165. Corsicana, Navarro County

We have been to Corsicana many times.  It’s one of the traditional waypoints on our way out to or back from East Texas.  We have specific gas stations we would stop at or specific restaurants to eat at.  Sometimes we would even stop at Collin Street Bakery, home of the fruitcake (as fate would have it, we stopped at the other Collin Street in Waco for cookies on the way here).  But we never go downtown and had never seen the courthouse.  And it turned out to be a good place for a group bathroom break, so there’s that, too.

We hit our cache on the way here.  There’s always a cemetery, so we stopped at the Corsicana Hebrew Cemetery.  We were led to the monolithic stone of Isaac Baum, local businessman, who was nominated by no less a personage than President Ulysses S. Grant for the position of postmaster and confirmed by the Senate back in the days when they handled such weighty issues as the choosing of postmasters. 

In the tree besides the grave we found our bison-ish tube.  You rarely hear about the Jews of Texas, much less see any signs of their lives outside the larger cities.  I say that, but I also remember a few years back when a gorgeous synagogue in a small town was physically moved to Austin because the last caretaker of it had died.  We all leave traces of our lives and passing through the world.  And here was one more.  But it was time to think of the living.  It was going to be lunch time soon so we got on the road to hit the next town on our journey…