Trail Ride Festivities Planned

BEN WHEELER—Downtown Ben Wheeler will be full of cowboys and cowgirls, horses and wagons, music and storytellers, and more on Saturday and Sunday, November 15 and 16.

Trail rides begin at 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. each day with overnight campsites available. Each ride will be about 10 miles long mostly on county roads, and is expected to take about three and a half hours, said organizer Ron Horton, who has done trail rides in Texas and Arkansas for about 35 years.

Horton is still figuring out the best routes, but expects a cloverleaf pattern that will bring the riders back into Ben Wheeler for lunch and in time for the evening activities. Riders will camp out in the park on the north side of the fire department.

Horseback riders are welcome; a few wagon seats should be available (but not guaranteed) for passengers.

Saturday’s activities also include demonstrations of Dutch oven cooking, or campfire cooking with a thick-walled, usually cast-iron pot.

Saturday night’s entertainment kicks off with a multimedia historical spotlight, "Riders of the Orphan Train," presented by Alison Moore and Phil Lancaster. The program from 7 to 8 p.m. includes original songs and music, literature, storytelling, and archival photographs that share stories of some of the more than 200,000 orphaned children relocated from New York to homes all across America from 1854 to 1929, including many in East Texas where they found homes with families needing help on the farm or in homes, or with couples who didn’t have children of their own.

November is designated as National Adoption Month, to raise awareness of the need to adopt children and youth in foster care.

Alison and Phil, who met at the Kerrville Folk Festival, were enthralled by the orphan train stories after seeing a PBS documentary about the subject.

She is an author who won the Katherine Ann Porter Prize for Fiction in 2004 and recently won a grant from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Dobie/Paisano Foundation to help complete an orphan train novel. He is a musician who was an original member of the acoustic quartet, Still on the Hill.

The free presentation is scheduled in the Firehouse Community Room, followed by live music from 8 to 10 p.m.

Ben Wheeler Development Company (BWDC), which is sponsoring the event, is returning the southern Van Zandt County community to the way it looked in 1935 and bringing new businesses, cultural attractions, and a new attitude to the area. The project will take at least three years probably longer to recapture the old-fashioned atmosphere with an even longer timeline for some projects. In a community with a thousand or so nearby residents, there will be music venues, new restaurants, new shops, a fully restored downtown park complete with gazebos, and more.

Ben Wheeler, named for the first man to carry mail into Van Zandt County, thrived during the late 1800s and early 1900s as families arrived in horse-drawn wagons, rode horses, or walked to visit, get mail, buy supplies, and sell or trade goods at one of the several general stores.

The community included churches, barbers, blacksmiths, tailors, saddle and shoe shop, several gins and mills, a bank, the Berry Resort Hotel, boarding houses, a movie theater, lumber yard, a garage with gas pumps eventually, cafes, a school, and even a college at one time called the Alamo Institute. Ben Wheeler shrank after World War II as many people left for large cities to find work.

To participate in the trail ride, call Ron Horton at (903) 567-2514.

For general information, call Jennifer McMahon at (903) 833-1070, email j.mcmahon@bwdc.net, or go to www.benwheelertx.com.