It’s Worth Telling
The stories behind the stories...
The Man Who Gave Texas The Stars
Editor’s note: The Wimberley View is excited to debut a new weekly column, “It’s Worth Telling: the stories behind the stories,” by writers from Texas and beyond. You’ll recognize many of the contributors, and some may be new to you. Their voices will entertain you on a variety of topics like Texana, regional cuisine, thought-provoking mysteries and the environment, including the wonders of the Dark Sky. You’ll read book reviews, stories about Texas State Parks, and learn the ins and outs of music, art, culture and history in the Wimberley Valley. Sit back and enjoy. These stories are worth savoring.
Occasionally, I like to reflect upon some great gifts that have benefited Texas. Let me tell you about three such gifts that led to a priceless fourth.
In 1926, a rich bachelor banker died in Paris, Texas. His estate was worth about 1.2 million dollars. Today, that would be about $17 million, enough to buy a Whataburger for everybody in Dallas and Houston, with enough left over to What-a-size the fries. In his will, the banker left 90 percent of his money to The University of Texas to buy a telescope and build an observatory. The banker’s name was William Johnson Mc-Donald.
Well, as you might expect, Mr. McDonald’s heirs didn’t like him leaving all that money for a telescope. They believed that anyone who would do such a thing must not have all the pickets in his fence. So they sued.
Fortunately, Mr. Mc-Donald had shared his telescope dream with his barber. He said that astronomy was a young science of great potential, and he hoped that, “one day a telescope would be built that would allow astronomers to see even the gold-plated streets of heaven.” In this case, the jury believed that his wish was the product of a sane mind.
Once UT had the money, they had to go shopping for a mountain to put the observatory on. That must have been fun. Mountain shopping has got to be the coolest thing a person could ever get to do. Lucky for the UT astronomers, they were located in a state that had West Texas in it, with some of the finest stargazing potential in North America. After driving several thousand miles around the region, inspecting various sites for altitude, dark skies, cloudless nights and poor prospects of rain, they found what they were looking for near Fort Davis. It had no official name, but the locals called it Flat Top Mountain. It was part of a ranch perfectly named for that region: The U up and U down Ranch. You can’t make this stuff up.
President Harry Benedict of UT wrote a letter to the owner of that mountain, Mrs. Violet McIvor. He told her of McDonald’s gift and of the university’s great need for a mountain to put the observatory on. Benedict wrote that her mountain was ideally suited for such an observatory. He asked her if she might consider giving her mountain to science.
I think Violet surprised him when she did just that. She wrote back almost immediately and gave UT the entire top of the mountain, 200 acres. She also gave UT the land to build a road to the summit. The resulting highway, Spur 78, is to this day the highest highway in Texas.
The mountain was officially named Mt. Locke after Violet’s grandfather, G.S. Locke, from whom she had inherited it. Violet wrote to UT and said she was delighted “to have her grandfather’s name perpetuated in the Davis Mountains.” And there is a kind of divine synchronicity here in the fact that G. S. Locke was a descendant of the great British empiricist John Locke. And you know the scientific motto of the empiricists was pretty much, “Go and look.”
As gifts inspire gifts, only five months after Violet gave her mountain to UT, the estate of longtime Fort Davis Judge Edwin H. Fowlkes, donated the adjoining mountain, known as Little Flat Top and that mountain was formally named Fowlkes Mountain in his honor.
Three gifts to Texas. An observatory and two mountains. These collectively gave us a fourth gift: one of the world’s leading centers of astronomical research - in fact, these gifts gave us the stars themselves, just as William Johnson McDonald predicted.
W. F. Strong broadcasts ‘Stories from Texas’ and other commentaries bi-weekly on Texas Standard’s National Public Radio network out of Austin. He is a Professor of Communication and Culture at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
“William Johnson Mcdonald: The Man Who Gave Texas the Stars” was first aired on Texas Standard Radio in 2015 and published in ‘Stories from Texas: some of them are true’ in 2018. Copyright W.F. Strong. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.
