lake Mayor and U.S. Representative Joseph Jefferson Mansfield; Women Airforce Service Pilot (WASP) Patricia Braun O'Bannon; and the namesake of Oldham County, Williamson Simpson Oldham (d. 1868), who is among those reinterred. Cemetery features include curbing, monuments, masonic gravestones, grave slabs and obelisks. A Ladies Cemetery Association cared for the burial ground early in its history; today, the Eagle Lake Masonic Cemetery LLC maintains this historic cemetery.

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Everything Near Eagle Lake

455 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the nearest 200 are listed here — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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