Amy F.M. Yates & Mary Ann Montañez

Christine, Texas Map

Christine, Texas

Small South Texas Town

More Histories of Small Towns in South Texas

 

Interview with Mrs. Bettie Seiffert

 

            This interview began and ended on October 1, 2005.  Mary Ann Montanez and Amy Yates interviewed Mrs. Bettie Seiffert at her home in Christine, Texas.

 

Mary Ann:        What is your name and how old are you?

Bettie:               My name is Bettie Seiffert and I am 74 years old.

 

Mary Ann:        How long have you lived in Christine?

Bettie:               Almost all my life.  Both my parents were from Christine, and we moved away when I was very small.  We came back when I was seven, and I have lived here ever since except for one year when I worked in San Antonio.

 

Mary Ann:        Are you married? 

Bettie:               Yes.

 

Mary Ann:        Do you have any children and if so how many?

Bettie:               Three.  I have two daughters and a son.

 

Mary Ann:        Did you attend School in Christine?

Bettie:               Yes, from the second grade through the twelfth grade.  I attended first grade in Houston, Texas.

 

Mary Ann:        What is your highest level of education?

Bettie:               I completed one semester at San Antonio College when I was forty years old, but high school is all I had had up to that point, and I have done numerous continuing education courses as a camp director through the camp association.

 

Mary Ann:        What is or was your employment status?

Bettie:               I wasn’t a “Jack of All Trades” since I’m a woman, but I’ve done a little bit of everything.  After I finished high school I worked in San Antonio for Winn’s Department stores.  I worked for a doctor, and then I came back home and was married.  I worked for several doctors in this county.  I worked in the tax office as a tax clerk for two and one-half-years.  I worked for an attorney who owned an insurance agency, and I was girl Friday there for a long, long time.  There were several other girls working there part of the time.  But I worked for him for thirteen years.  And then I quit that job to stay home with my children when they were young teenagers.  The insurance company that I had been working for, through this attorney’s office, asked me to take the exam for my insurance license and represent them.  I passed the exams and became an independent agent for another company.  Later I represented several companies.  I ran the insurance agency from my home for three years.  And then I literally had my arm twisted to open a ranch camp and share ranch life with city kids.  I thought the lady was crazy, but we kicked it around for awhile and talked to different people, business people, the lawyer I had worked for, the banker I knew that was from the hill country, and we discussed it thoroughly and prayed about it, and we went into summer camping.  And for twenty-two years we shared our ranch with city kids.  We closed that camp in 1990.

 

Mary Ann:        How did your family come to live in Christine?

Bettie:               Christine was promoted all over the United States and some foreign countries as a panacea for everybody’s problems, and it was set up by a land promoter and people came from everywhere.  My families both came to buy land here.  They had the main sale in October of 1909 and it lasted two or three months.  My grandfather from my dad’s side came from Mississippi-Louisiana.  My mothers’ family came from West Texas and New Mexico.  Both families sold everything they had to come here and buy into this paradise in south Texas which was a lot of prickly pear and cactus and mesquite thorns.  Dr. Charles F. Simmons was the promoter. 

 

Amy:                Bettie, can you tell us a little bit about where you were born and raised?

Bettie:               I was born in Robstown, Texas.  My father was in the Merchant Marines.  He was a seaman and in the Merchant Marines most of his life, and he farmed some.   We moved six weeks after I was born, and then they came back up here to this property, where I live now, which my father farmed.  We moved from here down to Taft and lived down there for awhile while he was at sea.  Every time he was shipped out we had to be close to the ports where he shipped, so we lived all up and down the Texas coast.  I started school in Houston, Texas, and then we moved back here, to Christine, at the end of my first year in school, and we have lived here ever since.

 

Amy:                Can you tell us what life was like when you were young?

Bettie:               Well, it was the post depression era.  I was born in 1931.  We were poor, but we weren’t ashamed of it, and so was everybody else- put it that way.  Nobody had a lot, some people had a little more than other people but it was very much a rough time for everybody.  We did everything.  We didn’t have cars.  We used a wagon with mules to go to church until I was nearly grown, and then Daddy bought a surplus Army Dodge troop truck, one of those with the big canvas on it for us to use on the farm and that is what we used to go to town and to go to church.  There were not very many people here who were well enough off to have cars until quite late in my growing up period.  I graduated from high school here.  I graduated as the last valedictorian in Christine.  Sunday was a big day.  There were five churches here and everybody went to church. When church was over, everybody would take a covered dish to the Brown Lake and we had a picnic.  The adults played dominos on the cement tables.  We would get in that muddy water and swim, chase frogs and play.  It was a very, laid back, easy time to grow up, and we didn’t have television.

