Dove Road

© John K. Taber 2002

I have taken to driving Dove Road instead of Highway 114 to get to town. Dove Road isn’t crowded, and it avoids the noise, pollution, and the aggressiveness of the Highway 114 drivers.

Dove Road is an old road, one of the oldest in Tarrant County. Parts of it are still county road. It roughly parallels Highway 114 but is oddly segmented because it was built in pieces in the early days, only as far as needed. Each segment is fairly straight, but the next segment continues at an odd angle. It begins in Grapevine at Dove Corners, and in segments proceeds west through Grapevine, Southlake, and Westlake to Roanoke.

This part of Texas is full of mourning doves. They have a peculiar call, a woo-oo, woo-oo, rather than the coo of the turtle dove. When I first moved here, I mistook the mourning dove’s call for an owl’s. Folks imagined that the call was plaintive, hence the name “mourning.” It must have been the plenitude of mourning doves that caused so many places around here to include “dove” in their names. The area is also known as Cross Timbers because of the thickets of various oaks, mostly scrub oak today, crossing the beginnings of the Texas Plains.

Recently, so-called killer mold (stachybotrys) was found at Dove Elementary School on Dove Road in Grapevine, and had to be cleaned up. That made TV news. The poor girl on local Fox News TV station could not handle Dove Elementary School on the teleprompter, and pronounced dove to rhyme with stove instead of love.

Dove Road was used by Bonnie and Clyde. They murdered two state troopers near the intersection of Dove Road and Highway 114. It is an incident reflected in the movie. According to official sources the officers approached their parked car to assist them, and were gunned down. It was Clyde Barrow’s fingerprints on a whiskey bottle that identified them. There is folklore disagreement where these murders happened. According to some long-time residents of Trophy Club, the murders occurred near the old Medlin barn, now torn down in what is now Trophy Club. They say Bonnie and Clyde stopped to picnic when the officers tried to sneak up on them. But, a local newspaperman says that an old-timer he talked to claims the murders happened in Euless, at least twelve miles to the south. The evidence is overwhelming, however, that the murders happened where the officials say it did.

There was a monument to the officers, Wheeler and Murphy, near the site. The monument was removed for freeway construction, but eventually it was returned. The monument read:

WE THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF
TEXAS
ACKNOWLEDGE AND THANK TROOPERS
EDWARD BRYAN WHEELER
AND
H. D. MURPHY
FOR THE GREAT SACRIFICE THEY
MADE TO KEEP THE PUBLIC SAFE.

TROOPERS WHEELER AND MURPHY
WERE SHOT TO DEATH EASTER SUNDAY,
APRIL 1, 1934 NEAR THIS SITE ON
WEST DOVE ROAD BY THE INFAMOUS
CRIMINALS, BONNIE PARKER AND
CLYDE BARROW. WHEELER AND MURPHY
STOPPED THEIR MOTORCYCLES NEAR
PARKER AND BARROW’S CAR, THINKING
A MOTORIST NEEDED ASSISTANCE. WHEN
THEY APPROACHED, THEY WERE SHOT.

THEIR EFFORTS WILL STAND
THE TEST OF TIME.

MAY GOD BLESS THEIR SOULS.
            ERECTED 1996

This area is developing madly. Perhaps somebody feared that developers and publicists would misrepresent the incident here to sell houses and hamburgers. A Bonnie and Clyde hamburger (meaning with ketchup on it) is not far-fetched. Ponder is only fifteen miles away, where scenes for the film Bonnie and Clyde were made simply because the old Ponder State Bank robbed by Bonnie and Clyde still stands, though it has long since ceased being a bank. The movie crew patronized the Ranchman’s Cafe which has been doing a boom business ever since. Folks drive into Ponder in Mercedes lugging their wine in Igloos with them (Ponder is dry) to eat a steak at the Ranchman’s Cafe. There are even busloads of tourists in this unlikely Texas small town. So fears of mindless exploitation are well-founded, and this monument may help to ensure that an accurate version of the story prevails.

One day, off Dove Road, I noticed Lonesome Dove Road. Immediately, I thought of Larry McMurtry’s novel Lonesome Dove. Damn, I thought, must be a new tract. Developers will use any name that helps sell houses.

But Lonesome Dove Road is the real thing. A little north of the junction is the Lonesome Dove Baptist Church.

Dr. Quesenbury, pastor of the Lonesome Dove Baptist Church, says that McMurtry was eating in a Fort Worth restaurant and happened to see a church van through the restaurant’s window with the sign “Lonesome Dove Baptist Church.” This is from McMurtry’s own account. The poetry of the name took his fancy. His novel has nothing to do with this area of Texas (it is set along the border), but he made use of the name.

Larry McMurtry may have heard of the church much earlier through his family. One of his uncles was a member of the church.

Ironically, the church is often suspected or accused of stealing its name from McMurtry’s novel.

