Well, I’m not sure if Annie and that farmer were doing any “fancy dancing” at their dance last month, but there was certainly a lot of fancy dancing going on at SPJST Lodge 88 in Houston! I’ll speak about that fancy dance shortly, but I first want to thank everyone for the comments and compliments on last month’s column.
Editor’s note: for simplicity, all references to peoples originating from the Moravian, Bohemian, Silesian areas of the Austrian- Hungarian Empire in Central Europe will be referred to as Czechs, regardless of the time period.
It’s festival time in Burton,Texas, time for the 34th annual Burton Cotton Gin Festival, Saturday, April 15th on the grounds of the Texas Cotton Gin Museum. Watch history come alive in celebration of the 1914 Burton Farmers Gin, the oldest operating cotton gin in America, with a day of family fun from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m., and it’s free!
Czech and German immigrants to Central Texas in the mid to late 1800s were impressed with the richness of the soil and the fact that it had never been tilled. This was a major selling point to their families in the old country who were trying to extract a living by growing crops on land that had been drained dry of nutrients from centuries of farming.