 

Amy:                What were the names of the churches? 

Bettie:               The first church in Christine was built by Dr. Simmons and given to the first congregation who organized, and that was the Methodist church, and I grew up in that church.  The Baptist Church came soon after, and I think it was started in 1923 but maybe sooner.  The Catholic Church was here from early on.  There is a Catholic cemetery and a city cemetery.  There was a Church of Christ, and the Assembly of God Church and those were even as late as the 1940’s I think.  The Church of Christ moved to Pleasanton.

 

Amy:                What type of town was Christine?

Bettie:               Well, when it was first founded, there were probably 2,000 people living here.  Dr. Simmons built a railroad to the town.  He promoted it as a truck farming garden of the world, and people came here mostly as farmers.  There were a lot of merchants, there were four hotels, two banks and any number of department stores-it was amazing how many-and drug stores.  We came back here to live when I was seven years old in about 1937, and there weren’t that many people living here.  I would say probably twice as many as there are now.  There are about 400 now.  But that didn’t last for long.  It was common to ship 100 cars of cattle a day out of Christine.  But they just didn’t come from Christine, they would drive cattle from all over South Texas to Christine to put them on the train, and then have the cattle delivered to their destination. But after people started hauling their cattle to market in trucks, and they started having cattle auctions all over, the railroad didn’t have as much to do and it died probably in the late 1920’s.  I would guess by 1930, but I don’t remember when the railroad wasn’t here because I wasn’t here then.  My husband was born and raised here too, but he remembers the railroad.

 

Amy:                Was there school integration in this community?

Bettie:               We went to school with whoever lived here.  Some of my best friends are Mexican Americans.  We don’t even think of them as Mexican Americans – they are Christineites.  They are Americans.  When I began to study Christine history, I discovered an old resolution on the books at the courthouse that disallowed black people from staying in Christine overnight.  They could come to Christine and work during the day, but they had to be out of town by sundown.  I thought that was the silliest thing I had ever heard, because my mother would have spanked me all over if I would have been ugly to someone because of color.  We were raised to not be biased.  Mom use to say, “The good Lord made us all, and it didn’t make any difference what color we are, that’s who made us.”  No, there wasn’t discrimination.  In a small town like this there were some arguments, but I can’t even remember one.  But no, there wasn’t discrimination.  If you wanted to go to school, you went to school.  A lot of Mexican Americans didn’t go to school because they went to work early and barely existed by everybody in the family going to work.  And we were really luckier than most because we were allowed to go to school.

 

Amy:                Bettie, can you tell us the story of the black lady that came here to be a cook for a family in another town?

Bettie:               There is a story that I have heard of all my life.  Mr. Martin, and I can’t remember his first name, lived in the Dr. Duncan house, and he came to meet the train because they were expecting somebody to come for Thanksgiving.  When he got there, a black lady who had gotten off the train was very anxious because she was supposed to have been met by someone from Campbellton who was going to take her to their ranch to cook Thanksgiving dinner for them.  Mr. Martin took their family friend to the house and came back into town to check on this lady, and found out she was still there.  He said to her, “come get in and I’ll take you to Campbellton.  When he got her in the buggy he said, I’m not going to take you all the way to Campbellton.  I’m going to take you to my house.  You can’t stay in Christine overnight, if anybody found out you were here, they would be real upset.  So I am going to take you to my house and you can stay there.”  And when they arrived she said, “Is there something I can do?”   And Mr. Martin said, “You can help cook our dinner if you want to.” So she helped Mrs. Martin cook and get every thing ready for their dinner for the next day.  The next morning someone from Campbellton came looking for her in Christine and someone said that Mr. Martin had taken her to his house.  So they went and found her and took her to their ranch in Campbellton.

 

Amy:                Bettie, can you tell us if there are any places around Christine where people can go fishing?

