LANDSCAPE CHARACTERISTICS

INTRODUCTION

STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE

CHARACTER-DEFINING FEATURES ANALYSIS

NATURAL SYSTEMS

SPATIAL ORGANIZATION

LAND USE

CIRCULATION

VEGETATION

BUILDINGS & STRUCTURES

CONSTRUCTED WATER FEATURES

VIEWS & VISTAS

SMALL-SCALE FEATURES

This section analyzes and evaluates the characterdefining features of the Bassett Farms landscape that is the subject of this report according to the National Register of Historic Places criteria and the methodology outlined in A Guide to Cultural Landscape Reports: Contents, Process and Techniques. The content is divided into two parts.

The first part evaluates the landscape’s significance and integrity. The evaluation looks at the overall cultural landscape and ties what is extant with its historic development to determine how this landscape conveys or represents significant historic local, regional, and/or national events and trends.

The second part of this chapter analyzes extant landscape characteristics and features by comparing their existing conditions documented in 2021 with what is documented, or otherwise understood, about their historic condition during the period of significance. This analysis is organized by landscape characteristics which are defined as “the tangible and intangible aspects of [a place] which have either influenced the history of the development of the landscape or are products of its development.”1

For each landscape characteristic a summary of what is known about its character, development, and condition during the historic period is summarized. Primary features associated with each characteristic are then described in terms of their existing condition and evaluated whether they contribute or do not contribute to the cultural landscape’s character.

In cases where a feature could be categorized under more than one landscape characteristic, it was included with the characteristic that

1 Jeffrey Killion and Gretchen Hilyard, National Park Service Cultural Landscapes Inventory Professional Procedures Guide, 2009 provided the best way of understanding its relationship to the overall cultural landscape. Cross references are included in the narrative to provide clarity.

Bassett Farms is significant in the history of Falls and Limestone Counties, Texas, and the development of this region as a multi-faceted rural agricultural landscape. From 1871, when the land was first acquired, through 1967 when the last member of the Bassett family managed and lived permanently on the property, the history and evolution of this landscape reflects the larger patterns of regional history. In so many ways, the daily, seasonal, and yearly life at Bassett Farms tells the story of cattle-raising, cotton growing, tenant farming and post-Civil War freedom colonies. But it is also the history of settling and securing a demanding landscape, and constructing, repairing, and often moving farm structures as needs evolved in response to changing times. It is the story of the brick house at Home Place and the Hopewell freedom colony, farm structures, fences for cattle pastures, water tanks carved into the ground, and ways to move through this landscape. It is the story of county and town politics, but also of cotton farming, personal decisions, and the relationship among European-descended settlers, originally from Connecticut, and freed slaves building their Reconstruction-era lives and communities. It was a way of life that occurred throughout Texas and across the South, a complex history that has endured for over 150 years.

To determine the significance of any resource in this country’s history, it must possess integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and/or association, and be: a) associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history; or b) associated with the lives of significant persons in or past; or c) embody the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction, or that represent the work of a master, or that possess high artistic values, or that represent a significant and distinguishable entity whose components may lack individual distinction; or d) have yielded or may be likely to yield, information important in history or prehistory.

Bassett Farms meets all these criteria as a significant cultural landscape.

Settling central Texas in the 19th century was a difficult and demanding task. This was a pattern throughout much of the mid-section of the country, as land was settled both before and after statehood, and the trials and tribulations of building a life on this land were faced directly. The need to settle was accompanied by land division and road construction. The need for movement of both people, goods and livestock brought the arrival of the railroad, and a permanence to human structure on the landscape. This pattern of land development, played out in Limestone and Falls Counties, is clear and visible in the Bassett farm landscape today.

Bassett Farms lies a few miles east of the Blue Ridge region of eastern Falls County. This area was settled in the 1840s mostly by families from Tennessee. The Blue Ridge rises 75 to 100 feet to the east above Big Creek and then gently descends eastward toward the Little Brazos River.

Bassett Farms is in the Little Brazos watershed and the property is more-or-less bisected by Sulphur Creek, which flows from northeast to southwest across Bassett Farms, eventually emptying into the Little Brazos, which forms a portion of the western boundary of the farm. Early deeds refer to most of the parcels that comprise Bassett Farms as being on the “headwaters of the Little Brazos.” The Little Brazos rises in southwestern Limestone County, owing parallel to the Brazos River through Falls and Robertson counties until it reaches the Brazos in Brazos County.

