Fabled Elder Family Show elephant turns up in archives

Photo above, townsfolk at Sulphur Bluff gather for a photo with the dancers and musicians before the Elder Family Show’s last stop before moving on to Sugar Hill, Texas where they were caught up in the flu epidemic sweeping the continent in the fall of 1918.

From the East Texas Journal, July 2015

By Hudson Old, Journal Publisher

SUGAR HILL, TEXAS – Coming on a hundred years since a vaudeville-styled show with a circus tent flair arrived here, the local legend of the vanishing elephant remains a mystery.

But the story of the Canadian runaway who swam it across the Red River into Texas got a shot in the arm with a photo turning up in the Sugar Hill archives.

“My grandmother said they tried getting the elephant to load up on a ferry, but every time it set a foot aboard the deck rocked and spooked him. So George Holt rode him into the river and swam him across,” said Al Riddle, whose grandmother was part of the mix of relatives, orphans and runaways anchoring a traveling mix of singers, dancers and musicians led by Pleas Elder when the Elder Family Show came in 1918.

It was fall that year when the flu epidemic circling the globe swept across America. Two Texas counties reported cases on September 23. On October 4 it had spread to 35 counties and 77 a week later.

It swept through Sugar Hill, either catching up to or riding with the Elder Family cast. Willie Elder died. He was a son of the showman, Pleas Elder who never left after that and so the show ended here.

Some years later, George Holt, who swam the elephant across the Red River, married Morene Brownlee, an orphan born here in 1915. For most of his life he made his living with an axe, cutting timber. They had children and grandchildren and 60 years passed before the day three women came visiting, his half sisters.

Born in England, his family crossed the Atlantic to settle in Illinois where his father died. His mother re-married and they moved to Canada where his half sisters were born. There was a debate that day they came as to whether he was 14 or 17 when he left to escape conflicts with his stepfather. Their home was in a valley and the thing they remembered was watching him riding the road climbing up to the top of a hill where he turned his horse and waved, the last his family had seen of him before the sisters tracked him to Texas.

If the story of his joining the Elder Family Show at Galveston’s true, he worked his way down at least half a continent sometime before 1918. He told one story of traveling with a circus. A runaway horse charged through his tent one night, kicking him in the head as it passed. The man who tended the animals likewise tended the gash that left a scar in his head.

Three of the girls in the show were straight from the Elder family line; the fourth, Augusta Mae DeLockery was an orphaned relative, one of the two of the show girls who stayed on at Sugar Hill.

She married a widower, A.T. “Buck” Blalock, whose first wife was the daughter of Pad Harris, the patriarch of Harris Chapel. She died two days after giving birth to their fifth son.

“My grandmother stayed first to help him with his sons,” said Mr. Riddle, the son of Rose Blalock, the first child and only girl among four children born to Buck and Gussie Blalock.

At 15 Rose married a man making moonshine ‘between the creeks’ and Buck Blalock promptly showed up at his still.

“He made it plain that no daughter of his was going to be married to a moonshiner,” Mr. Riddle said. “He gave him a team of mules and 20 acres and however he made it stick, he turned him into a farmer for a while.”

With the beginning of World War II, Rose’s husband traded farming for life as a trucker, hauling munitions. Rose went with him on the truck and Mr. Riddle high tailed it to Gussie and Buck’s.

“She was a fabulous story teller,” he said. “She said Pleas elder always had a ‘professor’ of music traveling with them and that he changed professors often so that they were always learning to play new instruments and different styles of music. They were all musicians.”

Besides taking care of the elephant, George Holt played the drums.

“I’ve got a pair of drumsticks he carved,” said his grandson, Gregg Holt, a loan officer at American National Bank.

When the world was quieter, Al Riddle remembers the sound of his grandmother’s guitar wafting on the breeze.

“It was beautiful,” he said. “She’d come out on the porch on Saturday afternoons and as soon as the music began it was like ringing a community dinner bell to call up the crowd.”

In the wider community, they were known as Uncle Buck and Aunt Gussie. Mr. Riddle remembers her speaking German at times when visiting with Febert Anschutz.

“Or maybe it was Bohemian,” said Tony Anschtuz, Febert’s grandson. “When my grandfather was up in his 80’s we went down to visit his family in Lee County, east of Austin. They were Bohemians.”

Febert was working in Houston when he signed on with the show as a roustabout.

“He told stories about using the elephant to pull up the tent,” Mr. Anschutz said. “He was 20 when he started with them.”

Bennie Elder, one of the performing girls, was 12.

“They were at Sugar Hill when my grandmother turned 20 and that’s when they married,” Mr. Anschutz said.

For two generations following, Bennie Anschutz was the community midwife.

The other two daughters of Pleas and Lydia Elder married and left Sugar Hill.