Press: Jimplecute

Jefferson used to be the first city in Texas. Standing on the shore of Big Cypress Bayou, 20 miles from the Louisiana line, busy Jefferson shipped cotton, flour, pork, wool, hides, beeves and beeswax over the then navigable bayou waters to Caddo Lake, thence down the Red River to the Mississippi, New Orleans and the sea. During Reconstruction and after, Jefferson sheltered some 35,000 folk, their bustling business centring around the city’s slave-built courthouse and its mile of docks.

In the 1870s, a Cassandra appeared on this happy scene in the person of Jay Gould, who dickered with Jefferson’s soft-spoken businessmen about the possibility of putting through a branch of his Texas & Pacific Railroad to connect the city overland northeast with Texarkana and the T. & P. main line. Annoyed when the Jeffersonians would not talk his kind of turkey, the black-whiskered railroad baron clapped on his plug hat and walked out croaking a curse on the whole pack of them: “Bats will roost in your belfries, trees thrust branches through mouldering buildings, grass grow in your streets!” Jay Gould put through his branch line after all, but with it, his unpleasant prophecy started to come true. The railroad made Jefferson’s tributary back country independent of the port. That same year (1873) Government engineers decided Big Cypress Bayou was flooding farms and villages in the sandy lowlands, dynamited the natural dam which had backed the bayou up toward Jefferson, thus put the city’s docks out of commission, ended its water commerce with Shreveport and New Orleans.

Through all these civic misadventures, one of the liveliest of Jefferson’s four dailies was a sheet with the incomprehensible title of The Jimplecute. Colonel Ward Taylor had founded this paper in 1856 when his city was 20 years old and beginning to ride high. Its name came from the initials of the sheet’s motto: “Join Industry Manufacturing Planting Labor Energy Capital in Unity Together Everlastingly.” Peak Jimplecute circulation, in the 1880s, was around 5,000. A Greenbacker in a Democratic town, stanch Publisher Taylor died in 1894. The paper was continued by his son Ward and daughter Birdie. Commercially moribund, Jefferson now saw its population shrink to 2,515 by 1910. The city still had an air of faded grandeur, however, sufficient to impress young Barry Benefield, a local boy who later made his home town the scene of best-selling Valiant is the Word for Carrie.

In 1915, Birdie Taylor took complete charge of the Jimplecute. In 1926 the paper was sold. The new owners immediately changed its name from Jimplecute to plain Journal. “Miss Birdie” carried on the job printing business, still runs it at 76. Last year the Journal changed from a daily to a semiweekly. Its 2,000 readers supposed that like almost everything else in their quiet, moss-grown city, the Journal would now drowse off to sleep.

Last month, somnolent Jefferson was suddenly jarred into what may be its second boom era when the spine-tingling cry of OIL! was raised, and the Flesh & Hootkins Well was brought in outside the city. Last week, if Jeffersonians needed further assurance that an oil boom had spilled into their laps they had it in the person of 30-year-old Thomas Edward Foster, who showed up and promptly bought the Jimplecute with the announcement that he was going to revitalize it. Tom Foster is a Texas publisher who follows oil around as a hound follows coons. His specialty is running newspapers that carry plenty of oil news, plenty of boomtime ballyhoo and advertising. Publisher Foster bought the Journal as an ideal vehicle for such an enterprise. This week the Jimplecute nameplate was dusted off and the paper started out again as a daily under the Foster flag.

Jeffersonians soon decided that likable Tom E. Foster was just the man to operate the resuscitated “Jimp.” Fresh out of the University of Texas in 1926, he started with the weekly Champion in thriving Center, then took in its opposition, made it a daily. When oil bubbled up near Kilgore in 1931 Publisher Foster was on hand 72 hours later with the weekly Kilgore News in his pocket. He made it a daily in three months. Convivial young Publisher Foster slyly says that his favorite hobby is the perusal of “old Scotch works,” and he is no great reader. He regards Jefferson’s oil field as a “major strike.”

No sooner had Publisher Foster taken over the Jimplecute than Jefferson gave him a bang-up story. As he sat talking one morning last week on the ground floor of Jefferson’s Marion County lockup, Sheriff Alex Brown was killed by a shotgun blast from an unknown assassin who fired through the window of the jail.