'Cemetery All That Remains of Town Known for Its Lignite' by Clay Coppedge/Temple Daily Telegram

Cemetery All That Remains of Town Known for Its Lignite

by Clay Coppedge

Temple Daily Telegram - October 31, 2005

Other than a cemetery that doesn't even carry the name of the community, almost nothing

remains of the old mining community of Big Lump. The San Antonio Cemetery just off U.S.

Highway 79 is all that's left of what used to be Big Lump.

Big Lump was named for the big lumps of lignite that came from its mine. The community

was located near Sandy Creek on the Missouri Pacific Railroad four miles west of Milano

and about two miles east of Rockdale.

The community's namesake is a soft, brown low-grade coal, of which Milam County was

blessed in abundance. An 1867 survey showed extensive deposits in the county, and

mining commenced there some 20 years later. The amount of lignite in Texas and Milam

County was once described as 'inexhaustible.'

Railroads bought the first loads of lignite but it turned out to be poorly suited to

their purposes. Instead, people burned it in their homes. It was used in boilers for

steam-powered generators and broken down to activated carbon, which the sugar industry

used as a clarifying agent.

'Dangers are many, pleasures are few,' goes the line from the old coal mining song

'Dark As A Dungeon.' The Big Lump mine's foreman, Guy Clymore, was killed there

accidentally by a International-Great Northern switch engine in March of 1927. Another

man is said to have died there in 1900, though details of the death are sketchy at

best.

In 1913 seven miners and a mule were trapped when a mine tunnel at another mine caved

in after heavy rains flooded Sandy Creek and the creek bottom caved in from the weight

of the water. One man died in the accident. The other six men and the mule were rescued

after being trapped in the mine for six days and five nights.

From the song 'Sixteen Tons' by Tennessee Ernie Ford: 'You load 16 tons and what do you

get?

'Another day older and deeper in debt.'

Miners at Big Lump were paid 15 cents for filling a mine car with about 1,400 pounds of

lignite. Between 1910 and 1920 as many as 40-to-50 railroad cars loaded with lignite

left Rockdale every day. Lignite sold on the open market for $5 a ton.

The early-day lignite industry was at its peak about this time, and Big Lump enjoyed

its heyday.

A post office opened there in 1912. Two years later it had perhaps 400 people, a store,

a cotton gin and a Mexican Catholic church across from the International Great Northern

Railroad tracks and the Big Lump Store.

By 1924 the post office was gone and so were most of the people. Petroleum and

electricity were the new things, and Big Lump took its lumps, along with the rest of

the industry.

Lignite made a dramatic comeback in the 1950s, and Rockdale was the epicenter of its

revival. The Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) began using char produced from lignite

at a plant near Rockdale. The first metal from the Rockdale plant was produced in

October 1952.

Lignite was back, and Rockdale boomed. The town's school enrollment jumped from 728

students to more than 1,200. Rockdale writer George Sessions Perry wrote an article for

the Saturday Evening Post titled 'The Town That Rained Money' about those heady times.

Fifty years later the vast deposits of lignite proved to be not inexhaustible after

all. Alcoa will move its lignite operations to Bastrop and Lee counties, though Alcoa

remains the biggest employer in Rockdale.

After all this, the community of Big Lump lives on mostly in memory, which is how Jim

Gober came to call his business The Big Lump Flower Shop.

Gober didn't know anything about Big Lump either until he got his truck stuck in the

mud and had to walk into Rockdale for help. In describing where his truck was, someone

said, 'Oh, you're out there by Big Lump.'

'It sounded like a good name to me,' Gober said.

Because it did, the memory of Big Lump lives on, even if the lignite that inspired its

named proved to be something other than inexhaustible.

All articles from the Temple Daily Telegram are published with the permission of the
Temple Daily Telegram.
All credit for this article goes to
Clay Coppedge
and the
Temple Daily Telegram