08/02/2026
The Houston Post · Sun, Mar 2, 1952 | Leon Hale
ONE day, many centuries ago, Nature was busy planning the meandering course of the Trinity River.
Suddenly, at one point, the wise old girl decided to switch the course of the river off its general southeastward heading. So, on a lark, she jogged the stream to the southwest for about three miles, then turned it back south for another three. Then she sent it heading east for six miles.
After fashioning this sweeping bend, she grew tired of playing and let the Trinity move on again. There were more bends, curves and meanderings before the river filled its appointment with the bay more than 100 miles away.
But this is the story of one river bend, and what happened inside it.
Way back upstream, when heavy rains came, water ran off the slopes of the rich Texas Blacklands and joined the Trinity. And in these runoff waters were part of the very life of the land—its fertility.
The Trinity carried these waters down to the bend, and spilled them over her banks on the low East side and spread them across the expanse of land inside the bend. And when the waters abated, the fertile silt had settled and built, inch by inch, a deep layer of rich soil.
Then the farmers came.
The spot at which the big bend started forming is just a few miles north of the town of Midway. Here the Trinity forms the boundary between Madison and Houston Counties.
Cross the Trinity on State Highway 21 from Madisonville to Crockett, and you cross at the spot where the river was heading east on the last leg of the big bend.
As you go over the bridge heading toward Crockett, most of the land in the bend lies up to your left.
The history of the bend up until a few years ago could be written easily with one six-letter word—cotton.
Farmers came and plowed up the deep, rich soil and planted their cotton, and even today, much of the land inside the bend is known as some of the best cotton land in the world. Cotton fortunes were made and lost and remade in the bend.
Plenty of good cotton crops are still made in the bend, and much of the land will yet turn out a bale an acre even if it hasn't had a pound of fertilizer applied to it.
The plantation operations are an old story now. You could have seen this story over and over again in the big bend. Dozens of mule teams working in the fields. Hundreds of hoe hands fighting Johnson grass. Cotton picking and hauling. Profit in a good year; loss in a poor year.
Yes, the floods still come and deposit the fertility. Levee work has helped hold the waters back, but the threat is still there.
But the face of the big bend is beginning to change.
Much of the land in the bend has been bought and sold several times. Just four years ago, a man with $40 an acre to spend could have gone into the bend and bought land just as long as his money lasted.
Today he'd be lucky to buy an acre for $100. Some owners won't sell for $150 or even more.
What's happened?
For one thing, the vast flood control program steadily progressing up and down the Trinity has cast a new and promising light on the river bottomland. Landowners are given to understand that in the not too distant future, Trinity overflows may be a thing of the past.
Then, too, men with different ideas on how to use fertile soil are moving in. With them they're bringing beef cattle and improved pastures, and crowding out the cotton.
A look at the operations of the Seven J Stock Farm, Inc gives an idea of what men with money to spend are doing with land in the bend.
The Seven J stretches out over 10,000 acres, and nearly all of it is flat, cleared bottomland. Just four years ago, most of this vast acreage was planted solid to cotton. This place was formerly the old Murray Plantation.
Now headed by J. R. Parten and managed by Nath Colwell, the Seven J has been developed into a ranch with an amazing potential for beef production.
Farmers along the river in this section used to say you couldn't build a pasture in the bottom.
Now they're learning they were wrong. Johnson and Bermuda grasses, the plants that sometimes made cotton production unprofitable, are welcome sights to the cattle raiser. Another plant, which was classed as just another w**d to fight until recently, is now recognized as a "wild alfalfa" which cattle relish and grow fat on when it's young and tender.
Manager Colwell of the Seven J says: "Usually we'll have more grass in the summer than we can ever graze. It's winter grazing we're interested in."
The Seven J has that winter grazing now. More than 2,000 solid acres on the Seven J is now covered in Singletary peas, that soil improving crop which also furnishes cool season grazing.
In combination with hairy vetch, these peas, for three or four months of the year, can carry up to three cows on an acre.
On other parts of the Seven J, which used to grow cotton, pastures of native bur clover, seeded hubam and crimson clovers and dallis grass stretch out to make this ranch the possessor of probably as much improved pasture as any ranch in Texas.
Near the Seven J is another smaller ranch bought three years ago by the Johnston Brothers, Ralph of Houston and William of Oklahoma City.
On this 1,000-acre place, the brothers have taken the cotton land and are using it to experiment with grasses like KR bluestem and fescue. Vast fields of alfalfa cover the bottomland, and cattle grow fat and fancy.
Between the Johnston Brothers and the Seven J lies the Big 4, a 2,800-acre place which was bought out of cotton three years ago by Buddy Wakefield and J. H. Frossard of Madisonville and L. H. Durst of Houston.
On this place, says Mr. Wakefield, you can see how the big bend land is being changed "poor boy style."
"We're sitting right between two experiment stations," says Mr. Wakefield, "the Seven J and the Johnstons. They do the experimenting, and we look over the fence and get ideas."
The three owners of Big 4 still depend on 800 acres of tenant cotton to carry them along while they convert the big farm into a cattle ranch.
Large tracts of this place were grown up in w**ds with "stems" as big as your arm, and tons and tons of trash were cleaned off the farm. "I bet we cleaned up three pickup loads of nothing but s***f cans," says Mr. Wakefield.
The Big 4 plans include a gradual shift away from cotton into alfalfa and grass and clover to fit into the cattle picture.
The shift is already far enough along that the cattle are showing comfortable profit on a ranch operated on a practical basis.
With about 1,500 acres, a lifelong farmer named T. J. Maples is also taking part in the big improvement program going on in the bend. He is clearing up brush and timber and contributing generally to the trend that's making the bend a beautiful valley.
These four ranches and farms make up about 15,500 acres which give an idea of how many millions of acres of Trinity bottomland may look someday when the flood control program is completed.
And now something else has happened to enhance the attractiveness of our big bend.
The geologists have recently decided that the reason the Trinity made that big bend centuries ago was due to a major fault in the earth's structure, and now oil comes into the picture.
Nearly every foot of the bend has been mineral leased, and development has started.
The future of the big bend may justify the picture painted by the wildest imagination. It will be a far different valley from the one the Trinity used to spill her waters over.
