Mary Jane Gentry

Most people conjure up two images when they think of the historical industries of Texas: cattle and oil. Yet Texas was once a significant producer of bituminous coal, and from the 1880s until the 1930s, Thurber, Texas, a wholly-owned company town about halfway between Fort Worth and Abilene, was the state’s leading producer. Once the largest, most cosmopolitan city between Fort Worth and El Paso, home to about ten thousand people from more than a dozen nations at its height, Thurber is now one of the best known ghost towns in the state. Mary Jane Gentry (1912-1996) wrote the first complete history of the town’s rise and fall in her 1946 master’s thesis, entitled “Thurber: The Life and Death of a Texas Town,” under the supervision of famed historian Walter Prescott Webb of the University of Texas. Available to most researchers only as a multi-generation photocopy, her thesis has been essential reading for those studying coal mining, labor history, and company towns in Texas. Now published for the first time, introduced and edited by industrial historian and authority on Texas ghost towns T. Lindsay Baker, The Birth of a Texas Ghost Town offers a unique and interesting glimpse into a now vanished coal town.

Gentry’s text shines with a love of her subject, the people and history of the town of her youth. Coupled with her lucid writing style, this makes her narrative a quick, entertaining read. The editor’s introduction and preface gives a detailed history of Gentry’s life, thesis, and work as a Texas high school teacher, and places her work in its historical context. The editor chose not to make any substantive changes or annotations to the text, though coal company records unavailable to Gentry have superseded some of her information and out of date facts are allowed to stand without annotation or comment. Readers may also find some 1940s idioms quaint, or stumble over words like “negro” and “colored” in the text. These are minor quibbles. The Birth of a Texas Ghost Town is an essential introduction to the history of bituminous coal mining in Texas, and wonderfully details the birth and death of a vibrant and important company town.… (mais)