F-Troop Marker Dedication, Mineral Wells, TX, October 14, 1972
32
the elimination of most of the enemy
opposition.”
At Camp Wolters in June, on the
25th day, a general presented the
Medal to Lieutenant Knight’s father,
Roy Knight. Jack is buried in a ceme-
tery named for his great-grandfather,
Holders Memorial Chapel Cemetery
near Cool, not far from where he
played as a boy and grew into the
man whose selfless sense of duty
exacted the ultimate sacrifice.
ADELL
Alexander Sanger thought his
daughter the prettiest gal in late
19th-century Dallas; we’re talking
1890. Likely because of his status as
a ”Big D” merchant — he owned the
Sanger Mercantile Company in Dallas
— his pretty girl was the namesake
of a pretty little community here in
Parker County: Adell.
Settlement of the site, now
dissected by Farm Road 1885 some
12 miles northwest of Weatherford,
began after the harrowing days of
Indian attacks which ended in the
1870s after “Bad Hand” Mackenzie
(Gen. Ranald Slidell Mackenzie)
broke the back of indigenous resis-
tance, forcing Comanches, Kiowas
and others to walk the “White Man’s
Road.”
By the late 1880s, Native
Americans were well into their “new
life” and for the most part bitterly
disappointed by its stark realities.
Seeking arable land and adequate
acreage for ranching, white settlers
trickled into the Adell vicinity in the
late 1880s, J.R. Fondren among them.
In 1889, Fondren founded the first
business, a grocery store. Pretty Adell
came into the picture the next year
when Bentley B. Barton arrived from
Denton County and figured there
were enough folks scattered about
to petition the government for a post
office. As the story goes (at least one
of them), Barton knew Sanger, who
suggested the name Adell. With the
Postal Service finding no fault with
the name, in 1890 mail service began
with Barton as postmaster and contin-
ued through May 14, 1904, when
the government, that entity which
can both “giveth and taketh away,”
decided it inexpedient to deliver mail
to the small community and diverted
it to the office at nearby Garner.
Barton held the postal post four years.
When the office closed, Orvil P.