Tolbert’s Texas
About Services at 1-Man Church
Holy Trinity Episcopal Church
Dallas Morning News
Wednesday, 30 March 1955
Part 3, Page 3
By Frank X. Tolbert
Some years ago, Walter Dickson Adams was the only member of the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Forney, Texas. All the others had died or moved away.
Still, services continued at this beautiful church, an ornament of the town since 1901.
Young padres would come from Dallas to preach. Some Sundays, Adams, a small, keen-minded druggist-bank president-newspaperman, would bring a guest or two. Some Sundays, Adams, who is 82, would be a 1-man audience in the 150-capacity auditorium, solemnly listening to a full sermon.
“Now we have seven members and have bought an old section house from the T&P and we’re studying about using it for a parish house or Sunday school,” says Adams, a man who had an almost incredible diversity of successful careers.
Adams has been The Dallas News’ correspondent in Forney since September, 1887. And he has been both business agent and reporter for The News since August, 1893.
He has operated the Adams Drug Company in Forney since August, 1893, and one year he was president of the American Pharmaceutical Association.
He has been president of the Forney State Bank since 1939 and he was mayor of the town for a term starting in 1914.
Adams said he started off his career as correspondent of The News by getting a “royal dressing down” from the managing editor, Frank Doremus.
A mob hanged a man from a bois d’arc tree on Mustang Creek, about a mile and a half from Forney. Adams didn’t send in a report. His excuse when Doremus jumped him was that he had no transportation to the scene. Back came these instructions:
“Rent a horse at the livery stable next time. We want you on the front row at all hangings in and around Forney.”
Adams says “that jacking up made me a better reporter. I don’t think I’ve been scooped since.”
He was born in Kemp, Texas on the last day of 1872. He worked as a printer’s devil in Kaufman at the age of 12 for $1 a month and a suit of store clothes at the end of six months service. He came to Forney in 1887 when “four mules couldn’t drag an empty wagon through the downtown street after a heavy rain had hit the blacklands.”
In June, 1889 he became the founder and editor of the Forney Tribune. He took an active interest in politics and his paper contain salty notices like this: “Don’t forget to come to the political meeting next Saturday. Be there, not with a knife up your sleeve, but fetch along a 20-pound bois d’arc club and an iron resolution to beat the stuffings out of anybody who mistakes you for a brainless jackass and presumes to ride you in the interest of some political boss or clique.”
Adams is a widower and has no children. He spends much of his time at the drug store, which has most of its original furnishings – and yet the atmosphere of the place is a thousand times too cheerful for there to be a museum feeling about the old drugstore.
He is an authority on the life of John Wien Forney, a Pennsylvania editor and railroad promoter, for whom the town was named when the railroad came in the 1870’s. Previously Forney was Brooklyn.
This 82-year-old bank president takes his duties as News agent very seriously: “I give it the same attention I would the biggest proposition that could be submitted to me. It’s partly a matter of sentiment with me.”
He has never had a soda fountain in the drug store.
“Soda fountains attract mice. I hate mice.”
