Tickets for the June 10, 2023 Historic Home Tour are now on sale! $20 for adults and $8 for kids 12 and under to visit five locations on S. Center and S. Bois d’Arc streets. Tickets are available for purchase at the Spellman Museum of Forney History and select other locations. We hope to see you there!
If you’re interested in volunteering as a docent for this event, please email us at historicforney@gmail.com.
Save the Date for our upcoming Historic House Tour!
Saturday, June 10th we’ll be hosting a summer home tour of some historic houses and buildings along Center St. and S. Bois d’Arc. Tickets will go on sale soon! Follow the Spellman Museum on our facebook page for the latest info on the event. We hope to see you there!
Thanks to the City of Forney, it is now easier to get to the Museum. New crosswalks were recently installed at the intersection of Main and Bois d’Arc streets.
Images courtesy of the City of Forney.
Visit our Facebook page and get more frequent updates on events, weekly historic photos and stories, and interact with other Forney history fans.
https://www.facebook.com/spellmanmuseum/
The FHPL is please to host a tour of historic homes in the downtown residential area of Forney. See this poster for information. More details will be released as we get closer. Tickets will go on sale in early-mid November.
We are happy to introduce a new and hopefully ongoing event at the Spellman Museum. The Forney Historic Preservation League is partnering with the Forney Arts Council to host 3rd Thursday Evening at the Spellman Museum!
Themes are developed based on the traveling or rotating exhibit currently on display in the museum’s multi-purpose room (MPR). These 3rd Thursday Evenings will include activities such as guest speakers, demonstrations, crafts, films, music, and more – all plus food and drink! We have the first three months planned through April and are developing programming for dates beyond.
The first event is Thursday, February 16th from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. to complement our Literary East Texas exhibit from Humanities Texas. This exhibit honors the work of 25 authors selected from more than 200 writers who have lived in and written about the eastern half of the state. This expansive part of Texas allows for a variety of settings from the Red River to the Piney Woods and the Gulf Coast. Passages of their works are illustrated by photographs taken especially for this exhibition by Nell Blakely. As the brochure states, “the goals of Literary East Texas are to encourage readers to discover and rediscover writers of the region, to match the words of these authors with photographs of the people and landscape they described, and to honor representative writers of the region.”
Activities for the event on the 16th include a book “blind date”, decorating journals and bookmarks, and book signings and sales from local Forney authors. Featured authors are:
Mike Farris, author of legal thrillers like A Death in the Islands, Isle of Broken Dreams, Wrongful Termination, and more.
(Author photos link to their pages on amazon.)
Arlene G. Stein, who will tell us about the adventures of Serious Henry and her line of children’s books.
Brian Moreland, writer of supernatural horror such as Dead of Winter and Blood Sacrifices.
and Elizabeth Lawless, author of Creative Monster and Western Legends, and more.
All will be joining us February 16th for our first 3rd Thursday Evening at the Spellman. We hope that you will too!
Tomorrow is Halloween, a holiday which some celebrate by watching scary movies. The 1940s were a wonderful time for scary movies with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Gaslight. And don’t forget The Wolf Man, Ghost of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, and then of course House of Frankenstein which featured Frank, the Wolf Man, Dracula, an evil scientist, and a hunchback. That pretty well covered all the bases. Think of it as The Avengers for horror fans – combining all of their favorite characters into one movie.
The head honcho of horror movies at the time was writer and producer Val Lewton. Russian-born but having moved to the United States as a child, Lewton began writing at an early age and dabbled in everything from newspapers and magazines to novels and film scripts. He hired on at RKO movie studio in 1942 to head their new horror unit. He initially made B movies that were cheap but profitable and eventually moved his way up to the A list films and actors. His credits include these horror classics:
Cat People (1942)
I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
The Seventh Victim (1943)
The Ghost Ship (1943)
The Curse of the Cat People (1944)
The Body Snatcher (1945)
Isle of the Dead (1945)
The last two films starred none other than Boris Karloff of Frankenstein fame. In The Body Snatcher, Karloff stars as a “resurrection man” (more commonly known as a graverobber) who relentlessly torments and blackmails the doctor to whom he provides bodies. Isle of the Dead depicts Karloff as a Greek general who quarantines an island after a mysterious outbreak starts killing inhabitants and giving power to a vampire. Spooky stuff.
