Milam County Historical Commission
Milam County, Texas

Sandow is a community about 7 miles southwest of Rockdale in Milam County.

Prior to being named Sandow it was called Millerton and before that Freezeout.

Sandow was a Prussian-born strongman who was being promoted by Florenz Ziegfeld in his

famous Ziegfeld Follies.

Presumably, those who chose the name wanted to project strength and vigor.

Eugen Sandow is considered both the father of modern body building AND the namesake of

Sandow, Texas,

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Sandow was born in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) on April 2, 1867, to a

German father and a Russian mother. His family were Lutherans and wanted him to become a

Lutheran minister. He left Prussia in 1885 to avoid military service and traveled

throughout Europe, becoming a circus athlete and adopting Eugen Sandow as his stage name.

In Brussels he visited the gym of a fellow strongman, Ludwig Durlacher, better known

under his stage name "Professor Attila". Durlacher recognized Sandow's potential,

mentored and in 1889 encouraged him to travel to London and take part in a strongmen

competition. Sandow handily beat the reigning champion and won instant fame and

recognition for his strength. This impetus launched him on his career as an athletic

superstar. Soon he was receiving requests from all over Britain for performances. For the

next four years, Sandow refined his technique and crafted it into popular entertainment

with posing and incredible feats of strength.

Florenz Ziegfeld wanted to display Sandow at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in

Chicago, but Ziegfeld knew that Maurice Grau had Sandow under a contract. Grau wanted

$1,000 a week. Ziegfeld could not guarantee that much but agreed to pay 10 percent of the

gross receipts.

Ziegfeld found that the audience was more fascinated by Sandow's bulging muscles than by

the amount of weight he was lifting, so Ziegfeld had Sandow perform poses which he dubbed

"muscle display performances"... and the legendary strongman added these displays in

addition to performing his feats of strength with barbells. He added chain-around-the-

chest breaking and other colorful displays to Sandow's routine. Sandow quickly became

Ziegfeld's first star.

In 1894, Sandow featured in a short film series by the Edison Studios. The film was of

only part of the show and features him flexing his muscles rather than performing any

feats of physical strength.

While the content of the film reflects the audience attention being primarily focused on

his appearance, it made use of the unique capacities of the new medium. Film theorists

have attributed the appeal being the striking image of a detailed image moving in

synchrony, much like the example of the Lumière brothers' Repas de bébé where audiences

were reportedly more impressed by the movement of trees swaying in the background than

the events taking place in the foreground. In 1894, he also appeared in a short

Kinetoscope film that was part of the first commercial motion picture exhibition in

history.

In April of that same year Sandow gave one of his "muscle display performances" at the

1894 California Mid-Winter International Exposition in Golden Gate Park at the "Vienna

Prater" Theater.

While he was on tour in America, Sandow made a brief return to England to marry Blanche

Brooks, a girl from Manchester. Soon, due to stress and ill health he returned

permanently to recuperate.

He was soon back on his feet, and opened the first of his Institutes of Physical Culture,

where he taught methods of exercise, dietary habits and successful weight training. His

ideas on physical fitness were novel at the time and had a tremendous impact. The Sandow

Institute was an early gymnasium that was open to the public for exercise. In 1898 he

also founded a monthly periodical, originally named Physical Culture and subsequently

named Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture that was dedicated to all aspects of physical

culture. This was accompanied by a series of books published between 1897 and 1904 - the

last of which coined the term 'bodybuilding' in the title (as "body-building").

He worked hard at improving exercise equipment, and invented various devices such as

rubber strands for stretching and spring-grip dumbbells to exercise the wrists. In 1900

William Bankier wrote Ideal Physical Culture in which he challenged Sandow to a contest

in weightlifting, wrestling, running and jumping. When Sandow did not accept his

challenge Bankier called him a coward, a charlatan and a liar.

In 1901, Sandow organized the world’s first major bodybuilding competition in London's

Royal Albert Hall. The venue was so full that people were turned away at the door. The

three judges presiding over the contest were Sir Charles Lawes the sculptor, Sir Arthur

Conan Doyle the author and Sandow himself.

