Few people lived in the Neches River bottom as late as 1970. Man was noticeable only in the occasional cabin or lean-to hunting camps built on the higher river bank ground. Some of these camps belonged to locals known as the Dog People because of their hunting methods—handed down by their ancestors who had found this wilderness shortly before the Civil War—using a local-bred dog called a cur. The dog was bred for bravery, endurance, and devotion and would run its quarry until it bayed or turned back so the hunter could kill it. This type of hunting—not to be confused with sport—was a method of survival that often prevented starvation for families during the Depression years.
I. C. Eason grew up in those lean times. His oral stories of generations of Dog People come from around the campfire, from the fishing boat, in front of a pot bellied stove. In the 1970s, I. C. Eason made the decision to prove ownership to his land, which, along with most river bottom land, had never had a deed filed on it. With a lawyer he took on the big companies who wanted to cut the timber, drill for oil, lay pipelines and put up miles of power lines. All of a sudden he was in the middle of a big battle, and he soon became known as “The King of the Dog People.”
“I ain’t got nothin’—what I’ve got I’m sittin’ on it. This is my whole life. It’s mine, and nobody’s gonna take it from me, not as long as I draw breath and gun-powder burns.” —I. C. Eason
"Dog People of Caneyhead Exhibit Opens"
In The News:
The earliest settlers in Southeast Texas lived on farms, and mostly lived apart from other neighbors. They were self-sufficient, and lived off of the richness of the Big Thicket, wandering into the small hamlet of Beaumont when they needed to on trails, or by boat on the Neches River.
After Texas became a state in 1845, settlers began to pour into Texas to take advantage of free land being offered as an incentive to settle the great wilderness. With the settlers came people to seek richness from her natural resources, which in Southeast Texas was the enormous expanse of some of the best timber on earth. By 1850, transportation of goods to market required more than the early paddlewheel steamboats that plied the Neches River, and the first railroad was built, only 20 miles long. Getting the railroad into the remote timber land required a huge amount of money, and SE Texan John Henry Kirby saw a fortune to be made. He arranged wealthy financiers from the East Coast.
In this exhibit, you can visit a reproduction of Silsbee's 1900 depot and feel what it was like to travel by train back then. In the second part of this exhibit located in the upper gallery, you can see how the railroad was cut through the wilderness, building the towns along the way that are still there today.
See pictures of old steam locomotives that worked in this area and learn how the enormous trees were felled, and dragged to the train by great oxen or mule teams, and then lifted on the train cars by a steam mechanism. See relics of old Santa Fe and of the workers who made their living on the railroad.
In the late 1800's to early 1900's, almost every little town (and big ones) had a bottling plant to make and bottle soft drinks. Silsbee had a bottling plant in the same building as the Ice House as early as 1909. Some towns had the license to bottle Dr Pepper, invented in Waco, TX, and Coke (Coka Cola) created in Atlanta, Georgia. The bottles were hand blown and imported from the East coast of the US, and had the name of the town the soft drink was bottled in--so each town had its own bottle. For towns that did not have the Coke or Dr Pepper contract, they made different flavors of soda, or purchased the "syrup" in bottles. Popular flavors were sassafras, grape, orange, and cherry. The bottling plant had large machines where they made their own carbonated water. Then the bottling machine was used to pipe carbonated water into the bottle, and the syrup (flavoring) was gravity fed from a big crock hanging at the ceiling. Once the soda was mixed in the bottle, it was capped by hand pressure with a bottling machine and the finished soft drinks were packed in crates and sent to local stores. The drink cost a nickel, but if you returned the bottle you would be refunded 3 cents. The bottles were then washed and rebottled.
The Ice House Museum is the proud recipient of one of the most complete bottling plants in the US, thanks to our lifetime collector Casey Romey who donated his entire collection to us. We have over 150 hand-blown bottles with the names of many SE Texas towns, as well as seltzer bottles and all of the bottling equipment and accessories. It is very appropriate for our museum to have this exhibit, because these early sodas were sold here "ice cold" as early as 1909, packed in the ice created in this ice plant.
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Programming made possible with funding from Humanities Texas and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as a part of the Federal ARP Act.
This project is funded in part by the B. A. & E.W. Steinhagen Benevolent Trust through the
Southeast Texas Arts Council
2023 Funding is made possible through the Foundation of Southeast Texas and
The Junior League of Beaumont, Entergy, the Silsbee Economic Development Corporation, and the Summerlee Foundation as well as individual gifts from citizens who support our work.
Texas Association of Museums
Recipient 2024 Gold Award
