Yams are big in Gilmer, but they’re not the only item on the local menu – Houston Chronicle

GILMER - Wandering around the Upshur County Courthouse square on a misty weekday afternoon recently, I couldnt help but notice that in a few days upwards of a hundred thousand yam fans will be descending on this pleasant, little town north of Longview. Red, white and blue banners in almost every storefront window proclaimed, Welcome to Yamboree.

A Gilmer tradition since 1935, the four-day festival features parades, carnival rides, yam-pie baking contests, a barn dance, art exhibits, a fiddlers contest, an essay and poetry contest, a decorated yam competition, livestock shows and a Tater Trot sponsored by a local funeral home. Queen Yam has already been named.

Now, I like a slice of sweet-potato (or yam) pie as much as the next person - preferably warm, with a pat of butter melting into the orange filling - but on this day stories were on my menu, not pie. I found three. (Sweet potato and yam, by the way, are used interchangeably, but they are two entirely different vegetables.)

**

Near Gadsden, Ala., on May 2, 1863, 15-year-old Emma Sansom was busy with chores when a mule-riding Union Army detachment under the command of Col. Abel Streight passed the Sansom farm. Just beyond the farm, Streight noticed a wooden bridge across rain-swollen Black Creek. Aware that Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest was in pursuit, he burned it down.

Forrest and his cavalry showed up shortly afterward, saw the bridge had been destroyed and asked the young woman working in the yard about any other crossings. Emma told him she knew of a ford. The general pulled her up behind him on his horse and off they went. As they approached the creek, Union sharpshooters atop a cliff began firing.

As the story - and later a ballad -- goes, Emma waved her bonnet, taunting the Yankees. A bullet passed through her calico dress, but neither she nor Forrest were hit. Finding the ford, the column crossed safely. Emma was delivered back to her worried mother.

A pink granite marker, erected on the Upshur County courthouse lawn in 1964, tells the Emma Sansom story, concluding with her Gilmer connection. A year after her daring ride with the future founder of the Ku Klux Klan, she eloped with a disabled Alabama soldier, Christopher B. Johnson. After the war, the couple settled near Gilmer, where they raised seven children.

Christopher Johnson died in 1887, Emma in 1900. Shes buried in Little Mound Cemetery, 12 miles west of town.

I had read online that an Emma Sansom marker in Gadsden had been the object of protests in recent years. I asked Gloria McLuckie, a retired high-school drama teacher who now heads the Gilmer Area Chamber of Commerce, whether anyone in Gilmer had ever protested. Shhh, she said, grinning. Were in Gilmer, Texas. We dont talk about such things.

Most Gilmerites, McLuckie said, dont even know the marker exists. Its one of several Confederate remembrances around town. As a granite marker outside the local museum explains, they honor our Confederate ancestors who sacrificed and gave their all to protect home, our beloved Southland and a way of life.

**

Eddie Turner knows that way of life. When he graduated in 1960 from a segregated high school near Gilmer, he resolved to flee the family farm. Graduating from Prairie View A&M with a degree in biology, he caught on with the Atomic Energy Commission and for 40 years lived in Amarillo and worked in nuclear security for the nearby Pantex plant, the nations primary assembly, disassembly, retrofit and life-extension center for nuclear weapons (quoting the Pantex website).

Turner retired in 2007, and with his wife Elberta returned to the old home place outside Gilmer. The 80-year-old -- who looks at least 20 years younger -- resolved to get involved with his community. A regular at city council meetings and county commissioners court, he also participates in community theater. In 2018, the Gilmer Area Chamber of Commerce named him the years Outstanding Citizen.

He doesnt pay much attention to the Confederate monuments. We dont need to raise cane about everything, he said.

Turners focus these days is the old Dickson Orphanage for Colored Children, the states only home for Black children between 1901 and 1943. The orphanage had almost been forgotten until Turner and his two brothers, Gene and Wilson, along with their cousin Huey Mitchell, wandered into a pine forest behind Bubbas Fat Burgers and James Brown BBQ Kitchen, about a mile south of downtown. After numerous searches over several months, they happened upon two weathered gravestones hidden under dense undergrowth.

The markers were all that was left of an orphanage that was home to as many as 200 children. Some of the youngsters may have been survivors of the Galveston hurricane of 1900. All were bereft of family, regular meals and a roof over their heads. Life for an orphaned Black child in the early 1900s was almost hopeless.

The man who came to their rescue was the Rev. W.L. Dickson, a Black minister in Gilmer who provided not only a home for the children but also an education. Boys were taught farming and a trade; girls learned domestic work. That was basically all the jobs that blacks could get, Turner reminded me.

The Rev. Robert C. Buckner, founder of the Buckner Baptist Childrens Home in Dallas, established the orphanage in Gilmer after citizens of Upshur County donated 70 acres. It grew to more than 600 acres. Its more than 40 buildings included dormitories, a library, a cook house, a domestic science building and a potato curing plant.

Dicksons health began to fail in the 1930s, and the orphanage fell on hard times. In 1943, the state closed its doors and moved the children to the Texas Blind, Deaf and Orphan School in Austin. The buildings and most of the land were sold off, with 72 acres set aside for Texas A&M to develop a sweet potato farm.

Mr. Dickson needs to be remembered, Turner said, as we stood inside the chain-link fence protecting the newly mowed cemetery. His Upshur County neighbors agree. They brought tractors, chain saws and stump grinders to help the Turner brothers clear what Eddie Turner described as a total jungle. Local churches, White and Black, cleaned up the long-forgotten cemetery. The city of Gilmer applied for and received a state historical marker.

It was a reminder to me that people are good, Turner said. My attitude is, lets do what we can do and move forward.

**

When I talked to Turner by phone last week, he was tuning up his tractor, getting it ready for the two big parades that highlight this years four-day Yamboree, the 84th. Riding atop a float will be the 2021 Yam Queen, Hannah Jean Henson, a senior at Gilmers Harmony High School. Headlining the barn dance are singer/songwriter Mike Ryan of San Antonio, along with Lee Mathis and the Brutally Handsome. School kids around the county get out on Wednesday afternoon and stay out the rest of the week.

The Yamboree owes its existence to a weevil. Yamboree creative director Amorette Burch explained that in the early 1930s the little beetle with a protruding proboscis devastated local cash crops, all except the yams. To celebrate, Gilmerites organized the East Texas Yamboree in 1935. Its been held every year since, except for three years during World War II and last year because of the pandemic.

Despite thousands expected this year, neither the city nor the county requires masking or social distancing, Gloria McLuckie told me. People are just starving for the town to come alive again, she said. Were just so excited.

Gilmer is 230 miles north of Houston. Dates for the Yamboree are October 20-23.

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Yams are big in Gilmer, but they're not the only item on the local menu - Houston Chronicle