By Douglas Pils
When The Battalion’s 130th birthday rolled around on Oct. 1, 2023, I did what I’ve done in many years – I posted Happy Birthday greetings.
Yes, I work at Baylor University and the students working for The Lariat are now my daily concern. But The Battalion is where I got my start. It’s where I spent nearly a decade working to ensure its survival and growth. So, my life forever will include promoting publications at two of Texas’ oldest universities.
Baylor is older than Texas A&M, but The Battalion is older than The Lariat, which will celebrate 125 years in 2025, so we’ve got a party to plan in Waco.
Back to my Oct. 1 post. My former San Antonio Express-News co-worker William Luther, a wonderful photographer and person, made a comment that sent me down the rabbit hole looking for the answer: “Would love to know what happened to the folks on that original masthead.”
He’s talking about the staff box listed just under “The Battalion” stretched across the top of Page 1. There are eight names in the box, nearly all of them with only initials for their first and middle names. That made finding them hard.
There’s a lawyer who served as a Texas legislator and judge; a Central Texas dentist; a Spanish-American War veteran who was a renowned botanist and younger brother to Texas’ only impeached governor; a prominent doctor who made a large impact at the University of Texas and in Austin; an oil field worker; a railroad engineer; and another lawyer who spent time as a Texas legislator and his great grandfather served with a Revolutionary War hero.
Missing first names made the search difficult, but the Association of Former Students’ “Find an Aggie” search tool helped a great deal. That told me if they graduated, what they studied and, in some cases, when they died.
With a first initial, last name and a date or year of death, I then used Ancestry.com to start looking for guys born around 1873 or 1874. I know I found six of the eight. I’m fairly sure of the seventh and the eighth appears lost to history.
While at Texas A&M, I often shared news of former students’ internships or jobs. That showed current students what was possible if they worked for The Battalion. The goal is to get the dream job using the skills gained from working in the basement of the Memorial Student Center.
The posts began with, “in today’s episode of ‘Where Can Working for The Battalion Help Take You’ we find” this person landing that dream job. I always felt that the word “Help” was necessary. I never wanted to assume The Battalion took anyone anywhere. You still had to do the work to get your degree and learn all of the skills needed to graduate.
So, consider this the first episode, the pilot episode if you will, of “Where Can Working for The Battalion Help Take You,” albeit 130 years late.
Ernest Lynwood Bruce
Editor-in-Chief
Born on Sept. 21, 1876, in Mineola, Texas, he graduated in 1894 with a degree in Civil Engineering. At school, he was the president of the Calliopean Literary Society, which collaborated with the Austin Literary Society to create The Battalion in the fall of 1893.
His father, Simeon Bruce, was born in Vermont, while his mother, Catherine Reeves, was from Georgia.
Bruce became a prominent lawyer in Orange, Texas, where he lived for 49 years, serving several terms in the Texas Legislature. He also was the Orange County attorney and served as special judge in the first and 128th judicial districts, according the obituary that ran in The Bryan Eagle on Jan. 5, 1949.
A little over 55 years after he helped create Texas A&M’s newspaper, the headline in the Bryan Eagle after his death read “First Editor Of A-M Battalion Dies at Orange.”
William Lee Dazey
Associate Editor: Austin
Dazey’s World War I draft card says he was born April 7, 1874, so he would have been 44 when he filled that out.
He was studying Civil Engineering like Bruce, but didn’t graduate. One of the early editions of The Battalion mentions him being a First Lieutenant in the Ross Volunteers as they were preparing to head to one of the fairs.
His father, Jasper Newton Dazey, was born in Mississippi, while his mother, Emma Evans, was from Tennessee.
Will Dazey shows up three years after The Battalion’s debut in an 1896 phone book in Fort Worth as a dental student. He ended up being a dentist with a private practice in Hillsboro, Texas. His brother Evans Dazey also was a dentist. His marriage to Adelaide McClellan was worthy of a newspaper story.
Will Dazey died on April 2, 1920, at age 46 in Dallas.
Alexander McGowen Ferguson
Associate Editor: Austin
Ferguson graduated from Texas A&M with his bachelor’s degree in Agriculture in 1894 and his master’s degree in Agriculture in 1896. He was born on Jan. 7, 1874.
His parents, James E. Ferguson and Fannie Phillips Fitzpatrick, were both from Alabama.
Two years after receiving his master’s degree, Ferguson was one of the 89 Texas Aggies fighting in the Spanish-American War in Cuba in 1898. He was a sergeant in an artillery regiment.
Four years after that, he shows up in the Cactus yearbook at the University of Texas teaching botany, which he also taught at Texas A&M.
His background in agriculture and botany led him to study at Cornell and to work at Shaw’s Botanical Gardens in St. Louis. He moved to Sherman, Texas, in 1906, and then Howe, Texas, in 1931. He operated Ferguson Seed Farms in both towns and he was considered a pioneer seed breeder.
His obituary in The Dallas Morning News on Jan. 9, 1955, said he originated three varieties of corn and two varieties of oats. He died at 81 years old at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Dallas after a short illness.
Ferguson certainly stood on his own, and it seems he stayed away from political life led by big brother James Ferguson, who was governor of Texas from 1915 to 1917. Big brother was impeached, removed from office and barred from holding the office ever again. He did serve as the first First Gentleman of Texas after helping his wife, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, win the race for governor in two different terms from 1925-27 and 1933-35.
One of Alexander Ferguson’s sons, Sam Ferguson, graduated from Texas A&M in 1943 and served as captain in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps in Europe during World War II. He founded Ferguson Industries, which designed and manufactured custom agricultural and industrial chemical process equipment, according to his obituary in 2007.