The area can have challenging and forceful climate and weather patterns. As was prevalent among successful farms in the region, the human and development responses to this are evident at Bassett Farms, particularly at the Bassett Home Place. The Bassett House is built on a slightly elevated position near, but not too near, the branch of Sulphur Creek that supplied water through its spring. A one-story porch, later replaced by a screened, two-story porch, provided summer shade and shelter and a place to sleep. Oriented to the south, the house was positioned to capture breezes, and large trees grew up on its west side to help keep the house cool. These basic principles of location, form, and orientation were typical of rural farmsteads in the region, including the tenant houses at Bassett Farms.

This pattern of regional response to natural features also played out in the selection of land sections for cotton growing or cattle grazing, as well as the site for gas and oil exploration. It also includes the excavated stock tanks for cattle, still present in this landscape today. It is a broad pattern in American land settlement history throughout the country’s mid-section and is clear at Bassett Farms.

Henry Bassett and the Bassett family played an important personal and occupational role in the development of this landscape. Bassett was one of thousands of 19th century settlers, arriving with sufficient capital to invest in real estate, graze cattle, grow cotton and eventually explore for oil and gas. An interesting character, Henry Bassett moved from Connecticut to Iowa and eventually to Grimes County, TX, and then to Kosse where he eventually settled. Bassett continued to acquire tracts of land in the area. Unlike many incomers to Texas in this period, Bassett settled, built a house of brick, and established a home and life that sustained for three generations.

Following Bassett’s death in 1889, ownership and responsibility for the property and its operation went to his widow Hattie Ford Bassett. At age 39, she became one of Limestone County’s leading women cotton landlords. She continued to acquire additional acreage as it became available and added new structures to the landscape to support the expanding cotton operations. Cotton farming was always a gamble, threatened by weather patterns, pest infestation, and the national market. Yet Hattie Ford Bassett and Bassett Farm endured, as she added land for both cotton and cattle grazing.

Importantly, Hattie Ford Bassett also developed a complex relationship with the neighbors at Hopewell Freedom Colony, a relationship often of mutual need and support, whether for domestic help or loans. As noted in Bassett Farms history “At the turn of the century, the Bassetts had many farmhands, and in fact, housed as many as forty families on the property. Annual celebrations such as Juneteenth were great festivities with barbecues, baseball games, and preaching. At Christmas, the family gave gifts to everyone housed on the farm and decorated the main house with trees in every room. Birthdays at the Bassett home were special occasions with all the children in town invited for games, cake, and ice cream ... one child visiting relatives in town was invited to the party. She had no money for a gift, but brought a box with fresh, juicy plums that were enjoyed by all.”

The multiple generations of the family were central in the development of this Texas region and its connections to the larger area.

The landscape of Bassett Farm and Hopewell Freedom Colony is marked by distinctive, yet increasingly common in its day, land divisions. It was a life lived in the landscape, shaped by the land settlement patterns at all scales. Notably, there are no know family photographs taken in the house. Regionally, towns grew in response to economic opportunities, whether it was cattle grazing, cotton farming, or oil and gas speculation. As with the Bassett Farm landscape, many times it was all these endeavors. In many cases, as is true in this landscape, the early settlements were followed by or came after the railroad, as it reached across the broad expanse of the American west, mid-west and south. In Texas, the early railroad alignment was primarily positioned to transport people and products from Houston to Dallas.

This was accompanied by roads leading from one town to another, enabling the movement of goods and services. Bassett Farm was positioned on the main road from Kosse towards towns to the west. Undoubtedly, the farm was passed daily by travelers, local farmers, and other residents. It was a central point in the landscape, as the orientation of the main house reflects its position facing the road, but not so close as to impede travel, or be affected by others as they passed by.

The land settlement pattern benefitted from a relatively flat terrain, away from mountains and deep valleys. It very much relied on division of this broad expanse of the continent based on the section system, dating to 1785 but refined in 1851, as reflected in the property boundaries and orientation at Bassett Farm.

Following the establishment of the Republic of Texas (1836-1845), and despite threats to life and property, land grants were issued to reward families who emigrated to the Republic and those who served in the Texas Revolution. Several of these grants covered Bassett Farms but were later abandoned, and regranted in the 1850s.

