War had swept across the globe and the United States was ordering ships to send to battle. In Orange, shipyards around the Sabine River bustled with construction. Workers flocked to get jobs and they needed housing. Out along 16th Street grew Tiny Town, small homes for shipyard workers and their families. The years were 1917-18.
Most people who have lived in Orange during the past 80 years know the story of the population boom and Riverside housing complex during World War II. The World War I story is often lost. Likely few today know of Tiny Town.
“It was the Riverside of World War I,” said the late Eula Hoffpauir in a 1992 interview.
Hoffpauir died in 2005 at the age of 95. She moved to Orange with her parents during World War I when she was about seven years old and they lived in Tiny Town.
She recalled the houses were on 16th Street on two blocks in the area around Link and Burton avenues. The Kroger store now covers the site where several of the houses once stood.
Hoffpauir said the neighborhood had four rows with 10 houses each. Some faced Rein Avenue, some faced Burton and some faced 14th Street in what later became an alley. “They were close together and a lot of people lived there,” she said.
Dr. Howard Williams in his history book “Picturing Orange,” said by the end of 1916, shipyards in Orange were employing at least 500. Five shipyards were around the Sabine River and were building wooden sailing ships for the U.S. government.
A five-masted schooner named the City of Orange was launched on November 20, 1916. At the time, the ship was described as “the largest vessel ever built on the Gulf of Mexico or its tributaries,” Dr. Williams reported.
The massive building of wooden ships led to a need for the local lumber mills to produce more boards. The Lutcher and Moore Lumber Company build a new mill for the orders. The population grew to an estimated 18,000 to 20,000 people during the war. The U.S. Census in 1910 said the city had a population of 5,527 in 1910.
A local newspaper in January, 1918, had a headline “There’ll Be No Let-Up to Wooden Ship Program.” Orange Police Chief Carter ordered that all alien enemies in town needed to register for a federal list. The registrations were for “natives, citizens or subjects of the German empire or the imperial German government.” All males of the age of 14 and older who were not naturalized citizens needed to register and carry their registration documents at all times. “Females are not alien enemies within the present statutory definition,” the newspaper reported.
The late Julia Bacom Wingate was born after World War I, but she grew up in her family house at Link and 14th Street adjacent to the Tiny Town houses. Many of them still stood during her childhood in the 1920s.
The houses had “four rooms and a path,” she recalled in the 1992 interview. The path was the phrase used to describe the way to an outhouse for homes without indoor plumbing. The rooms in the house included a kitchen, living room and two bedrooms. Bacom said most of the families she knew had several children and used the living room as another bedroom. The kitchen also served as dining room and living room.
A “want ad” from the January 1918 newspaper offers a four-room house on Burton Avenue for sale. Though the ad doesn’t mention the name “Tiny Town,” the house fits Bacom’s description of the houses. The price was $1,000 (about $16,000 in 2016 money). Buyers could put $250 down in cash and pay $8 a month for the house.
One baby born in Tiny Town grew up to be a tiny woman with a big voice. The big band vocalist “Wee Bonnie Baker” was born Evelyn Nelson in Tiny Town. Different websites list her birthday as either 1917 or 1918. BandChirps.com reports she was the vocalist on the 1939 hit by the Orrin Tucker Band of “Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny Oh!” She was five-feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds.
After World War I ended, the tiny houses remained. Bacom recalled they were “a Godsend for a lot of families” during the Great Depression. The houses had cheap rent. They were heated by a pot-bellied stove or a kerosene heater.
The Tiny Town houses were later moved. Hoffpauir in 1992 recalled some moved to Meeks Drive and some northward on the old Lemonville Road, which is FM 1130.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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