Thursday, April 25, 2024
GATESVILLE HISTORY:
When Wong Lee first stepped foot in Gatesville he was a curiosity.
Lee was the first Asian in town, according to a 1949 report in the The Gatesville Messenger and Star Forum by Bob Saunders.
With a long pigtail down his back and dressed in a Tang suit (traditional Chinese clothing), Lee was popular with the kids in town. They paid him daily visits.
“He was a curiosity to us [the children]. All of us kids made it a point to drop by and see how the old Chinaman was getting along,” Saunders wrote. “He was always glad to see us, I guess he got lonesome by himself.”
Why he was in town was a point debate.
Saunders reported that Col. Horatio Atkinson, the proprietor of the much acclaimed Atkinson Hotel, sent someone to California to find a Chinese man to work in Gatesville to wash and iron their clothing. White laundered shirts were a “badge of gentility” and mostly worn by doctors, lawyers and bankers, Saunders would write.
This claim may be in dispute because many Chinese immigrants were already in Texas operating laundry businesses.
The Chinese first arrived to help build the Houston and Texas Central Railroad in 1870. More of them would arrive in 1881 with the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and once the line was completed, some of them decided to stay in Texas.
There were 136 Chinese in all of Texas during the 1880 census enumeration. That was first census to enumerate Chinese in Texas, according to a report written by Dr. Edward C.M. Chen, titled “Into the Future-Together Two Lunar Centuries of Progress 1877-1937.”
Lee, in all available accounts, worked hard, spoke in pidgin English and spoked of going back to China.
He worked and lived in a shack just off the courthouse square on 7th Street, then known as Faunt Le Roy Crossing Road. The May 1885 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of downtown Gatesville clearly shows the structure and labels it simply as “Chinese Laundry.” The structure itself wasn’t very large and was built flush with the dirt sidewalk. The inside didn’t have a ceiling and you could see the rafters overhead.
He was a busy man, according to Saunders, washing and ironing men’s white shirts and collars saying that he didn’t do any other kind of laundry.
“I think somebody told me that he washed and ironed two shirts and six collars for two bits [the equivalent of twenty-five cents],” wrote Saunders. “All he was working for was to make enough money to go back and be buried in China.”
Lee would tell a young Saunders and his friends that if his pigtail was ever cut off that he would not be able to go home.
Unfortunately, Wong Lee’s wish to return to his homeland, was not to be.
“One Saturday night someone went into Wong Lee’s place, put a rope around his neck and hung him from the rafters in his front room.” Saunders wrote that no one knew or cared who had killed him because there was no law against killing a “Chinaman.”
The Sheriff ruled the death a suicide.
The kids disagreed.
They point out Lee’s happy disposition and plan to make enough money to go back to China.
Saunders wrote that when the body was found, Lee’s shack had been ransacked and that even the floor boards had been ripped up by someone searching for Lee’s money.
“But he [Lee] fooled them, for he put his money in the bank,” Saunders wrote.
Courthouse records do not reveal anything about Lee’s murder or what became of the money he had placed in the bank. There was no probate of his estate after his death. It can only be assumed that he was buried in an unmarked grave in the old City Cemetery ... a long way from his homeland where he wished to be.
