The little town with a big history

As Atlanta and the surrounding area was populated by settlers from the East Coast, it wasn’t long before progress caught up to them and railroad tracks were laid to help them progress. When the Kansas City Southern Railway plotted their route between Shreveport and Texarkana in 1895, they built a depot six miles east of Atlanta and less than a half-mile from the Arkansas state line.

When the post office was opened in 1896 it was named for an official of the railroad company, a Mr. Bloomburg. Since the town was the last station on the railroad line before it left the state, it soon became a shipping point for area farmers.

By 1900 the town had a population of 198. It was incorporated in 1911 and by 1914 had a small bank, a hotel, a restaurant, several stores, and a population estimated at 600. Between 1914 and the 1960s the population fluctuated between a high of 600 and a low of 433; in the 1960s it fell from 500 to 231. In 2000 it was 375.

Today, the town is most known for the annual Cullen Baker Fair that was started in the 1970s and held on the first Saturday of November. After a two-year hiatus, it is coming back strong this year.

Cullen Baker might be the most well-known resident of the town, but he isn’t the only V.I.P. to ever walk the streets.

The Little Rock 1/9th Thelma Mothershed-Wair was born in 1940 to Arlevia and Hosanna Claire Mothershed in Bloomburg. They eventually moved to Little Rock where she made history as the eldest member of the Little Rock Nine group who attended Little Rock’s Central High School following the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education court case. The Little Rock Nine were enrolled in 1957, followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened, however, and the school was forced to allow them entrance. These original nine students eventually led to the desegregation of all public schools in the area.

Big Jim Patterson

Born on the Fourth of July 1847, James Wesley “Big Jim” Patterson stood out for more than one reason. His parents, James and Lucinda, lived close to the Texas line in Lafayette County, Arkansas (Lafayette was later changed to Miller) when he was born, but considered Bloomburg, Texas, to be home.

Coming of age during the Civil War in the Borderlands area was dangerous and outlaws were plenty – including his own cousin, Cullen Montgomery Baker. Jim decided early that he would stay fast in his faith and not turn out like so many others.

Standing at 8’4” made Jim quite unique, and it was said that he believed God had a plan for him. When he was discovered by the Sells Brothers Circus, he was afforded an opportunity very few people from East Texas had at the time; he travelled the country. When the Sells Brothers sold to Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus, Big Jim toured the world.

Named the “World’s Tallest Man” by the Guinness Book of World Records, Big Jim made up to $15,000 a week (in today’s money) by selling autographed photos. Occasionally he dressed in women’s clothing and was passed off as the “World’s Tallest Woman.”

By 1890, he was a wealthy man and owned several properties throughout the United States. It was said that one Christmas he gifted all of the little Patterson girls wooden pump organs, which were rare in this part of the country.

After his retirement, he was known to roam the woods late at night, dressed in one of his old circus costumes. This may have added to the rumors of a Bigfoot traipsing around the Boggy Creek area.

Big Jim was born on a holiday and died on a holiday – Halloween 1920. It seems fitting for a man that was larger than life. Swamp Fox of the Sulphur

Cullen Montgomery Baker was born in 1835 in Weakley County, Tennessee, to John and Nancy Baker. The family moved to Texas in 1839 and eventually settled in Cass County, where John received a land grant of 640 acres from the Texas Congress. In his teenage years, Cullen became a mean-spirited drinker. Despite his hard-living ways, Mary Jane Petty fell in love with the scrappy boy, and they married in 1854. Nine months later he killed his first man. Their daughter, Louisa Jane Baker, was born in 1957 when the couple was 21 and 19. (Louisa married, had seven children, and died at the age of 44 in Oklahoma.) Prior to the Civil War, the little family spent time in Perry County, Arkansas, at the farm of his uncle, Thomas Young. After Mary Jane died in 1860, Baker returned to Texas. Baker joined Company G, Morgan’s Regimental Cavalry, in 1861, at Jefferson, but he is designated a deserter on January 10, 1863. In 1862, he joined Company I of the Fifteenth Texas Cavalry at Linden; beside his name is written, “left sick on the Arkansas River.” After his service he was discharged due to disability.

He married his second wife, Martha J. Foster in 1862. They settled in Cass County where Baker was a ferry captain on the Sulphur River until Martha died in 1866.

It was noted that Martha’s death left him deeply bereaved, however he proposed to her sister, Belle, just two months later. When Belle married Thomas Orr, a schoolteacher and later a prominent community activist and politician, it made he and Baker bitter enemies.

Baker’s activities after deserting the Confederate Army are shrouded in mystery and rumors. It was said he killed no less than 200 men and terrorized people all along the banks of the Sulphur River. One legend has it that he was associated with the Ku Klux Klan.

When the Union Army and the Freedmen’s Bureau came to the area, Baker focused his attention upon killing their employees and clients. In December 1867 Baker also wrought havoc upon Howell Smith’s family because of their alleged “unorthodox” relations with the black laborers they employed. He was wounded, but eluded capture.

Baker and his group of outcasts and killers are credited with murdering two Freedmen’s Bureau agents, one in Texas and another in Arkansas, and numerous black men and women. When his gang disbanded in December 1868, Baker returned to his home in Bloomburg.

It was there that a group of neighbors led by Orr, whom Baker had earlier attempted to hang, killed him and a companion on January 6, 1869. Legend has it that the whiskey Baker drank was laced with strychnine. Orr collected a reward when he delivered Baker’s dead body to Jefferson, which was then the county seat. Baker was buried there.

The “Swamp Fox of the Sulphur” became notorious in the Southwest and even drew the notice of the New York Tribune. While some cite his actions as a defense of “Southern honor” during and after the Civil War, others see him as a mean, spiteful, alcoholic murderer. Louis L’Amour memorialized Baker in his novel “The First Fast Draw.”

Baker is the subject of at least two biographies: “Cullen Baker: Premier Texas Gunfighter,” by Ed Bartholomew (1954) and “The Borderlands and Cullen Baker,” by Yvonne Vestal (1978). Ironically, the first book written about him, “Life and Times of the Notorious Cullen Baker,” was penned by his killer, Thomas Orr, in 1870.