Tuesday, April 23, 2024
(Editor’s note: Material for the following article was gathered from the Hood County News, “granbury” magazine and Thomas T. Ewell’s “History of Hood County.”)
On a winter night in 1870 Ashley Crockett’s father suggested his son go to the newspaper in Weatherford and learn to be a printer.
The newspaper owner put the 12-year-old boy to work, but Ashley had no place to live.
The owner gave him a buffalo robe for cover and let him sleep in a tiny lean-to barn behind the owner’s cabin.
In later years Ashley, grandson of the Alamo hero, told how on some nights he could hear the Indians slipping through the settlement stealing horses.
Ashley learned the trade so well that he spent 80 years publishing and working in Hood County newspapers.
He was 97 when he died on May 31, 1954.
Ashley’s grandson, Kenneth Hendricks, said it wasn’t until near of end of Ashley’s life that he really enjoyed being the grandson of the Alamo hero.
State Sen. A.B. Crawford, who bought the Hood County Tablet from Ashley, got him appointed honorary assistant sergeant-at-arms for the Texas Senate.
Ashley lived in Austin for a year and enjoyed the fame of being Davy Crockett’s grandson as he served in the Capitol. A widower, he discovered that having a famous name attracted numerous lady admirers and invitations to dinners.
ARRIVED IN TEXAS
Robert Crockett, Davy’s son and Ashley’s father, came to Texas with his mother, Elizabeth. Ashley was the last son born to Robert’s second wife.
Ashley was an avid reader. When radio news became popular he did not listen because he believed news was not authentic until it was printed.
When W.L. Bond and E.B. Garland established Hood County’s first newspaper, the Granbury Vidette, in 1872, Ashley left school and went to work for the new paper setting type by hand.
He would still be hand setting type when he was 90 years old and working for Crawford.
By the time Ashley was 18 he was co-editor of the Vidette, a partner at 20 and owner in 1883 at 26.
His son Harold worked with his father at the paper. At the time Harold used carbon tetrachloride to wash the ink from the pages of type after the paper was printed.
The chemical slowly poisoned the boy. He was only 20 when he died. At the time doctors did not know what made the boy ill.
When Ashley became owner in 1883 he soon changed the paper’s name to Granbury Graphic. His reason was that “Vidette,” meaning a sentinel at an outpost, was no longer appropriate for a Granbury newspaper. Granbury was no longer an outpost on the frontier, Ashley explained in an editorial announcing the name change.
In those outpost years Crockett wrote about shootings, fights, the Mitchell-Truitt gunfight, trials and an execution.
Hood County had two newspapers from 1880 until 1946. Frank Gaston operated the Granbury News from 1888 until his death in 1930.
RIVAL PUBLISHERS
Crockett and Gaston kept a printing feud going for many years. Many readers thought they might come to blows or have a shooting.
Crockett was born with a film over one eye, limiting his vision to one eye.
Gaston named Crockett “blank ace.”
Because Gaston wrote on many subjects, Crockett tagged Gaston with “Gassie.”
Twenty-five years of Graphic ownership was enough for Crockett. He sold the paper and moved his family to Glen Rose.
There he and a forgotten partner started the Glen Rose Herald in 1907 but returned to Granbury in 1913 and became an assistant postmaster.
In 1919 he founded the Tolar Tablet, a weekly for the growing community. Back in Granbury, Crockett changed the paper name to the Hood County Tablet.
With the collapse of cotton prices after World War I, followed by the Great Depression and drought, the veteran publisher hung on through a barter system. His grandson, Hendricks, remembered when the kids went to the show they signed a ticket, and the theater owner traded those for ad space in the paper. It was done the same way in all the different stores.
In 1937, after many deadlines and hard work, the 77-year-old man sold the paper to A.B. and Norma Crawford. They would buy the Granbury News in 1945 and merge the two into the Hood County News-Tablet.
Crockett lived through the rough frontier years of gunfights, Indian raids, fence cuttings, cattle and horse stealing, whiskey stills and night lynchings.
He never lost his belief in the town and area that went from pioneer settlers to prosperous ranching and farming, to Depression ruin and post-war prosperity.
editor@hcnews.com | 817-573-7066, ext. 245
