By Cynthia Leal Massey
Helotes is home to the “World Famous” John T. Floore Country Store, a Texas Historic Landmark listed in the National Register of Historic Places that celebrated its diamond anniversary in 2017.
But who was John T. Floore? John T. Floore in front of the original Red & White/Floore Country Store, late 1940s. Photo by Woodrow Marrs. Courtesy of Wayne Marrs and the Historical Society of Helotes.
Editorial staff recognize the sensitive nature of the content of this article. While eliminating any reference to the KKK would sanitize the article and make it palatable to most readers, doing so would also gloss over a significant aspect of John T. Floore's life. Sanitizing history for the sake of readers' sensitivities is not, in our opinion, an effective method of ensuring that repugnant portions of human history do not repeat themselves. Immortalized in the 1973 song, “Shotgun Willie,” by Willie Nelson, Floore, who residents called the “unofficial mayor of Helotes,” is described in this way: “Now, John T. Floore was a-working for the Ku Klux Klan, At six foot five, John T. was a hell of a man, Made a lot of money selling sheets on the family plan.” The title of the song is the nickname Nelson got after confronting his daughter Lana’s husband and threatening to kill him if he repeated his assault on her. How lyrics about John T. Floore got into the song is a mystery. But the album has been touted as one of the first albums of “Outlaw Country,” and perhaps that is where the connection lies. Born August 4, 1898, in the northeast Texas town of Troup, south of Tyler, John Tramell Floore was a conventional product of the South. Settlers of Troup in the 1840s were predominately
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from Virginia. Floore’s grandparents, who were from North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Arkansas, moved to east Texas where his parents, Lloyd Floore and Mary Foster, were born in the 1860s. John T. had two older brothers, Lloyd Jr. and Henry “Shag,” and three younger sisters, Mary Francis “Frankie,” Margaret, and Beulah. His youngest sister moved to Helotes with her husband Bern Vinck, who in the 1950s ran the newly built Riggs Garage (now Mander’s Automotive). Troup was a small railroad town in the 1870s. By 1892, the town had 600 residents, eight general stores, four churches, millinery shops, saloons, physicians' offices, drugstores, a hotel, a district school, a meat market, and a cotton gin and gristmill. The municipal government included a city commissioner, a justice of the peace, and a constable. By 1914, Troup’s population had doubled and the town included a bank, a telephone exchange, two cotton gins, several restaurants, and a weekly newspaper. The town was predominately Presbyterian in creed and Democrat in politics, both of which John T. Floore embraced. The history of the KKK in Texas had its beginnings during Reconstruction and was focused in northeast Texas, with Klan members pledging to support the supremacy of the white race, to oppose the amalgamation of the races, to resist the social and political encroachment of the Republican “carpetbaggers,” and to restore white control of the government. The Klan's regalia
Helotes: Gateway to the Texas Hill Country – Summer 2018