"Milam County Town Answered to 3 Names" by Jeanne Williams.Temple Daily Telegram:

Milam County Town Answered to 3 Names

by Jeanne Williams - Temple Daily Telegram

April 16, 2012

ROCKDALE - When it came to names, the Milam County farming community called Millerton

wound up in the history books screaming for recognition against some big-name

competitors.

Mule skinners, for motives unclear, christened the stopover they passed through while

hauling freight from Matagorda as “Freeze-Out” even before Emil Miller won himself a

namesake town by donating land for a school in 1873.

But Millerton couldn’t compete with a company’s choice to honor the hero of the day -

German strongman Eugene Sandow - with his own village when they set up lignite mining

operations there in 1922. Millerton officially died that year, but in name only.

The community rolled on as a mining town.

Today, the name Sandow lives on in an industrial setting in Central Texas, but a

community that struggled with three names is buried forever beneath the site of Alcoa

and Luminant operations.

Although few might connect the moniker with the surname for “the father of modern

bodybuilding,” the name Sandow indentifies Luminant’s two coal-fired power plants,

Alcoa’s defunct lignite mine and the site of where three Alcoa generators burned coal

for electricity.

The town of Millerton, sometimes called Millertown, survived long enough to distinguish

itself as a Milam County unincorporated borough, but in most history books its name was

edged out by the more famous handle of Sandow.

The nickname Freeze-Out was out of the running. The Handbook of Texas On-Line mentions

Millerton as forerunner to Sandow, and identified it as a mining community on FM 1786

eight miles southwest of Rockdale in southern Milam County.

However, Mrs. Robert N. Baker’s article for the 1974-era “Rockdale Centennial - A

History of Rockdale, Texas 1874-1974” recognized the community in the order

“Millerton-Sandow” with a few paragraphs about its background and a photo of the

Millerton School, complete with a bell tower.

A trading post, quarter-mile racetrack and several saloons made up the town of

Millerton until Miller brought respectability to the village by establishing a school.

A post office opened there in 1873 under the name Millerton. It became a voting

precinct in 1874, the year Rockdale emerged as a new railroad boom town. The Millerton

Masonic Lodge No. 390 was chartered June 5, 1874, and continued until 1883.

Freeze-Out didn’t warrant a visit from U.S. Census takers, but Millerton was officially

documented in the federal 1870 headcount with more than 700 residents. Countywide,

census takers tallied 1,666 families spread through Cameron, Davilla, Maysfield, Port

Sullivan, Bryant Station, Maysfield, San Andres and Millerton. The town, however, was

not included in the 1880 census.

Emil Miller’s town was home to farmers, including field hands and their wives and

children, but was prosperous enough to support five practicing physicians: Georgia

native Samuel W. Anthony, 38; Patrick H. Johnson, 47, of Kentucky; David E. Lee, 47 of

North Carolina; Jim Richards, 27, of Virginia; and Simon B. Robinson, 46, of Virginia;

and a dentist named Patrick Johnson Jr., 21, according to 1870 census information.

Millerton’s commercial district included operations by two merchants, Henry V. Miller,

45, and William Miller, 22, who were listed as Georgia natives.

The town was served by three carpenters, John Y. Morgan, 58, of South Carolina; Samuel

Richards, 30, of Virginia; and John D. Wills, 25, of Alabama.

Resident brick mason was John McKinney, 25, of Tennessee. William A. Sewell, 43, of

Tennessee was school teacher; James Waddell, 51, of Tennessee was blacksmith; and

stockmen were Leonidas Rainy, 25 of Missouri, Andrew Roberson, 28, of Texas and James

Wiley, 21, of Tennessee, according to 1870 Census records.

Millerton’s post office closed in 1876, reopened in 1889 and permanently closed in 1891

when mail was routed through Rockdale.

In 1918, Federal Fuel Company opened a lignite mine at Millerton, shipping out coal via

the Rockdale Sandow & Southern Railroad.

McAlester Fuel Company took over lignite mining operations in 1922, renaming the town

Sandow after the famous strongman, according to the Handbook of Texas On-Line.

The Sandow lignite fueled several power plants in Texas, but natural gas put the mine

out of business in 1950. However, in 1951, Alcoa decided to open an aluminum smelter

and a three-generator power plant at Sandow. The village that struggled with three

names was overshadowed by a mammoth industrial compound and settled into a history

book/ghost town existence.

Curiously, Millerton/Freeze-Out lives on through its burial ground on Alcoa property.

Norine Holder Holman’s “170 Years of Cemetery Records in Milam County” said the

inactive and abandoned cemetery - in the true spirit of its namesakes - has answered to

four names: Freeze-Out, Sandow, Snodgrass and Millerton. But Milam County genealogical

researchers have determined that “the name is definitely Millerton” for the old

cemetery, according to Holman’s book.

The name might be Millerton, but there are no Millers’ graves identified among the 51

headstones. The earliest burial was E.D. Snodgrass, who died in 1863 while a member of

the 21st Texas Cavalry, C.S.A. He shares space with a veteran from the Texas

Revolution, Isaac B. Garner, a surveyor, 1810-1893.

jwilliams@tdtnews.com

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All credit for this article goes to
Jeanne Williams and the Temple Daily Telegram