Business, banking and baseball back when

Above photo, Morris Rolston, Marvin Coffee and Bugs Cross played for the Mt. Pleasant Cubs, a sandlot semipro baseball club playing for tips from fans until August Hoffmann decided to bankroll the team and build a stadium.

From the East Texas Journal, July 2020

By Hudson Old, Journal Publisher

MT. PLEASANT, TEXAS – August C. Hoffmann spoke English with a German accent. Seven years after the town’s 1900 incorporation, it was either August or some earlier mix of Hoffmanns who opened Hoffmann Heading Mill and began sawing White Oak bottom timber into lumber for wooden barrels. He built a railroad spur off the long-gone Mt. Pleasant to Paris (Ma & Pa) railroad into the bottom to bring timber to town by the car load.
Before the 1936 oil strike at Talco caused construction of the also long-gone oil refinery, Hoffmann’s mill was the region’s biggest industry. August Hoffmann made money and invested.
In 1913 he was a charter member of Guaranty Bank’s board.
In 1929 he headed up a Chamber of Commerce consortium of businessmen who sold $80,000 in capital stock to build a powder milk processing plant, a vision to keep an agrarian economy afloat after King Cotton died. Later sold to Borden Milk, the once thriving plant closed and became a warehouse for airplane parts.
August Hoffmann worked with breeders to upgrade dairy cattle across the county, wrote historian R.L. Jurney.
He said the combination of dairy business and the milk plant kept both the farmers who drove the economy and the merchants depending on them afloat through the World War II era.
August’s son, Gus, was flying airplanes when most kids his age were still dreaming of driving a car. His father opened the town’s first landing strip.
“In those days,” once-upon-a-ball player named Cecil Campbell said in a 1995 interview, “every town had a sort of pick-up semipro baseball team willing to play for whatever money fans in the bleachers could collect when they passed the hat.”
Gus Hoffmann was a whale of a ball player.
So August Hoffmann hired Morris Rolston – later to become an attorney and district judge – as a player-manager, plugged a cash infusion into the Mt. Pleasant Cubs, and coordinated construction of Fair Park on the county fair grounds.
Its covered grand stands made the park a landmark and Mt. Pleasant a baseball town, said the late W.T. Ballard, who remembered teams from across the South coming here to face the Cubs. Trains brought crowds when Satchel Page and the Kansas City Monarchs came to town for an exhibition game.
In 1934, the Cubs won the state semi-pro tournament at Waco, advancing to the national tournament in Denver.
Mr. Ballard remembered crowds gathering at the telegraph office to get real-time updates.
Gus Hoffmann the baseball player named the third August Hoffmann after Johnny Morrow, a team mate from the glory days.
August Johnny Hoffmann got here in time to remember “Uncle Babe” Hoffmann, who lived alone in a little house down by the milk plant, east of the tracks and the train depot.
“He didn’t speak English,” Johnny Hoffmann said. “Saturdays daddy always wanted me to hunt him down, which wasn’t hard. He’d sit in the back of the Texan Theater all day and watch Gene Autry.”
The old East Side where Johnny grew up was an interesting place, close to town, but it still often took most of an afternoon to hunt down Uncle Babe at the theater.
“By the time you stopped by the hideout in the woods to smoke some of the cigarettes you stole from your daddy’s pack, then hid in the old WPA ditch to chunk rocks at cars, walked the tracks and looked in the cars for hoboes, it took a while to get to town.”
Johnny Hoffmann’s not quite sure how many of the original German Hoffmanns landed and passed through Mt. Pleasant. August “Pa” Hoffmann bought out the early ones at the heading mill and whoever the others might have been, besides Uncle Babe, he doesn’t remember.