He travelled all around the world on tours to countries as varied as South Africa, India,

Japan, Australia, New Zealand. At his own expense, from 1909 he provided training for

would-be recruits to the Territorial Army, to bring them up to entrance fitness

standards, and did the same for volunteers for active service in World War I.

He was even designated special instructor in physical culture to King George V, who had

followed his teachings, in 1911.

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Sandow's resemblance to the physiques found on classical Greek and Roman sculpture was no

accident, as he measured the statues in museums and helped to develop "The Grecian Ideal"

as a formula for the "perfect physique." Sandow built his physique to the exact

proportions of his Grecian Ideal, and is considered the father of modern bodybuilding, as

one of the first athletes to intentionally develop his musculature to predetermined

dimensions. In his books Strength and How to Obtain It and Sandow's System of Physical

Training, Sandow laid out specific prescriptions of weights and repetitions in order to

achieve his ideal proportions.

Personal life:

Sandow married Blanche Brooks 1896, with whom he had two daughters, Helen and Lorraine.

He was unfaithful to her later in marriage, and she refused to mark his grave.

Death:

Sandow died at his home, 61 Holland Park Avenue, Kensington, London on October 14, 1925,

of what newspapers announced as a brain hemorrhage at age 58. It was allegedly brought on

after straining himself, without assistance, to lift his car out of a ditch after a road

accident two or three years earlier.

However, without autopsy, his death was certified as due to aortic aneurysm, which his

biographer in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states may have been syphilitic

in origin.

He was buried in an unmarked grave in Putney Vale Cemetery at the request of his wife,

Blanche. In 2002, a gravestone and black marble plaque was added by Sandow admirer and

author Thomas Manly. The inscription (in gold letters) read "Eugen Sandow, 1867–1925 the

Father of Bodybuilding."

In 2008, the grave was purchased by Chris Davies, Sandow's great-great-grandson. Manly's

items were replaced for the anniversary of Eugen Sandow's birth that year and a new

monument, a one-and-a-half-ton natural pink sandstone monolith was put in its place. The

stone, simply inscribed "SANDOW" (written vertically), is a reference to the ancient

Greek funerary monuments called steles.

Sandow was befriended by King George V, Thomas Edison, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and

classical pianist Martinus Sieveking. He was portrayed by the actor Nat Pendleton in the

Academy Award-winning film The Great Ziegfeld (1936). In a third season episode of The

Venture Bros. titled "ORB," Sandow was portrayed as a bodyguard of the main characters'

great-great-grandfather.

In the One Step Beyond episode "Earthquake", in which a hotel bellboy predicts the 1906

San Francisco earthquake just a few hours before it hit, Sandow (as well as Caruso) is

mentioned as 'a guest in the hotel'.

As recognition of his contribution to the sport of bodybuilding, a bronze statue of

Sandow sculpted by Frederick Pomeroy has been presented to the winner of the Mr. Olympia

contest, a major professional bodybuilding competition sponsored by the International

Federation of Bodybuilders, since 1977. This statue is simply known as "The Sandow".

In professional wrestling, Wilhelm Baumann of the Gold Dust Trio would adopt his ring

name as Billy Sandow in honor of Sandow. Nearly a century later, current WWE superstar

Damien Sandow would adopt his ring name in honor of Billy Sandow and, indirectly, Eugen

Sandow as well. This is not unlike one of Sandow's contemporaries, Stanislaus Zbyszko,

whose name would later be adopted by Lawrence Whistler as a tribute to Zbyszko and became

more well known as Larry Zbyszko.

In 2013, Eugen Sandow was portrayed by the Canadian culturist Dave Simard in the film

Louis Cyr.

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Born: Friederich Wilhelm Müller - April 2, 1867 - Königsberg, Kingdom of Prussia

Died: October 14, 1925 (aged 58) - London

Resting place: Putney Vale Cemetery

Other names: Eugene Sandow

Known for Bodybuilding

Spouse: Blanche Brooks

Children Helen and Lorraine Sandow

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Sandow

*****

Thanks to Dolores Sonntag for this information!

This is
Eugen Sandow,
the man for whom Sandow, Texas
was named.

How Did Sandow, TX Get its Name
Wikpedia

Thanks to Dolores Sonntag for this info