Joe Gilbert
Associate Editor: Calliopean
Gilbert graduated from Texas A&M in 1894 with a degree in Agriculture and he was Captain of the Ross Volunteers. After leaving A&M, he earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch in 1897. According to the Texas State Historical Association, he did postgraduate work in New York, Boston, Minnesota, Canada and Europe.
He was born on May 8, 1873, the son of George and Mandana Hornsby Gilbert at Hornsby Bend near Austin. He is the great grandson of Reuben Hornsby, holder of a land grant from Stephen F. Austin, also according to the Texas State Historical Association.
Gilbert went on to be a surgeon, served as the physician for the University of Texas athletic teams, founded the University of Texas Student Health Center and he was one of the founders of St. David’s Hospital in Austin. He also served at Seton Hospital in Austin. He spent some time back in Bryan as a physician for Texas A&M in 1906, but he returned to Austin in 1908. He served as director of the University of Texas student health service until he retired in 1946.
The TSHA said Gilbert was a member of the Travis County Medical Society, the Texas Medical Association, and the American Medical Association. He was a member of the State Board of Health and served on the Selective Service examining boards during both world wars.
He died when he was 78 on Oct. 11, 1951. His obituary in the Austin American on Oct. 13, 1951, breaks down all he did for the University of Texas and as a surgeon in Austin.
Alexander M. Todd
Associate Editor: Austin
It was a little difficult to find much information about A.M. Todd, who was a 1st Lieutenant in Company D and also President of the Young Men’s Christian Association, according to several editions of The Battalion from that first year.
Todd was a Civil Engineering major, but he didn’t graduate, according to the Association of Former Students’ records. There’s an Alexander M. Todd on the 1910 Census living in Corsicana, Texas, working as an oil well driller. He shows up with a WWI draft card showing a birth date of March 31, 1874, so he’s the right age to have attended Texas A&M in 1893. He also shows up in working in Oklahoma oil fields and he died in 1920.
Edward Charles Jonas
Business Manager: Austin
There wasn’t much information to be found about The Battalion’s first business manager. Jonas, who as listed as E.L. Jonas in the box, was president of the Austin Literary Society, so he was the counterpart to E.L. Bruce, who was President of the Calliopean Literary Society and editor-in-chief of The Battalion. It makes sense that one ran the editorial side, while the other ran the business side of the young publication.
Jonas, who was born on Jan. 17, 1873, graduated from A&M with a degree in Civil Engineering in 1894. He died on March 24, 1947, and his death certificate said he was a retired resident engineer from the Southern Pacific railroad company. His father, Peter Jonas, had been born in Germany.
Harry Phillip Jordan
Associate Business Manager: Calliopean
Jordan was born on Feb. 16, 1873, in Warrenton, Virginia, and he went to high school in Beaumont. He graduated from A&M with a degree in Civil Engineering in 1895. He graduated from the University of Texas law school in 1898 and married Vara Higginson 10 years later on June 8, 1908.
Jordan’s father was a noted yellow fever expert and he served as a Colonel in the Confederate Army. His great grandfather, Count Vonyard, came over with Lafayette and served as an officer under the French General in the Revolutionary War.
Jordan was 45 when he filled out his World War I draft card and he was a general practice lawyer in the Fidelity Building in Waco at the time. He served as an assistant county attorney from 1898-1903, was a Colonel in the Texas National Guard and was a member of the Texas Legislature from the 68th district.
Jordan outlived all of his fellow editorial board members of The Battalion, dying on June 7, 1965, in Waco. He was 92 years old.
L.L. Brown
Associate Business Manager: Austin
Brown is the only member of that first masthead that escapes my search. He was majoring in Agriculture, but he didn’t graduate. There’s a reference to him being a 1st Sergeant in Company C at A&M, but that’s the extent of the information about him on the Association site and in editions published by The Battalion in 1893-94.
Without a first name, searching for L.L. Brown on Ancestry provides too many hits and no one who was born in that early 1870s-time frame jumps out. The common name doesn’t help. It’s possible that someone majoring in agriculture just returned to working on his family farm somewhere in Texas.
For now, he’s lost to history. If anyone reading this might have a clue to who he might be, by all means let me know.
———————————————————-
130 years and counting
This was a fascinating exercise and it’s always fun to track down information like this. I wonder what these eight men thought of their creation as they grew older. I can imagine they were not unlike many Aggies today, lamenting that Texas A&M isn’t like it used to be and that these new kids working for The Battalion just don’t know how easy they have it compared to how it was in their day.
From the humble beginnings of two literary groups combining to gather news and prose, The Battalion has adapted throughout the years. It has gone from weekly to five times a week and back to weekly, while also producing daily content on thebatt.com, magazines and digital content on its many social media channels that exist today and whatever will come in the future.
I would hope that Bruce, Dazey, Ferguson, Gilbert, Todd, Jonas, Jordan and Brown could appreciate the many ways the publication they started has grown and set the standard for constantly coming up with new ways to gather news and prose.
I’ll leave you with a letter to the editor from the Dec. 1, 1893, edition of The Battalion, where the young staff received praise. I often admire recent staffs and current staff in the same way.
“We admire the pluck of its editors in publishing their paper among discouragements. From this, The Battalion’s first issues, we predict a far better career than its predecessor, the Journal, had.”
Over 130 years later, I’d say the “far better career” has been had and it’s still going strong.
May have missed someone in that special Battalion History Lesson that you wrote, Douglas, but thought there were Two missing early journalists.
Only noticed L. L. Brown. Who else.
Thanks Dad. Mr. Brown is the only one I couldn’t find. There are eight in the box. Alexander M. Todd was a difficult one to find, but I feel certain he’s the oil field guy.