Bettie:               The closet place to fish is Choke Canyon at the park down at Three Rivers.  Everybody goes down there to fish.

 

Mary Ann:        Can you tell me how Christine got its name?

Bettie:               Christine was originally named New Artesia.  When they took the incorporation papers to Austin to have the city incorporated back in 1910, they found out there was already a New Artesia in West Texas and they had to choose another name.  The men that took the papers to Austin called a city meeting and discussed it with the city alderman and they argued and argued and couldn’t come up with a name.  Finally, they said, “Why don’t we just let our wives pick a name?  The women met and decided to name it after the first little girl who was born here who was Christine Andrews.  Her father and mother were James and Rieta Andrews.  James Andrews was the city marshall at that time.  Christine Andrews died about three or four years ago and we buried her here in Christine with a little bit of a special ceremony because she was our namesake.  She gave us our name.  It was said Mr. Simmons named Christine after his daughter, he did not.  He didn’t even have a daughter named Christine.

 

Mary Ann:        What caused the population to go down?

Bettie:               Three things:  The railroad, World War II, and the annexation of our school.  The depression was so bad in the late 1920’s.  The railroad was the biggest thing.  Dr. Simmons built the railroad with his own money from San Antonio and it was used tremendously.  It was used for hauling cattle; it was used for hauling produce.  A lot of people were truck farmers and they hauled their produce to San Antonio.  There were restaurants in San Antonio that ordered lettuce by the crate loads.  So the railroad was busy.  People had everything they bought in San Antonio shipped out here on the railroad.  They went to San Antonio on the railroad to buy wedding dresses.  It was the way to go to San Antonio.  And, so as long as it was being used it was fine.  The biggest thing that the rail was used for was to haul cattle to market.  There weren’t local cattle auctions like there are now.  So they would haul the cattle to Kansas or to Fort Worth or to wherever they were shipping the cattle.  Then when the ranchers started hauling their cattle by truck, which was cheaper, then the railroad lost out and it died.  The second thing that happened was World War II.  When the railroad left a lot of the businesses left because they didn’t have any way to have their merchandise brought in, and didn’t have anybody to buy it either.  People were moving out.  World War II came along and all the young men who were able bodied went into the service.  When they went to the service and saw a little bit of the rest of the world, they did not come back to Christine.  If they married somebody from Boston or somewhere else they lived somewhere else.  A lot of the people who did live here who were too old to go into the service, went into Civil Service jobs in San Antonio at Kelly Field or whatever, and they literally picked up their houses and had them moved into San Antonio, and they lived there until they retired, and then they came back.  Basically, Christine lost most of its inhabitants at the end of World War II.  The school in Christine was annexed to the Jourdanton School District and this killed Christine.  Christine is almost a ghost town now.  Christine has one gas station that sells groceries, one Mexican café, the food is tremendously good, and there is one little beauty shop in a lady’s home.  Christine use to have its own pool.  In fact, it had the first swimming pool in the county that we build literally by hand back in the 1950’s.  People from all over, including Pleasanton, and Charlotte, came and bought memberships and swam here too.  But, when they decided they wanted a pool in their towns, then later on ours died.  Our swimming pool didn’t have a filter system, we had to drain it once a week, scrub it, fill it up and start over.  It just got to be more than anybody could do.  The last class to graduate from Christine High School was in May 1948 and after that students went to Jourdanton High School from that time on.  The Christine school didn’t annex until later which was probably in the 1950’s.

 

Mary Ann:        Were you brought up in a segregated community?

Bettie:               No, everybody was equal here.

 

Mary Ann:        Did you witness any type of discrimination toward yourself or others?

Bettie:               No, in the first place, if I had, my parents would have spanked me good.  And back then spanking was okay.  We were brought up to believe that everybody was the same created by God.  It didn’t make a difference if they were brown, black or white.  No there wasn’t.

 

Mary Ann:        During the time of your upbringing, what were your views of minorities?

Bettie:               I didn’t realize there were minorities when I was being brought up until the 1970’s when the government decided to pass a law that you couldn’t discriminate against minorities whether they were from a different nationality, black, Hispanic, or if they were women, and that is when I realized there were minorities.

 

Amy:                Can you tell us of the Massacre at Dead Man’s Tank?

