Name: Kosse, Texas
Address: Kosse, TX

The King of Western Swing Was Born Here RoadyGoat

Right near this small town, a giant of American music was born. On a farm in the Moss Springs area a few miles outside Kosse, James Robert 'Bob' Wills entered the world on March 6, 1905. From these rural Texas beginnings he would go on to create an entirely new genre of music: Western Swing. With his band, the Texas Playboys, Bob Wills blended the frontier fiddling he learned from his father with the syncopated rhythms of big band jazz and the raw emotion of the blues he heard alongside the men in the cotton fields. The result was irresistible dance music that swept the nation, and his famous 'Ah-haaa!' became a signature call on dance floors everywhere. The family pulled up stakes for Hall County in 1913, and it's Turkey, up in the Panhandle, that throws the big Bob Wills Day every spring. But Kosse has never forgotten that it had him first — the Heritage Society has brought his daughter Carolyn down for Homecoming weekend to tell his story where it actually began.

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The Engineering That Built a Town RoadyGoat

The town of Kosse is, at its core, a product of 19th-century civil engineering. Before 1869, there was nothing here. The Houston and Texas Central Railway decided to build a town at this exact spot as part of a massive infrastructure project. The chief engineer, Theodore Kosse, used surveying tools to plot a precise, efficient path for the railroad across the rolling prairie. His crews then had to grade the land, creating a flat, stable roadbed for the tracks. This involved moving tons of earth with mules and scrapers. They built wooden trestles to cross creeks and low spots, ensuring the grade remained consistent. Once the track was laid, the company surveyed and staked out a street grid oriented to the railroad, creating a town plan from thin air. Kosse didn't grow organically; it was designed and built, a testament to the power of engineering to transform an empty landscape into a center of commerce and community.

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Kosse, TX RoadyGoat

Kosse's history began in the mid-1840s as a community known as Eutaw. It became a stage stop for stagecoach routes and later, with the planned route of the Houston and Texas Central Railway, Kosse was established two miles west of Eutaw and named after the railway's chief engineer, Theodore Kosse. For a brief period, Kosse was the northernmost terminus of the railway, leading to a population boom. However, this was short-lived as the rail line extended further north to Groesbeck, reducing Kosse's population. The town was formally incorporated on May 22, 1871. Kosse later experienced an oil boom in 1922 after oil was discovered, but this ended quickly in 1923 when the wells did not produce as expected. The Great Depression severely impacted Kosse, leading to business closures and population decline.

Silvia King

1803

Born in Morocco, Silvia King (also written as Sylvia King) was well into adulthood and married with three children when she was kidnapped and brought to Bordeaux, France by slave traders. King recalled receiving drugged coffee before she was forced into the bottom of a ship with other enslaved Africans for the Middle Passage to New Orleans. King was purchased on the auction block in New Orleans by Master Jones, planter and owner of a large cotton plantation. She was then chained to the other purchased slaves and forced to march more than 450 miles by an overseer to La Grange, Texas. Jones placed King in a marriage with another slave, referred to as Bob, against her will. An exceptional cook, she prepared Master Jones' meals full time and completed other domestic tasks such as weaving cotton cloth for use on the plantation. The federally sponsored Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project documented King's extensive oral history in Marlin, Texas in 1937. From her narrative, one can gather a clear glimpse of the hardships that slaves endured and acts of resistance such as the ring shout, an emotionally charged, symbolic dance where slaves came together to gain cultural and spiritual sustenance from one another. After King gained her freedom, she went on to marry twice more and serve as a member of the Galilee Colored Baptist Church in Rosebud. Following King's statement that she was born in 1803, her death certificate state that she passed away on Nov. 10, 1937, at the age of 133, making her age a point of debate and legend. (2012)

Historical Marker → · 4.6 mi away

Steele, Alfonso

1836

Alfonso (Alphonso) Steele, last Texas survivor of the battle of San Jacinto , was born on April 9, 1817, to a pioneer family in Hardin County, Kentucky. At the age of seventeen he traveled by flatboat down the Mississippi River to Lake Providence, Louisiana, and there in November 1835 joined Capt. Ephraim M. Daggett 's company of volunteers bound for Texas to aid in the revolution. They arrived in Washington-on-the-Brazos on New Year's Day 1836 but quickly disbanded, since the Texans had not yet declared their independence. Many volunteers returned home, but Steele stayed, working in a hotel and grinding corn for bread to feed the delegates gathered to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence . Once independence was declared, Steele set out with a company of men under Capt. Joseph L. Bennett to join William B. Travis in San Antonio, but when they reached the Colorado River they received word that the Alamo had fallen. Near Beeson's Crossing on the Colorado the company fell in with Gen. Sam Houston 's army on its retreat from Gonzales and marched under Houston's command to Buffalo Bayou. In the battle of San Jacinto Steele was a private in Capt. James Gillespie's company of Sidney Sherman 's regiment. He was severely wounded in the first volleys of the battle but continued in the fight until it ended. Houston rode Steele's gray horse through much of the battle, until the animal was shot beneath him. After months of recuperation, Steele was discharged and made his way to Montgomery County, where he farmed and raised cattle. There he married Mary Ann Powell on September 28, 1838. In 1844 they moved to a part of Robertson County later organized into Limestone County; they resided there until Mrs. Steele's death in 1903. The couple had ten children and many descendants who distinguished themselves in military service. In 1907 Steele revisited the San Jacinto battleground at the invitation of Houston's son, Andrew Jackson Houston , and retraced the course of the historic engagement. On February 10, 1909, the Thirty-first Texas Legislature honored him as one of two living survivors of the battle of San Jacinto. A poem entitled "The Last Hero" was written and dedicated to him by Jake H. Harrison. Steele died on July 8, 1911, near Kosse, at the home of a grandson, and was buried in Mexia. A portrait of him hangs in the Capitol .

