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Lone Star Church inside / Wes Nations
the bottom of the pool. After farms were put in cultiva-
tion, the sand washed into the pool and it eventually
disappeared. It was the head of Clear Fork of the Trin-
ity River.”
Though Poolville was not officially founded until
the early 1880s, the pool put the area on the map,
and around 1870 a man named Jim Taylor opened a
saloon and general store. People settled there and the
town began to take root. M.L. Scott opened a sawmill
on the east side of the pool and about 1879, A.H.
“Major” Dunn donated land for a town site. Local
children had been learning their lessons in a log farm-
house near the pool, but in 1879 settlers erected a
new building in town to serve as school and church.
In 1883, Poolville became a “real” town and had
its very own post office.
In 1920, Poolville’s population was estimated at
500; the Great Depression whittled those numbers
down. By 1950, only 350 souls called the town home.
There were 230 in 1980 and in 1990. But by the
2000s, Poolville began to grow, reaching a population
of 520.
At the junction of Farm Roads 3107 and 920, today
The gruesome scene walloped the searchers with an iron
fist. Many were so utterly disturbed that they could not contin-
ue the search for little Fremont Blackwell, who they surmised
had met a similar fate. Some of the riders followed a trail that
looped back up to the Red River, but there the search ended.
After nearly a year of captivity in Kansas, 7-year-old
Fremont “went native” — he embraced his captor’s ways and
speech, learned to loose arrows with sufficient accuracy and
was adopted into the tribe. So engrossing was the “Indianiza-
tion” of the boy that by the time a white trader ransomed him,
Fremont could not remember his own name. Queried about
his family, he could only recall that his father’s name was
Upton and that he lived near Weatherford in Texas. At length,
Fremont reunited with his family, but was not and would
never be again the same Parker County boy who’d left out on
the back of a Comanche pony a year before.
“Considering himself an Indian,” wrote Marshall, “Fremont,
like most boy captives, preferred the Comanche tongue and
attempted to establish contact with his adopted Comanche
people by going to Gourdneck Creek and signaling with calls
resembling the hoot of an owl and the howl of a wolf. He
sometimes threatened to return to the Comanches. When he
became angry with the other Blackwell children he shot them
with bow and blunt-tipped arrows until they were ‘blue all
over.’”
Fremont told his family that the Comanches killed Tommy
because he cried. Like the cowbell tossed out on the trail, the
child’s shrill cries put the party at risk of being discovered. It
was a risk they addressed with sudden and awful brutality.
Many such tales could be told of the Slipdown Mountain
area where Poolville grew up around a spring-fed pool on
the Clear Fork of the Trinity River. The pool for which the
town was named was located about a half-mile northeast of
the town square and was well known and often visited by
drovers and their thirsty herds. According to historictexas.net,
“The pool was never dry, and it served as a wash place for
the pioneer women. Big herds of cattle watered there on their
way to West Texas and New Mexico, as did herds from South
Texas as they went up the trail to northern markets. The pool
was 200 yards long, running six inches deep at the east end
and six to eight feet on the west. It was fed by cold springs in
76
Douible Dose of History: Lone Star Church standing and then razed / Wes Nations
Continued on page 94