Bead-Hawley Burgundy Gold Floral Glass TB

Please drop this item in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; the bag keeps the trackable clean and prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take the travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission is needed to leave the U.S.

Photos in the travel bug logs are appreciated.  I will be re-post them here, where they can be seen by other cachers.

This is one of a series of large beads obtained from different places and converted into travel bugs.  They are named for Texas towns with interesting names or histories.

Hawley was once known Deming’s Bridge, after Edwin A. Deming, who constructed a crude bridge over the Tres Palacios River in 1857.  There had been a community in the area since the 1850s but it went unnamed until a post office opened in 1858, with Deming as postmaster.  Jonathan Pierce was the next postmaster and when his son Abel “Shanghai” Pierce received an appointment in the Navy through the efforts of Robert Bradley Hawley.   Pierce repaid his son’s benefactor by renaming the town in his honor.  Shanghai Pierce and his brother Jonathan had their ranch headquarters just south of the bridge around the time of the Civil War.  By the mid 1880s, Deming’s Bridge had a thriving population of 300 which grew to 500 by the early 1890s.

In 1903 the New York, Texas and Mexican Railway was advancing across the prairie and Jon Pierce donated land to insure the railroad would pass through the region.  The town of Blessing appeared that year and Hawley’s post office and Masonic Lodge moved to the new town, cutting Hawley loose to become an eventual ghost town.

Today the most notable reminder of the town is the well-kept Hawley Cemetery whose most famous resident is Shanghai Pierce.  His statue, ordered far in advance of his death, is one of the tallest landmarks in Matagorda County outside of Bay City.  Pierce, who was fiercely proud of his thrift, got the sculptor to give him a hefty discount and erected the statue in Blessing so that he could admire it before it was put to use when he died.