Cotton Barge - Spear

​Circa 1910: In the early years of the 20th Century Cotton barges brought cargo from farms in the interior of Texas to market in Houston with its rail network connecting to all of America. The Union Compress and Warehouse had a wharf on the north shore of Buffalo Bayou a few hundred yards east of a steel draw bridge that would one day be the McKee Street bridge.
10 April 2017: The area where the Union Compress warehouses and wharf once lay is now overgrown with underbrush and trees, and even the foundations have been gouged out to bare earth. Recreational runners and bikers along the trail which snakes its way along the north shore have few hints of the once busy workplace. The south shore of the bayou is mostly inaccessible, congested with anastamosing overpasses and ramps for Interstate 69. For a view of this wharf area from the south shore of Buffalo Bayou, see Cotton Barge - Grombach. ​
Postmarked: [illegible]; Ft. [Worth? perhaps a Railroad cancellation]
Stamp: [Removed]

To: Mrs. E. L. Spear
Dickinson St.
Amherst, Mass. 

Message: Hot, is no name for it to day. I don’t feel like wearing any clothes at all.
Bob & Bess.
Edward L. Spear and Bessie Clara Ashcraft were married 31 December 1891, and settled into a life in Amherst, MA making their home at #8 Dickinson St. for most of the early 20th century. Edward made a living as a carpenter, a building contractor, and as an older citizen, the Amherst Town assessor. They had two sons, Irving (1894), and John W. (1903). Edward’s father was Lewis J. Spear (1826-1896) and his mother was Mary A. Smallidge (1830-1881). Bessie Clara Ashcraft was the daughter of John A. Ashcraft (1843-1878) and Martha Ann Wright (1842- 1921). All these four parents are buried in West Cemetery in Amherst, so also is perhaps Amherst's most famous literati, the reclusive Emily Dickinson.

She was an obscure figure in her own lifetime, living at "The Homestead" nearly all of her life, dying there in 1886 at the age of 55. Edward and Bessie Clara lived less than a block away from "The Homestead" as early as 1900, and Emily Dickinson would certainly be known to them from their youth. When she died, Edward would have been 17 and Bessie 15, and their eccentric neighbor became legendary after her sister Lavinia Dickinson Norcross found Emily's poems and began to publish them in 1890.

​Edward Spear died in 1944 and Bessie died in 1944. Their burial records have not been located in West Cemetery or elsewhere in Hampshire County, MA. The authors of the postcard, "Bob and Bess" cannot be identified with available records.​ The brisk informality of the message suggests they were well acquainted, and probably either relatives or neighbors from Amherst.