The Lonesome Dove Baptist Church was started in 1846, and completed in 1847, shortly before Tarrant County was formed, while Texas was still a republic. At that time, this was the frontier, the westernmost church save for a small Catholic church in El Paso.

A band of settlers from Missouri started the settlement in what is now Southlake/Grapevine. The Republic of Texas, fearing Mexican efforts to forcibly retake Texas, made a determined effort to settle Texas with Anglos. Large tracts of land were given away in order to attract settlers, 640 acres to a family. This was one of the tracts available and being wooded it was attractive to the pioneers since the woods provided material for cabins, fire, fences, and implements. Also, there was no immediate problem, apart from thieving, with Indians in this particular area.

The name Lonesome Dove is peculiar, and there are several origin legends. A widely told tale is that a mourning dove flew over the church when it was built. However, the church was named Lonesome Dove before construction started.

Another story is that a dove alighted on an early pastor’s shoulder and stayed there during the entire sermon. Dr. Quesenbury, knowing doves, pastors and their sermons seriously doubts its probability.

The founders cast about for a suitable name once they decided to build the church. They had been meeting in each other’s homes, but the congregation had grown too large for that. One proposal was to name it for their original church in Platte County, Missouri. Dr. Quesenbury hasn’t discovered that name yet. Another was to name it the Platte Baptist Church.

According to legend, while debating what to name the church, the members heard a mourning dove call, and somebody remarked “Listen to that lonesome dove.” This is as likely an origin as any. Those settlers must have felt very lonely here. They were on the frontier, with wilderness all around. It was necessary to go to church armed because of lawlessness, and to post a guard during services to prevent Indians from stealing their horses. After the church was built, the back of the church on Sundays looked like an arsenal because of the stacked arms.

Basically, we don’t know why the church was so named. The name, lonesome dove must have resonated to trigger its adoption. My guess is, it must have been already current in folklore. Doves are important in western culture, in the Bible as the Holy Spirit and symbol of peace; and in literature and song as true and faithful love. Perhaps there was a song at the time about a dove that had lost its mate. Perhaps it evoked fidelity under trial. Perhaps it evoked loneliness.

Whatever the reason for the name, McMurtry’s novel also struck a chord. The novel led to a movie, then a TV series, and there are now places named Lonesome Dove all over the United States as a result. McMurtry said that he meant to kill the cowboy myth by showing how ugly the life was in reality. Instead he added to the myth and inadvertently started a Lonesome Dove industry. Dr. Quesenbury says that when the church established its website, Lonesome Dove businesses were all over the Internet, and his church could scarcely find an unused name for itself.

One myth has it that the church burned three times, the first time by Indians. The myth even supplies a date, 1865. But the church burned once, in 1930. It was the Mt. Gilead Baptist Church about ten miles to the west in Keller that the Indians burned. Probably, people conflate the two churches.

This intersection, Dove Road and Lonesome Dove Road, was the heart of a small unincorporated community, informally called Dove Community, right up to the 50s at least. The creek is Dove Branch, still used by the church for baptism. There was a blacksmith shop with one-cylinder engines to drive a conveyor belt. There were a couple of country stores, a cotton gin, a Woodmen’s Hall, and Dove School, all now gone. The Torian cabin in Grapevine, on display like a museum piece, came from here. One of Mr. Torian’s descendents, Bud Tanner, now in his 80s, describes the area well enough so that the listener can almost see and hear those bygone activities.

The Woodmen of the World, almost defunct now, was a fraternal order, like the Odd Fellows or the Elks. One of its benefits was a tombstone. In the old cemeteries around here you may see a tombstone shaped like a tree trunk. These were provided by the Woodmen, and there is one in good shape in the church cemetery of the Lonesome Dove church.

When you drive Dove Road, you should try to see settlers and wagons, old churches and graveyards of pioneer days, and an old, old country lane traveled by horse and wagon, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, and modern day refugees from the freeway.
Take your time. This is, after all, a country lane, and the Southlake police patrol it, glad to give out tickets to improve the police department budget. Begin at Dove Corners in Grapevine. Drive through Southlake stopping at the Lonesome Dove Baptist Church. Dr. Quesenbury is friendly, and if he has the time, can show you around. The church has a quilt made by its women members for a fund raiser decades ago hanging in pride from the rear wall. Member names are stitched in with their contributions, 25¢ perhaps or $1.50. Member names are freely spelled, thus Halford is also Hallford. In the church office is an old decanter carried by oxcart from Missouri, and used by the 1840 pioneers for communion.

Follow Dove Road west through Westlake to Roanoke. This is the prettiest stretch of Dove Road, a pure country lane through gently rolling hills and groves. It bisects the Circle T Ranch, some 2000 acres, owned by the Hunt brothers until their bankruptcy. They used the ranch to train thoroughbreds. It won’t remain a ranch much longer though, because it is now owned by H. Ross Perot and is scheduled for development. It is supposed to be upscale, but the past is disappearing. Still, the mourning dove will remain, its plaintive call reminding us of the past.