Sunday, May 19, 2024
Robert Lee “Uncle Bob” Saunders was an early-day resident of Gatesville and the son of one of Gatesville’s early business pioneers. Born in 1880 in Gatesville, Uncle Bob had many memories and stories from his childhood which, later in life, he put in writing during the 1940s and 1950s for The Gatesville Messenger in a weekly column titled “Down Memory Lane.”
According to John Frank Post, editor of the Gatesville Messenger from 1946-1978, “Mr. Saunders composed his Down Memory Lane columns from his West Main Street home in the shadow of the county courthouse dome. Deadline time would find him hunched square-shouldered over his small desk pecking away at his typewriter.” Post continued, “disdaining the rules of grammar and political correctness, he wrote like he talked – straight and plain-speaking. He was spared any tedious research, as his gifted memory supplied him with facts that he could weave into his own inimitable embroidery, using colorful anecdotes, local history, and happenings. Yes, Uncle Bob knew how to juice up a story.”
Post recalled that the “Down Memory Lane” column was a hit with the readers of the newspaper from the beginning. Post said that Uncle Bob’s close friends felt he viewed his writing as a “gift to his generation and a legacy to generations to come.”
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The following is an excerpt of Uncle Bob’s Down Memory Lane column that appeared in the May 18, 1951, edition of The Gatesville Messenger:
Haunted House Stigma
Leaving the public square on the south side of the courthouse, you will travel down West Leon Street to the Leon River, where you cross on the old county wagon bridge and hit the old Lampasas Road. Forking off to the south is the old Georgetown Road and up on a hill to the left used to be an old two-story house, which is the subject of this sketch.
Now remodeled and rebuilt, this house is a palatial home of Col. Henry Sadler and his wife and daughter, Mrs. Thomas Richardson. It is indeed a privilege to visit these good folks in their lovely home. Looking at this old home in this good year of 1951, you certainly wouldn’t ever dream that it was at one time called the old Haunted House on the Hill.
To be a haunted house there must be a tragedy connected with it, so let me tell you the story of that old rock house and you can judge for yourself whether there are any grounds for it having been called haunted.
In 1887 John Graham purchased ten acres of land on the extreme north end of 107 acres. This land was a hill overlooking Gatesville to the east. Graham contracted with two of his Cowhouse neighbors who were stone cutters and contractors to build him a two-story rock home on that windswept hill, a home something like the big rock mansion of George F. Adams that graced West Gatesville along about that time.
The Cowhouse contractors quickly went to work. There was an abundance of good prairie rock in nearby pastures to be used. Several of us boys who lived in the west end of Gatesville were mighty curious about the rock house being built, so we would often walk up there and inspect it. The Cowhouse fellers seemed like they knowed what they were doing.
It weren’t long until they had all the walls up and the roof on and the floors all laid and the windows in. It was beginning to look like a home when, all at once, the fellers quit work and it just stood there with the west wind blowing through it.
It wasn’t long before I heard the reason they weren’t working any more was because Newt Blackwell, one of the contractors, had got in a squabble with a Cowhouse neighbor over a land line and had been killed in the ensuing fight. John W. Graham, the owner, failed to have the rock house completed and it stood vacant for several years.
It shore looked spooky and maybe was haunted. Some of the folks said that in the wee small hours of the night you could hear somebody hammering on stone. The Knowing Ones said it was the spirit of Newt Blackwell wanting to complete the stone house.
That’s the way the old two-story rock house on the hill where the gentle zephyrs blow got the name of the Haunted House.
After leaving the place vacant and unfinished for several years, the heirs of John W. Graham sold the land and uncompleted house to Ed Tillman, who was our first Cotton Belt Railway agent. He had the house completed and he and his family moved over there.
