Around Town

I bought myself a new camera for Christmas. I have no idea how to use it yet, so I'm just leaving it on Auto. Yesterday, my sister and I took our kids for a photo shoot around Happy. For the next several posts, I'm going to share some shots of my town with you. It was a very overcast day yesterday, so the sky was terribly gray.

First off, proof that there really is a place called Happy, Texas. This is our post office:

Our old water tower:

A shot of the elevators along the railroad tracks. The elevators you see are concrete and were built by POWs during WWII. I'm not sure about all of the details, I'll try to go read the historical marker and get back to you on that.

There are more behind me and some to the west of the tracks. Unfortunately only one is open all the time now and one is open seasonally.

Happy sprang up along the railroad when it went through. It was important to the cattle industry and eventually to the grain industry. My grandmother told us about how they used to drive the cattle to town and put them in the pens (that would have been south of the current post office) by the tracks and then load them up to ship north. She told about how her uncle road the train with the cattle in 1918 and caught the flu and eventually died because of complications. (All of this happened before she was born.)

When we have a good wheat year we cut our grain and bring it to town to the elevator. Sometimes we even harvest maize in the fall. The grain is eventually shipped out on railroad cars.