Bevers / Huppler / Lena Huppler / McElhany

Day Twenty-Six: Alice to Raymondville, Texas

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November 7, 2019

Retracing Lena Huppler Bevers’ Travel Log

Fri. Nov. 7.

Left San Diego and drove for miles through timber.  Stayed all night on the praire in the car. – Lena Bevers

November 7, 1919 was a very similar day for the Bevers family as the day before.  They continued their drive south through timber.  For my mother and I, the landscape today was also similar to yesterday’s: fields and pastures with patches of woods, especially at the edges of the fields and along the highway.

A grove at a roadside park could be similar to the type of timber that the Bevers family traveled through. (Photograph by MRW November 7, 2019)

From Alice, Texas there are two routes that we could take to get to Raymondville.  U. S. Highway 281 runs south from Alice to Linn, then Highway 186 goes east to Raymondville. An alternative route would be driving to Kingsville, then take U. S. Highway 77 south to Raymondville.  On a 1924 Rand McNally map there are roads at the location of U. S. Hwy 281 and Highway 186.1  There is also a road to Kingsville, but about 15 miles south of Kingsville the road doesn’t extend to Raymondville.  Therefore, the highways we drove today were U. S. Highway 281 and Highway 186.

At Falfurrias, we decided to visit the Heritage Museum.  One picture on the display wall seems to represent what Herbert was doing in Texas.

A photograph of a real estate office in Falfurrias, Texas in 1920, hanging in the Falfurrias Heritage Museum. (Photograph by MRW November 7, 2019)

In Florence Bevers’ travel log, in the entry for November 8, 1919, she states that they had 50 miles to drive to get to Raymondville.2  Based on this statement, I propose that the Bevers and McElhanys spent the night in the vicinity of Encino or Rachal, Texas.  The place where my mother and I stopped for a picnic lunch at a roadside park is close to the point where Lena wrote that they spent the night on the prairie in their cars.

A beautiful roadside park in the center median of U. S. Highway 291, south of Falfurrias, Texas (Photograph by MRW November 7, 2019)

Instead of staying on the prairie, my mother and I continued south to Raymondville.  After 26 days of traveling, I drove into Raymondville at 1:50 PM.  Our first stop was at the Register of Deeds for Willacy County, where we searched the deed indexes to locate a transaction by Herbert purchasing property in the Raymondville area.  We were not successful in finding Herbert’s deed, nor did we find one for McElhany.  But we did find the deed of Frederick Kammrath, who in 1919 was Florence’s future father-in-law.  After our research at the Register of Deeds, we checked into our motel about 4:00 PM.

Notes:

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