Robert E. Russell, age 64, was upset with the spoiled youth. They were interested more in fashion than their friends and were lazy. “They can’t walk three blocks they must have a carriage,” he wrote. Back when he was young, he and his friends would walk a mile to a dance.
Russell wrote his observances of Orange more than a century ago, back in January 1911. Local historians now refer to his papers as “The Russell Diary,” though his writings are not in diary form, but in his recollections. Luckily, he wrote down his memories. Even writing them down decades later, his stories give view of how people lived here at one time.
Robert Everett Russell moved to Green’s Bluff with his parents in January 1854 when he was 6 years old. That’s the name the village on the west bank of the Sabine River was called then. He said it later was named Madison before it became Orange. The family arrived by boat, like most settlers did in the early days.
His father, named Robert Russell, had fought with General Sam Houston at San Jacinto April 21, 1836. His mother lived in San Augustine that year and the family story was that Davy Crockett had stayed overnight at her parents house and danced with her. The next day he headed toward San Antonio and the Alamo.
“In 1854 when I came here it was a small village, you might say right on the bank of the Sabine. There was nobody living more than three blocks from the river; everybody carried their wood and water from the river and at that time there was but very few wells and not more than one or two underground cisterns. Such a thing as wooden cisterns was not known at that early day,” he wrote.
The town had two or three small sawmills on the river and the main industry was producing hand-cut cypress shingles. His family built a two-story house in 1856 on Front Street at First Street. The cypress trees cut for lumber and shingles were so big that one of the three-foot wide doors was made with a single piece of cypress wood, he recalled.
He writes his memories of the 1859 “Reign of Terror” involving the Jack Bunch gang of counterfeiters. The town went through eight Saturdays in a row when someone wass “either killed, died or was drowned.”
Steamboats brought cotton from farmers upriver so it could be shipped out through the Gulf of Mexico to mills. When he was a boy, four or five steamboats ran back and forth up the river from early fall until late spring.
The Russells lost their two-story house in the September 1865 hurricane. His parents were out of town and he and his siblings had to run out into the storm as the house blew down. “Planks and house tops could be seen flying in the air like birds,” he wrote.
His older sister was hit by debris and he picked her up and carried her to safety. She died two days later. Another brother suffered a head injury.
He recalls that the steamer “Florilda” went down in the storm on the river bank by the Ochiltree house, which was one of three that withstood the winds. The Ochiltree house was at the Ochiltree-Inman Park now on Front Street.
Russell wrote that bolts of dry goods from Henry Thompson’s store were found hanging from a bridge on the Old Beaumont Road two and a half miles outside of town. The Thompson’s store was where the Riverfront Pavilion stands today.
Orange recovered from the Civil War and the storm. “All respectable people were more like one family,” he wrote. The houses and businesses were close together. Social gatherings were held at someone’s house once or twice a week, he recalled. His father’s house had a large living room and dances were often held there.
“They did not have to have a new dress or suit for every occasion as they do in this day and time (remember 1911),” he wrote. “At the time is when the character counted not fine clothes and money as it is at this day.”
He recalled sometimes people would walk a mile to go to a dance. “Now days they can’t walk three blocks and they must have a carriage. What a difference,” he wrote.
Russell started his memoir with “My friends have often said to me, why don’t you write a history of Orange. They seem to think that I ought to know and remember everything, they say to me “how do you manage to remember everything” do you write it down? No, by no means. I keep it all in my head.”
Luckily for history, Russell decided to write his memories. He died in 1922 at the age of 75 and he left a portrait in words of a time past.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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