The earliest settlement-era map depicting the area that is now Bassett Farms is the “Map of Robertson’s Colony” drafted by A. W. Cook and “made at Franklin June & July 1839.” The unlabeled outlines of the John W. Cassiday survey, a portion of which is part of Bassett Farms, is depicted along with the Little Brazos River and a notation that “this vacancy is surveyed but not correctly.” The only road depicted on the map is the “San Antonio Road, or Road from Bexar to Nacogdoches” well south of Bassett Farms. Just to the north of Bassett Farms, a vacant area was labeled as “rich muskeet prairies.”

After Texas became a state in 1845, settlement began to increase at a greater rate. In the late 1840s, the Blue Ridge region west of Bassett Farms was settled by stock-raisers and small farmers principally from Tennessee. In the 1850s, several farmers moved to the region with slaves, but in general, 1850s agriculture in the immediate vicinity of Bassett Farms made only limited use of enslaved labor. This contrasts with large plantation operations that were developed in the 1840s and 1850s further west in Falls County along the Brazos River bottoms by Churchill Jones and in northern Limestone County by the Stroud family.

The typical pattern across this region supported establishment of Bassett Farm, as well as other settlements in the area. As a surviving example of this pattern, Bassett Farms is significant and noteworthy in that it embodies and displays both the broad patterns and the smallest details of the decades of land development history. Gradual at first, yet later more substantial and rooted, the visible history at Bassett Farms is a surviving example of what life was like for many early settlers. Later, of course, Bassett Farms was more substantial than other farms in the immediate vicinity, yet its early, tentative history shares origins with those in the region.

Bassett Farms is also closely linked to Reconstruction Era establishment of freedom colonies. Hattie Ford’s relationship with her neighbors, particularly her Black neighbors on the south side of the Pasture in the Hopewell Freedom Colony, was complex. She relied on them for farm and domestic labor, while they relied on her for loans. Established as early as 1870, the Hopewell Freedom Colony and its associated church, cemetery, school, and lodge hall was founded by Black landowners. Participants in the Hopewell institutions (for example church, school, and lodge) included black tenant farmers on Bassett property. In this way, Hopewell Freedom Colony in essence served as a home location for the local AfricanAmerican community, whether or not they lived at Hopewell.

In the late 1890s and early 1900s, a younger generation of Black farmers sought new opportunities elsewhere. The Oklahoma Territory drew several Hopewell’s families, and Hattie Ford had the resources to acquire their farmsteads when they were ready to sell. Beginning in 1898, with the foreclosure of the Jefferson family’s debts on a 12-acre tract Hattie Ford and her husband sold to them in 1882, and continuing over the next seventeen years, Hattie Ford would come to own the original Freedom Colony farms of Anderson Jefferson, Henry Jefferson, William Moton, Edmund Taylor, and Robert Green as they died or moved away, totaling about 200 acres. Averaging about 40 acres each, these farms were interlaced with washes feeding into Sulphur Creek and did not offer the wide-open spaces of her larger acquisitions. Regardless, she rented them to additional tenants, making use of existing structures and making minimal improvements where needed.

This mutually supportive relationship between the Bassetts and Hopewell Freedom Colony residents were important, as is evident in records and surviving family photographs from the period, some of which show Bassett children and Hopewell Freedom Colony children playing together at Home Place. It many ways, it is indicative of the Bassett’s relationship to the land and the human and natural context.

Agricultural landscapes, like Bassett Farms, inevitably leave remnants of their history below the surface of the ground. These may be tools, agricultural implements, dishware, horse harnesses, animal bones, or structural remains indicating where walls were and are no longer. As the physical rehabilitation work at Bassett Farm has advanced in the past few years, evidence of these historical memories has been unearthed, indicating the potential to reveal more. It is a landscape that was settled, used, and modified over time.

As a surviving and substantial visual record of the broad patterns of land settlement as well as the intricate details of development, Bassett Farms is a significant cultural landscape in the history of the region and of Texas. It reveals the way this landscape was settled and used on a daily, seasonal, or yearly basis. This cultural landscape tells the story of early settlers, the Reconstruction Era Freedom Colonies, and the ups and downs of this life from the mid-19th century through the mid-20th century. It is the record of the aspiration and challenges to establish a life – a good life – in a time and context that were never easy, yet clearly rewarding in many ways, and over time.