Seven o'clock Saturday morning I left with my current wife for Ellis County. The next day was to mark our 34^th year of marriage, and she thought it was time for me to take a break from my Fort Remonstrans Heresy Awareness Project and bring her up to speed on the rôle of cotton in Texas history.

After turning off 35-E for Waxahachie we stopped for a slurp and a nibble so the sleepy citizens could get out of bed and begin adding local color to our holiday. I invested in a cinnamon bun as big as my steering wheel and began my lectures.

I told her that before the Civil War there were only a few settlers scratching the land for corn, oats, sweet potatoes and wheat. According to the 1860 Agricultural Schedule, only 389 bales of cotton were produced. In ‘79 the Waxahachie Tap Railroad laid some track. Then came the Fort Worth and New Orleans in '86, the M-K-T in 1889, and the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railroad in 1907. Ellis County discovered a world which showed a keen interest in its cotton-related industries. By 1900 Ellis County produced more cotton than any in the nation. In 1910 the Agricultural Schedule recorded that 106,384 bales of cotton had been raised, processed and shipped.

There was a little economic boom that lasted until the Depression. Thirty-two saloons sprang up around the Square. The Shelton Opera House opened in 1880 to satisfy the great Texas thirst for "culture" and entertainment. There was a racetrack, there were fairgrounds, there were bawdy houses and there was a Chautauqua Auditorium for showcasing Will Rogers, John Philip Sousa, William Jennings Brian and collateral American embarrassments.

Some of this wealth went into an interest of mine: residential architecture, and some of it went into an interest of my wife's: the decorative arts. So we checked the batteries in our cameras, hit the Gingerbread Trail and started collecting photographic evidence of the Courthouse, "Carpenter Gothic" homes, some local commentaries on the Arts & Crafts movement and the Chautauqua Auditorium at Getzendaner Park.

By this time I had finished my cinnamon bun and we began looking for a restaurant to do lunch in. Eventually we moseyed northward through Texas until we found our own personal hovel located in what used to be a Texas cotton field.

The wife and I agreed that our marriage had not been the unmitigated failure her mother and the Dean of Men expected it would be and we decided to extend the relationship into the foreseeable future.

But a day spent thinking about Arts and Crafts reminded me of William Morris and his words on the decorative arts—and sentiments not at all foreign to the Chautauqua circuit:

Now if the objection be made, that these arts have been the handmaids of luxury, of tyranny, and of superstition, I must needs say that it is true in a sense; they have been so used, as many other excellent things have been. It is also true that, among some nations, their most vigorous and freest times have been the very blossoming times of art; while at the same time, I must allow that these decorative arts have flourished among oppressed peoples, who have seemed to have no hope of freedom; yet I do not think that we shall be wrong in thinking that at such times, among such peoples, art at least was free; when it has not been, when it has really been gripped by superstition, by luxury, it has straightway begun to sicken under that grip. Nor must you forget that when men say popes, kings, and emperors built such and such buildings, it is a mere way of speaking. You look in your history-books to see who built Westminster Abbey, who built St. Sophia at Constantinople, and they tell you Henry III., Justinian the Emperor. Did they? or, rather, men like you and me, handicraftsmen, who have left no names behind them, nothing but their work?

Sometimes looking at even the humblest of these works elevates the soul.