say in Bullard if you stand beneath
the pecan trees south of Bullard
and turn your head slightly to the north wind, you can almost hear
the hallelujahs of an old-fashioned church revival.
It was here, on a rich piece of black East
Texas ground straddling the Cherokee
and Smith County
border, that men and women of another era fashioned a community
unlike anything we’ve seen since the early 1900s.
Burning Bush is gone today, remembered only by a grove of nut and
fruit trees and a few old wells, but in 1913 it was the dream of
375 members of a dissident Methodist church sect. It lasted less
than a decade.
In 1913, a year of revolution in the ranks of Methodism, Bullard’s
farmers watched from their front porches as a procession of strangers
moved down a dirt road leading to cotton
planter William Pitt Douglas’ old mansion.
They came to East Texas
to form a new colony, the Society of the Burning Bush, a Chicago-based
group formed a few months earlier to protest the increasing formality
of the Methodist Church.
The organization gained momentum when two wealthy businessmen, Chicago
broker D. M. Farson and Hotelman Edwin Harvey, joined the venture.
With their backing, the Society soon established additional colonies
in Louisiana, Virginia, and West Virginia. A real estate firm told
Farson that 1,520 acres were available near Bullard.
The Society offered to trade for the plantation a section of land
in Idaho, a tract of additional land only 12 miles from Chicago,
and a hotel and brickyard in Las Vegas, New Mexico. The trade was
made in February of 1912.
Several representatives of the Free Methodists soon arrived in Bullard
and a year later a chartered train brought the 375 initial colonists
The newcomers were strange, agreed Bullard’s
farm families. They stayed on the farm, labored quietly among themselves,
and seldom mixed with the townspeople.
L. B. Lynch of Bullard remembered
attending services at the Burning Bush tabernacle as a young boy.
“They rolled on the floor, they hollered a lot, and they stood on
the benches when they got religion,” he said. Some of their special
song books used in the services may be seen today in Bullard’s
Every person who joined the sect surrendered his or her earthly
possessions to a community storehouse. Everyone ate in the same
dining hall and liquor and tobacco were banned.
The colony existed largely through the sale of truck crops and fruits
from the orchards on the old plantation. But many members were from
the north and were unfamiliar with southern farming methods.
Even though they used advanced tractors, and equipment, Burning
Bush’s harvests were usually poor.
The colony tried to drill for oil before 1915, but abandoned the
project when a drilling stem broke underground.
Farson’s bond business went bad and in 1916, with its membership
standing at nearly 500, the colony found itself immersed in debts.
The Society had to purchase groceries on credit from Bullard
merchant J.L. Vanderver. Vanderver’s patience, however grew thin
and when the Society’s bill reached more than $12,000, he filed
a lawsuit against the colony and won.
The Sheriff of Smith
County seized the lands and sold them at auction on the steps
of the courthouse
on April 15, 1919. Vanderver bought the lands for $1000,00.
Most of the colonists quietly left the community, returning to the
north, many with soured memories of their experiences in East
Texas. A handfull, however, chose to remain in East
Texas, where they rented farms and later bought their own homes.
The last principal building on the old Burning Bush townsite was
torn down in 1957, leaving only the pecan orchard and a few foundations
as reminders of the Methodist experiment.
Excerpted from "The 25 Best Ghost Towns of East Texas"
Mr. Bowman’s fascination with ghost towns stems from his childhood
when his father would take the family to the site of an abandoned
logging camp where he used to work. These excerpts were from Mr.
Bowman’s 12th book on East Texas. It was also his third on Ghost
Towns. In his introduction he points out that East Texas has such
a large number of ghost towns because East Texas was once the most
populated part of the state. “Most of them,” he says; “only lasted
as long as the timber.” - Editor