our history: PEASTER
Peaster, the birthplace of Conan creator
By MEL W RHODES
I
76
n the Eighteen-seventies, Parker County was a
place of increasing stabilization and growth.
Indian raids were coming to an end, the last
occurring in 1874, and thousands of settlers
flooded the area. By 1880, nearly 16,000 people
called the county home, a handful of them living
in a tiny community called Peaster.
Located nine miles northwest of Weatherford,
Peaster began with a man named Peaster,
Georgia-born H.H. Peaster, who in the 1870s
bought 160 acres and built a house. The commu-
nity that sprang up around him was first called
Freemont, then, beginning in 1885, Peasterville.
At some point folks dropped the “ville.”
Postal service came to the farming community
in 1883 with a Dr. Howard serving as the first
postmaster. The real mailman, Josh Freeman,
walked to Weatherford once a week for the mail
intended for the 50 or so families of Peaster. He
earned 50¢ a trip for his trouble, and likely a few
blisters.
In 1891, Peaster and Tom Hunt donated
an acre apiece for a college, a two-story frame
building where book-learning enlightened a new
generation. By the mid-1890s, the settlement of
some 100 people had three churches, a steam
gin and grist mill, and six other assorted busi-
nesses.
Perhaps Peaster’s most famous resident
(though his residency was very short-lived) was
writer Robert E. Howard, creator of the charac-
ter “Conan the Barbarian.” Although he wrote
in various genres, he is regarded as the father
of the “Sword and Sorcery” sub-genre — slash-
ing swords, rippling muscles and fantasy-fueled
worlds where he addressed the issues of enemies
and evil he felt oppressed by his whole life.
His parents, Dr. Issac Mordecai Howard and
wife Hester Jane, were living on Dark Valley
Creek in Palo Pinto County during her preg-
nancy and moved to Peaster for better access
to medical care. Robert E. Howard’s short but
meteoric life began Jan. 22, 1906. In 1908,
Howard moved the family to Seminole, begin-
ning a nomadic life that found the Howards in
cowtowns and boomtowns across North Texas.
These included Bronte in 1909, Poteet in 1910,
Oran in 1912, Wichita Falls in 1913, Bagwell in
1913, Cross Cut in 1915, Burkett in 1917, and
finally, in 1919, Cross Plains, where, except for a
year spent in Brownwood completing his senior
year of high school, Robert spent the rest of his
life.
The year after the Howards settled in Cross Plains, the oil
boom arrived. Robert Howard hated the results. He later wrote in
a letter to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, summer 1931,
“I’ll say one thing about an oil boom: it will teach a kid that life’s
a pretty rotten thing about as quick as anything I can think of.”
The population jumped from 1,500 people to 10,000. The sleepy
town woke to a storm of frenzied activity and escalating chicanery
and crime.
His nomadic rearing in the backwaters of early 20th-century
Texas formed the author’s character and apparently his distaste
for life itself. He often voiced a desire to die young and report-
edly suffered from a phobia of aging and old age. He developed
a love of poetry and literature under his doting mother’s influ-
ence. But through his physician father he peered into the too-real
world of injury and violence. Farm and oil field accidents, some
horrific, were common. This and the fact he lived in a time when
one could still hear “firsthand tales of gunfights, lynchings, feuds
and Indian raids” caused him to develop a “distinctly Texan, hard-
boiled outlook on the world.” The worlds he created in his fiction
were violent and populated by the young and vigorous.
Robert E. Howard