Published: September 04, 2008 12:51 pm            

John Watson: Traveling the roads of Johnson County

Growing up here, I had often wondered why there was an overpass over the railroad at Boone Street and not one at Henderson Street, the main street through town. After some research I found that at the time the overpass was built, Boone Street was the main street through town.

If you were on the west side of town and wanted to go to Keene or other points northeast, you took Boone Street across the viaduct, as it was then called, connected with Mansfield Road and went to Keene or on to Mansfield and points north and east. You can still take Mansfield Road to Keene and see how narrow and crooked our roads once were.

However, they weren’t too bad for a horse and buggy or a Model T.

To go to Alvarado or Grandview you went out what is now Texas 4 and it split east of town. Take the left to go to Alvarado and the right to go to Grandview. There was no U.S. 67 going through the eastern portion of the county before the 1930s.

Leaving out on West Henderson, you would go to Pendell Street, make a turn to the right for about a block then turn back to the left and continue west to where McAnear Street is and continue on out west of town as the road is now. A short distance past where the Elks Lodge is, the road went to the left to a little low water crossing on the creek and continued on up the hill to connect with the present state park road, where it turns back west.

You went on past where the Cleburne State Park is now and on to what is known as Five Oaks and turned left, crossed the Brazos Point Bridge, built in 1914 and opened in January 1915, and on to Meridian. This was always known as the Meridian Highway.

To go to Glen Rose you left downtown on Henderson Street and went to Granbury Street and north on Granbury to Woodard Street; This was the old U.S. 67, which went on out through Bono, connecting with the present U.S. 67 a couple of miles west of Bono. About a mile and a half this side of the Somervell County line the old road veered off to the left and went through Nemo and on to Glen Rose.

The Texas Highway Department came into existence in 1917 and in 1922 started construction of U.S. 67 from Glen Rose to the only bridge across the Brazos in Somervell County, built in 1908 on old Highway South 10A. In 1923 the state continued construction on to Cleburne, coming into Cleburne on Woodard Ave. and ending U.S. 67 at Granbury Street.

It is my understanding that before this, people from Somervell County who wanted to go to Cleburne took what is now Farm-to-Market 200 from Nemo around to Five Oaks, where it connected with the Meridian Hwy and came in that way.

By 1937 the state thought we needed a better highway through western Johnson County. They started widening the highway a mile and a half this side of the county line and headed toward Cleburne. They veered south about two miles west of Bono and went south of Bono and connected with the Meridian Highway about a mile east of where the present Park Road 21 turns off.

That brought U.S. 67 in on Henderson Street; however, there was still the problem with the offset at Pendell Street. The state now purchased enough land From McAnear to Pendel to run the highway straight through.

The section of U.S. 67 from McAnear to Pendell became Stadium Drive, and the old section remained Henderson St. I think it was sometime in the ’60s that Stadium Drive was done away with and U.S. 67 became Henderson all the way out. The old part of Henderson then became Spell Street.

Billy Ewing operated a service station at the corner of Granbury and Woodard for many years. When U.S. 67 moved to Henderson Street, Billy moved his station to Stadium Drive in the building where the boot store is today across from the football stadium.

According to TxDOT records at the office north of Keene, in 1934 the highway department began construction on the eastern section of U.S. 67 at Venus, bringing it into Cleburne in 1939. This finally gave a good all-weather road completely across the county from east to west.

In the first half of the 20th century the road from Cleburne to Rio Vista, now Texas 174, stopped at Rio Vista. If you wished to visit someone in Kopperl, just across the river south of Rio Vista, you would take what is now FM 916 west past the Klondike Ranch, through the Goat Neck Community to the Five Oaks, where you connected with the Meridian Highway and then crossed the Brazos Point Bridge. At the town of Brazos Point the road T’d, and you went right to go to Meridian and left to go to Kopperl.

A big change occurred in the 1950s, when Lake Whitney was built and Texas 174 opened up trade with Bosque County. Before this time, the road from Cleburne went about 100 yards past where the old Cow Pasture Bank was located, turned across the railroad tracks and stopped. This was a gravel road until 1941.

These are just a few of the changes made in the roads of Johnson County over the past 100 years. Some of these roads may seem like a long way around to get to town, but remember, these roads were originally built during the time of the horse and buggy, and no one got in a hurry.

If you lived very far from town, just to go get groceries could take two days and was usually a once a month event.

Dad’s family moved to Nemo when he was 15, and I remember him telling about coming to Cleburne by way of the Meridian Highway and spending the night because the round trip and shopping could not be made in a day. After U.S. 67 was put in, that cut the distance to town almost in half. If you had a good horse and left home by the first light of day you could make it to Cleburne, do your shopping, and back home by dark or a little after.

Sometimes Dad would stay in town longer than usual and darkness would catch him before he got to Bono. He kept a lap spread in a trunk under the buggy seat to wrap up with in cold weather, and he would get that out and spread it on the floorboard of the buggy. The horse knew the way home, so Dad would tie the reins to the dashboard of the buggy and lie down and go to sleep.

The horse would go home, going to the gate to the lot at the barn, stopping and staying there until morning. Grandmother would go out the next morning and wake Dad in time for breakfast.

New roads and cars have really made a big difference in our lives.



John Watson is a Cleburne resident who can be reached at texastraveler@sbcglobal.net

        

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