Caching in Alvarado, TX 5/19/2010

This morning we drove south to Alvarado to do a few caches as we didn't want to spend another day in the big city of FW. There really wasn't much historical or interesting there and in fact there wasn't much there at all. A small town square with a few stores circled around it some open but most closed. Our caches consisted of 4 light post skirt caches one at a Waffle House, one at a drug store, one at the Alvarado town square and one at a church. There also was a cache on a guardrail by a bridge, 2 in trees near some woods and 4 in small cemeteries. There was one in Bethany Cemetery near a fence in the trees, 2 in Glenwood Cemetery and both those were in trees and the last 2 were in Balch Cemetery one on a fence and the other in some trees.

Balch Cemetery did have a short bit of history associated with as well as with Alvarado. Josiah Thompson and Benjamin Bickerstaff were the culprits and the story goes. Johnson County experienced much unrest during the reconstruction period after the Civil War, Schwartz said.
Benjamin Bickerstaff and Josiah Thompson, two former Confederate soldiers, seeking a career change and became outlaws, committing numerous crimes in Louisiana, Texas and the Johnson County area.
A story local historian Jack Carlton remembers differently. Bickerstaff and others, according to Carlton, had been accused of holding up a United States supply wagon near Sulphur Springs.
The men alledgedly stole the mules and set fire to the wagons and their contents.
Bickerstaff hightailed it to Alvarado to hide out at the invitation of an old friend, Robert Moore, who owned a general store in town.
Bickerstaff, according to whichever version you want to believe, either already knew or soon fell in with “local Alvarado scoundrel” Thompson who, the legend goes, ran a saddle and tack shop up front while peddling bootlegged booze out back.
The smart move for both would have been to maintain a low profile.
Instead they ran amok harassing recently freed slaves, terrorizing the town square by firing six shooters into the air, and other egregious breeches of etiquette. Alvarado folks were not amused.
Bickerstaff and Thompson’s April 5, 1869, plans to ride into town, buy flour and burn the square to the ground proved the last straw.
Anticipating their arrival, residents positioned themselves on rooftops and other strategic locations.
They welcomed Bickerstaff and Thompson with a greeting akin to the closing sequences of “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Wild Bunch.”
Thompson died instantly.
Bickerstaff received at least 26 wounds, Schwartz said, but lingered about 40 minutes, long enough to request water, whiskey and morphine.
“Their bodies were left on the street where they fell until the next morning,” Schwartz said.
Christian burial calls for a east-facing placement based on the belief that Jesus, on the judgement day, will return from the east.
Bickerstaff and Thompson so put out the good people of Alvarado that they made a point of burying them north and south instead. Or so the story goes.
The town afforded the delinquent duo some modicum of dignity years later by placing headstones on their graves in honor of their military service. Pointed headstones.
“That, I’ve been told, is what Confederate soldiers wanted so no Yankee would ever sit on their grave,” said Johnson County Sheriff’s Office deputy Jim Sloan.
Sloan supervises the inmate work crew used to maintain cemeteries, including Balch Cemetery, tended to by the Johnson County Cemetery Association.

There was one more interesting thing in Balch Cemetery and that was a grave marker reading "a little slave girl killed by a bear in 1856". This story goes adjacent to Balch Cemetery, separated by a fence, lies Senterwood Cemetery, the former cemetery for black residents. Residents established the cemetery in 1856 after a black bear killed a slave girl, according to the cemeteries historical marker. “She was hanging clothes on trees,” said Doris Lanfear. “There were no fences so she hung the clothes on trees. And the story is a bear attacked her, and her family heard her screaming, and they found her dead later some distance away. It’s just hard to imagine now that there used to be bears in Johnson County.” The girl’s name and age appears lost to history now. To ensure she’s not forgotten, the Balch-Senterwood Cemetery Association, in 1997, installed a gravestone for her.

Then it was on back to the coach for the rest of the day. Well that's about all from here for today so until tomorrow we love and miss you all. Mom & Dad Dori & Dick