This Day In Texas History - July 29

[joe817]

1867 – Fort Griffin was established on the right bank of the Clear Fork of the Brazos to protect settlers.

1878 - On this date in 1878, Leonard Waldo from Harvard Observatory and W.H.Pulsifer of Washington University in St Louis and other scientists from around the nation set up their equipment in Fort Worth to study the total solar eclipse which fell upon the metro area. Among the experiments being conducted was a spectroscopic observations of the changing light from the solar chromosphere. Many observers produced sketches of their observations (see below). One study estimated the height of the suns chromosphere at 524 miles. These were the first scientific studies of the sun ever conducted in Texas, and one of the first serious studies of the solar eclipse in the United States.

1926 - J. Frank Norris, the controversial minister of the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, was indicted for murder. He had been zealous in promoting prohibition, condemning gambling, and attacking the alleged teaching of evolution at Baylor University. Though he had begun the first regular radio ministry in the United States in 1920, he also openly supported the Ku Klux Klan and attacked the Catholic Church. His unrelenting criticism of Baylor, Baptist leaders, and state Baptist policies caused the Baptist General Convention to deny seats to Norris’s congregation at the meetings of 1922 and 1923. In a quarrel with Mayor H.C. Meacham, Norris shot and killed Meacham’s friend D.C. Chipps. The fiery fundamentalist was acquitted on grounds of self-defense.

1926 - Fredericksburg's original Nimitz Hotel was built on Main Street in the late 1840s or early 1850s and acquired by Charles H. Nimitz in 1855. The hotel had four rooms and a large central fireplace. The Nimitz soon gained a reputation for comfort and convenience. A number of families from Houston and Galveston spent their summers there, and among the more notable guests of the hotel were President Rutherford B. Hayes, Robert E. Lee (whose furniture Nimitz bought when Lee left Texas), Philip H. Sheridan, Horace Greeley, William Sydney Porter, the explorer Adolphus W. Greely, Ulysses S. Grant, William Rufus Shafter, Fitzhugh Lee, Earl Van Dorn and James T. Longstreet. Nimitz added the hotel's famous steamboat-shaped superstructure sometime after 1888 and finally deeded the hotel to his son, Charles, Jr., on June 6, 1906. His son and daughter-in-law sold the hotel on July 29, 1926, to a group of local men who remodeled it extensively at a cost of $125,000; they removed the ship-like superstructure and deeded the hotel to the Hotel Nimitz Company on October 13, 1926. Ownership of the hotel was transferred to the Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz Memorial Naval Museum Commission on June 15, 1970. The hotel is now the headquarters of the Admiral Nimitz State Historical Park and administered by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

1942 - On this date in 1942, Tarrant Field, later named Carswell Air Force Base opened in Fort Worth. As part of the Strategic Air Command, Carswell AFB became home to several squadrons of America's B-52 bomber fleet during the Cold War. Carswell AFB, and its successor, Naval Air Station Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base, have played a major roll in the development of Fort Worth, and in the defense of the United States.

1958 - President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The national commitment to a broad program of space exploration, including manned space flight, came in response to the Soviet Union's successful space launches, begun in 1957. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy set as a national goal the achievement of a manned landing on the moon by the end of the decade. Central to the agency's new future was the construction of a manned-space-development aggregation, including facilities in Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi. NASA also elected to build a new space-management, crew-training, and flight-control center on Clear Lake in southeastern Harris County, Texas, thanks to the efforts of Texas Congressman Albert Thomas. The Manned Space Center opened in 1963 and was officially renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center ten years later.

1961 - Oscar Fox, cowboy songwriter and hill country native, dies at age 82.

1899 - Wichita Falls was officially incorporated on July 29, 1889, and the first meeting of the town council occurred on August 21, with Mayor Otis T. Bacon presiding.

[LJM]

[budroux2w]

[USA1]

[FL450]

Always look toward to this thread
Thank you for taking the time to put this together.

[joe817]

Always look toward to this thread
Thank you for taking the time to put this together.

Thanks for the kind words FL450. They are appreciated.