When Lutcher Stark was 17, he started his freshman year at the University of Texas. He traveled by car from Orange to Austin with his mother and grandmother. The trip took three days. After all, it was 1904, a year when only the wealthy had automobiles and highways had not been developed.
The next year, Stark became the first student at UT to have his own car at the campus.
Those stories are among the hundreds bits of history uncovered by researchers Ellen Walker Rienstra and Jo Ann Stiles. They spent more than 12 years working on a book about three generations of the Lutcher and Stark families and their timber empire.
About 150 people went to an author’s presentation Wednesday night at the Lutcher Theater. The new book, “The Long Shadow: The Lutcher-Stark Lumber Dynasty,” was on sale to the public for the first time. The book, published by the University of Texas Press, will be on sale at the gift shops at the Stark Museum of Art, Shangri La, and the W.H. Stark House.
Lutcher Stark, the grandson of Henry Jacob Lutcher, the founder of the dynasty, later went on to serve nearly 24 years as member of the university’s board of regents and sat as the president of the board for most of the years.
Stark Foundation President Walter Riedel introduced the two authors by saying their history is the only one documented by facts “as opposed to crude myth.”
Riedel also announced that the Stark Archives collection to be stored for research in a building now under construction on Green Avenue, will be named for the late Eunice Benckenstein, a longtime member of the Stark Foundation Board of Directors.
Riedel said Benckenstein helped save the historical documents because many times Nelda C. Stark, the widow of Lutcher Stark, would say “just take them down to the river and dump them.”
Rienstra said the research was “historically significant” because of the trove of letters, documents and other items the families saved through decades. She also paid tribute to the Roy Wingate, a local lawyer and member of the foundation board who died in 2011, for his knowledge in helping them.
Henry Jacob Lutcher was a butcher in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, when he married Frances Ann Robinson. He went into the lumber business with a preacher, G. Bedell Moore. The two traveled to Texas to look for more timber and a place to establish a mill. They decided on Orange, Texas, in 1877.
Rienstra said the documents used for the book included Moore’s diary he kept on that first trip.
The Lutchers moved to Orange with their daughters, Miriam and Carrie. Miriam married William H. Stark, who Rienstra described as a “genius capitalist.” Stark later became president of the Lutcher and Moore Lumber Co. and invested in many other business ventures.
The historians found the letters between William and Miriam during their courtship and engagement, including the “joys and spats.”
Henry Jacob Lutcher Stark was born in 1887. He had a sister 18 months older. The sister, Frances Ann Stark, “grew ill and she died and they did not have another child,” Stiles said. Because of that, the Starks “were very protective of him.”
He went to public schools in Orange and then to the University of Texas. There he met and fell in love with a young beauty, Nita Hill, the daughter of a prominent Austin physician who served many years as the doctor for the university’s football team. Lutcher Stark was the team manager during his senior year and is credited with giving the team the nickname “Longhorns.” He started sitting on the bench with the football team when he was manager. He continued to sit with the team until about 1937 when famed coach D.X. Bible took the job to lead the Longhorns and ordered him to the stands.
Stark also helped lead the donations drive to build Memorial Stadium at UT.
Nita Hill became the first of Stark’s three wives. The first two died and then he married Nelda Childers of Orange, the sister of his second wife, Ruby.
The Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports was opened a few years ago. Stark had been an early proponent of “physical culture,” now referred to as exercise. He even learned weight-lifting from a renowned expert.
The directors of the Stark Center, Drs. Jan and Terry Todd, helped found the research center and museum, which is adjacent to Memorial Stadium on the UT campus. They attended the presentation Tuesday. Dr. Jan Todd said they made their first trip to Orange in 1985 to research Lutcher Stark at the Stark Foundation. The foundation donated money to open the center.
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