Additional information
by Ron Melugin (Author)
After legendary sheriff Pat Ware was thrown from his horse on a very muddy Commerce Street, the Gainesville Daily Hesperian observed that he "had enough mud sticking to his wardrobe to start a land boom in the Panhandle." The Hesperian had an eye for detail, down to the autumn leaf pen wiper Dr. Arthur Carroll Scott received as a wedding present and the raid on Fount Duston's watermelon patch. Ron Melugin has pored over thousands of articles from the newspaper's frontier era, piecing together advertisements for Botanic Blood Balm and a county clerk's train robbing spree. It is an account of bygone Gainesville so vivid that modern readers can almost see, hear and even (in the case of the 1894 privy ordinance) smell it.
Author Biography
Ron Melugin is professor emeritus at North Central Texas College in Gainesville, where he taught from 1965 through 2016. He holds a master of arts degree in history with a minor in government from Texas A&M University-Commerce. He is a member and former chairman of the Cooke County Historical Commission, a division of the Texas Historical Commission. His research has resulted in fifteen Official Texas Historical Markers. His previously published work is Heroes, Scoundrels and Angels: Fairview Cemetery of Gainesville, Texas (The History Press, 2010).