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Foster, William Henry

1922

William Henry Foster, geologist who discovered the unusual Kosse Oil Field, was born at West Plains, Missouri, on December 23, 1891. He was the son of the Rev. Henry Bowman Foster, a Methodist clergyman, and Mary Elizabeth (Chandler) Foster. Foster was a graduate of Drury College and received his master of science degree from the University of Kansas in 1914. In 1916 he joined the staff of F. Julius Fohs’s highly successful geological consulting firm in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At a time when many wildcatters were little more than gamblers or dowsers, Fohs and his university-trained team sought to establish petroleum geology as a respected science. In 1919 Fohs selected Foster to accompany him to Egypt and Palestine as emissaries of the Zionist Commission to hunt for mineral resources which might support the founding of a Jewish homeland. British troops under Gen. Edmund Allenby were assigned to guard the two geologists, who came under fire at least once from Arab bandits. Their report to the British War Office led to the establishment of cement manufacturing and mineral extracting plants on the Dead Sea. Returning to the United States, Foster was ordered to Mexia in Limestone County, where the Mexia Oil Field was proving to be a milestone in the history of Texas oil as the first fault-line field and the first producing from the rich and pervasive Woodbine Sand ( see WOODBINE FAULT-LINE FIELDS ). Foster now joined in the development of the Mexia area and often said in later life how proud he was to have been part of this critical breakthrough in the history of oil exploration . Here in the small town of Kosse, twenty-eight miles south of Mexia, he experienced one of the most bizarre adventures ever to befall a geologist. Having worked out the fault-line geology, he invited his future wife, Carrie Annette Berry of Mexia, to drive the stake for the discovery well of the Kosse Field. On August 18, 1922, the Jones No. 1 well blew in with hitherto unheard-of force but three days later mysteriously ceased to flow. Later work turned Kosse into a small producer, but it never fulfilled its initial promise and is still a text-book example of a one-well oil field. Foster married Berry on October 3, 1922. They had three children. In 1922 Foster and Wilhelm A. Reiter , the discoverer of the Mexia Field, left the Fohs organization to form Foster-Reiter Consulting Geologists and the Reiter Oil Corporation. These successful companies evolved into the Reiter-Foster Oil Corporation, with offices in Dallas, Tulsa (where Foster made his home), and New York. The young company prospered and helped to develop, among others, the Woodson Field in Throckmorton County and the immense Cushing Oil Field in Oklahoma. In the 1930s Foster became an independent with headquarters in Dallas and helped to discover and develop many oil and gas fields in Texas and Louisiana. One of his most significant finds was the discovery of natural gas for the first time in the Crane Trend of the Petit Lime in Panola County, Texas. His other interests included silver prospecting in Durango, Mexico. Foster was a member of the honorary scientific society Sigma Xi and a charter member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. He died on December 16, 1969, in Dallas and was buried in Sparkman Hillcrest Memorial Park there. His son, William Henry Foster, Jr., became an independent geologist operating out of Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

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Long Branch Cemetery

1870

This graveyard, one of the oldest in Falls County, was used for the interment of African-Americans for more than a century. Founded by former slaves in connection with the Methodist Episcopal Church of Long Branch (later Long Branch United Methodist Church), it covers more than three acres surrounded by farm land. The cemetery is the last surviving vestige of the Long Branch community. The earliest names associated with the settlement, including Thornton Craig, Jim Furry, Jessie Smith, Edmond Taylor and Nelson Weatherspoon, were all here by June 1870. Records do not indicate whether these men and their families were in the community as slaves or arrived after emancipation. Most came from Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Long Branch citizens built a two-room school house and chose educators from their ranks. Many made their living by tenant farming, working manual labor in nearby towns and taking in boarders, and several became landowners. They also served their country in military conflicts from the Civil War to Vietnam, including Anthony Shaw, Co. G, 104th U. S. Colored Infantry, who is buried here. On September 20, 1883, community trustees bought land from William M. Stephens to establish a hall of worship and an eternal resting place for those calling Long Branch home. While cemetery interments exceed 200, some early burials went unrecorded. Among the decedents are the remains of 25 freed slaves. One of these, Silvia King, recorded valuable personal and cultural history in the 1930s before she died at age 133. The school at Long Branch closed in 1950, and the church closed in 1971 and later burned. This important community burial ground remains an active cemetery. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2010

Historical Marker → · 4.6 mi away

Kosse Tabernacle

1912

After Evangelist Abe Mulkey led a 1912 revival at Kosse Methodist Church, city officials decided to build a tabernacle to accommodate Kosse’s growing religious needs. The frame building, completed that year for $2,000, featured a gable-on-hip roof, banks of paired windows, wooden stage, choir platform and pulpit, and a dirt floor. Originally designed for church functions, it quickly became a community gathering place. Events ranged from dances and singings to fraternal organization meetings and community dinners. In the 1930s, Kosse students attended classes here after the schoolhouse burned. It has also been a polling place and a refuge for hurricane evacuees. The tabernacle has been central to community events in Kosse.

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Kosse, Texas

Music in Kosse

Songs About Kosse

Artists From Kosse

Rivers & Roads in Song near Kosse

History of Kosse