Perhaps one or more of these movies played at the Spann Theater here in Forney. The movie theater was on Main St. near present-day City Hall and was owned by Milburn Mitchell, part of the same family who also had Margaret Mitchell Furniture across the street (present-day Eric Davis). In Forney Country, Jerry Flook relates this remembrance of a local boy visiting the Spann movie theater in the 1940s:
“On occasion, when a horror movie was showing, an employee of the Spann would come down the aisles costumed as one of the creepy characters of the movie. One Forney resident tells a childhood story of fleeing the theater in fright after a mummy unexpectedly appeared in the aisle during the midnight movie. As he ran for home a few blocks away, he encountered the Forney night watchman, Bob Crawford, on his nightly rounds. The surprise meeting of Crawford, who was a hulking figure himself, turned fright into outright terror and the young man never looked back until he stumbled breathless through his front door and locked it behind him.”
We don’t have night watchmen any more, of course, because we have a full time police force. Forney had only one law enforcement officer, the marshal, up until the 1950s. But fire insurance companies required that commercial structures have 24-hour surveillance in order for their rates to be affordable. One marshal couldn’t patrol downtown at all hours, so business owners pooled resources to hire a night watchman. He watched for fires downtown during the night but also possessed a certain degree of police power. He was assigned a specific route around the business district and checked in at each building by inserting a key from their front firebox into a time-clock which he carried. That record could tell where he had been throughout the night and when. The city of Forney took over the watchman’s salary beginning in 1924. The last record of a marshal being elected was in 1948 with Bondie Richman. I suspect that means that by the time the position was up again in 1950, the city had hired a more complete police force at which time the need for a night watchman would have been eliminated. Some of the Forney night watchmen over the years were: (?) Eudy, W.J. Pettigrew, Jesse Hawks, Robert W. Crawford, Ed Davis, Elvis Hamm, B.B. Henderson, J.H. Frame, and John Freeman.
If you’re out and about after dark this Saturday night and see a hulking figure in the street, it’s probably not the friendly night watchman of 60 years ago.
Or is it?
<dun dun DUN!>
Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to check out our facebook page.
Kendall
You can read more about 1940s horror movies on blogs HERE and HERE.
School started back this week for some area students and will next week for the rest. Summer break ends as classes begin. But did you know that in Old Forney some schools met only in summer so children could help on their family farms during planting and harvest? And private school years could be as short as 4 months, sometimes depending on curriculum and sometimes on when the money ran out.
There were various and assorted schools in the Forney area long before there was a Forney. As far back as the 1850s there were the Mustang School, East Fork, Union Hill, Wheatland, and others – all private and often held in private homes. Families pooled their money to hire a teacher for area students who could afford to take classes. Children usually attended just a few months before farm work took priority, and most quit lessons entirely well before anything resembling high school graduation.
In 1869 Harbin H. Self erected the Brooklyn School at the center of town near modern S. Bois d’Arc and College streets (where the current FISD building sits) in a building that also served as community center, union church, and Masonic meeting hall. By the early 1880s the school building had become so dilapidated classes actually met outside instead and at two different locations – south Forney and north Forney. Of course, back then north Forney really wasn’t all that far north. The new north school was built at N. Bois d’Arc and Aimee.
Students at North Forney public school, 1888.
Soon the north side of town had another school in the Lewis Academy, a preparatory school opened and led by Edward C. Lewis in 1894. The private academy taught primary, intermediate, and advanced students and not only offered classical instruction in Greek and Latin but also formed Forney’s first football team. It had male and female dorms and occupied both sides of Cedar Street between Buffalo and Kaufman. Over time the preference for free public schooling and the consolidation of north and south Forney schools reduced the number of students at Lewis Academy until it closed in 1903.
The Lewis Academy was in operation for only nine years (1894-1903) but was held in high esteem during its tenure.
Forney public school after consolidation, 1895-1896. This shows classroom #1 with S.J. Lewis, principal and teacher.
Classroom #2 with teacher Howard Parker.
As Forney grew it built new schools and upgraded old ones, receiving new buildings in 1903, 1922, 1938, 1968, and 1974. When a new high school was built, the old one usually became an elementary or middle school although some were torn down completely.
Forney HS, now FISD administration building, in a 1939 aerial shot. The school was built the year before.
Since then the number of schools in Forney has exploded. As recently as 1988, Forney ISD was only 3 schools: elementary, middle, and high schools. Forney now has 9 elementary schools, 2 middle schools, and 2 high schools for a total of 13, plus the administration building and academic center.
One thing has remained constant, however. Since Harbin Self’s Brooklyn School in 1869, there has always been a school building (either classrooms or administration) at S. Bois d’Arc and College streets. And next week it will usher in yet another school year just as it always has.
Thanks,
Kendall
Don’t forget to visit our facebook page!