Bettie:               That was before my time.  It’s a place where they unearthed 68 skeletons with arrows in them.  They were massacred by Indians.  Supposedly the Settlers that were killed were smelting silver.

 

Amy:                Can you tell us about how long ago this apparently happened?

Bettie:               I don’t know when the massacre happened.  In 1928, Mr. Wiley was digging for a stock tank and found 68 skeletons.  They unearthed an entire huge room underground made out of logs.  They had built a moat around it to protect them from Indian raids.  By the time Mr. Wiley found the moat had filled in.  It was kind of a hollow ditch.  Mr. Wiley came to find out there were buildings underneath.

 

Amy:                Have there been any tornadoes, floods or any unusual occurrences in Christine?

Bettie:               I don’t remember any tornadoes that were big.  In the 1980’s, my mother and I woke up from a nap one afternoon to a loud sounding noise.  It sounded as if a freight train was going to come through the house.  A little twister went through the pasture.  We could see it pulling up trees and throwing them around.  It cleared a little spot on the ranch east of us and rose up after that.  We’ve had several earthquakes in this county that have been mild.  Floods, that’s a different story.  We live by La Parita creek, which is usually a dry creek most of the time.  There have been several floods.  When I was a teenager in school it rained nine inches north of us.  Where we lived it didn’t even rain.  The water came down so fast that it flooded.  The time that it flooded big was in 1980.  We were running our summer camp out here and had horses in the creek bottom.  One of them got on the wrong side of the creek.  We decided to go and cut the fence, get the horse, pull her up to the hill and lead her home.  Before my daughter and a hired hand got the horse out, an eight foot wall of water came down the creek and swept them off their feet.  They held onto the halter of the horse until they were able to climb into a tree.  I saw some boys that were working nearby and I sent them to town to get the sheriff.  They were taking too long, so I started to town on foot and met the deputy and Mr. Bosquez coming to tell me the sheriff’s office would send a plane to search for the girls.  A plane came in search of the girls.  When the girls heard the plane they started yelling and screaming.  Then I knew they were alive.

 

Amy:                Mrs. Bettie, when we were talking earlier you mentioned alligators.  I didn’t know there were alligators down here.

Bettie:               Alligators have been here forever, as long as I can remember.  People have gone alligator hunting after every flood.  We have alligators in our stock tank right here behind the house.

 

Mary Ann:        What do you see for the future of Christine?

Bettie:               That’s a hard question.  I don’t know.  We have an annual homecoming every year to try and keep ex-residents interested in coming back to Christine.  Some ex-residents have come back and retired here.  That’s where the little spurt of growth we’ve had recently comes from.  After farmers got electricity they moved out of town.  There is no industry in Christine.  They found coal south of town and have a coal plant there.  The coal plant has made jobs for lots of people in Christine recently.  When most of the young people finish high school, they go somewhere else to get jobs.  I don’t really know if there is a lot of future for Christine.  We just try to hold onto the memories.  It was a wonderful place to grow up. 

 

Amy:                Bettie, can you tell us about the man and his will that started the town of Christine?

Bettie:               Yes, his name was Charles F. Simmons.  He was a doctor and lawyer.  He was raised in Missouri, where his father had a business.  His father put together a formula for liver tonic and sold it from a wagon like people did long years ago.  It was so well used and so good that he got rich on it.  Mr. Simmons either inherited or bought his fathers business.  That’s how he made his money and bought several ranches in Atascosa and McMullen counties, which totaled ninety-five thousand acres.  He had land in Live Oak County and made a subdivision there, and he called it Simmons City.  He built a church there and started the town.  He then subdivided this property into Christine and Imogene.  Dr. Simmons died before Christine was finished.  He provided for everything.  The first church was built and paid for by his estate and given to the first church that would organize.  He provided for the railroad to be finished.  He made lots of money on land sales.  He left his money to his children and wife.  He had daughters named Minnie, Margaret, Maude, Elizabeth, and Harriet, and he had a son named Harry.  Harry died from a snake bite at his father’s ranch in Live Oak many years ago.

 

 

 

Annotated Bibliography

Go to Small Town in South Texas

Interview with Bettie Seiffert

History of Christine, Texas

Pictures of Christine, Texas

 

Return to HISTORIES