Wharton, Texas

I took the day off from work today to visit Wharton, about an hour and a half southwest of Houston, with my mom, grandma and little brother. My grandma grew up in Wharton, and she and my grandpa moved back there when my mom was 1 from Beaumont until my Gran was transferred up to NYC when my mom was 13 (by that time my other 2 aunts had been born as well). They are still well-known in the community, my great-grandpa and Gran did a lot for the city, and they still invite my mom to high school reunions...even though she only went to school through 7th grade there! I've been to Wharton many times, but it was fun to go with both my mom and Granmomo and be able to take pictures of sites they remembered.

We first stopped for lunch at Hinze's BBQ, which is right on highway 59. Their BBQ is great and their pies are even better! :) Check out that meringue!!


Three generations at Hinze's - can you tell my bored 11 year old brother was the photographer? He wasn't even looking, he was just shooting. Boys.


Now onto the important stuff!

This is the county courthouse. It's obviously been restored and looks great, doesn't it?

This is hard to read, but it's a plaque outside City Hall. The top plaque, "Wharton Municipal Building, erected 1931", lists my great-grandfather, L.F. Worthing, as the Mayor Pro-Tem. On the plaque below, "Wharton Municipal Building, remodeled 1963", it lists my grandfather, Wayne White, as the Mayor Pro-Tem. Pretty cool, huh?

My mom made us stop and take a picture of this place. It's now an Allstate Insurance building, but it used to be a laundromat that also had several chairs with hair dryers on them. She said when she and her sister were little, their dad (Gran) used to make them sit under the dryers and read their Sunday school lesson. Oh, those were the days! I would love for life to be like that now!

This is the house my grandma grew up in, and where my great-grandma Tattie lived. It's for sale now, but my mom's cousin Jim Worthing lives there. I wish we could buy it!

This is the house my mom and her sisters lived in until they moved to Connecticut. My grandpa laid the brick sidewalk!

We also went by the cemetery to check out the Worthing plot.

My great-grandma Tattie and great-grandpa (who I never knew) are buried there, along with Granmomo's brother Louis and his wife, Great Aunt Gene (Emogene, hence the spelling). Also my grandpa was buried there in 2002 when he passed away and there's a spot set aside for Granmomo. May be morbid, but I think it made her feel better to see it and see her spot was there. We also checked out the Bolton plot (stay with me here - Tattie was Sallie Bolton Worthing, so the Boltons are her side of the family tree. We have a long history in Wharton.)

Also, my mom pointed out a famous Wharton-ite buried in the cemetery.

It's the middle headstone. Wait, you don't know who Horton Foote is? Seriously? Oh, neither did I. Apparently he's a well known playwright and screenwriter, who I would imagine is most famous for writing the screenplay of To Kill a Mockingbird and won an Oscar for it. He just passed away in March of this year. Wharton is just steeped in history! If you check out his Wikipedia page, his first play in 1940 was titled Wharton Dance.
It was fun riding around with my mom, hearing about who lived where, and what used to be what. The big joke is Wharton used to be so small they didn't have any chains, not even a Dairy Queen, only a Dairy Princess. It was a fun day and I am so glad I was able to go along! I think it's days like this you will always appreciate in the future, spending time with family and learning about where you came from.