The Naples Monitor (Naples, Tex.), Vol. 126, No. 30, Ed. 1 Thursday, September 6, 2012 Page: 2 of 10
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The Monitor Naples, Texas 75568-0039 Thursday, September 6, 2012 Page 2
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Pat Tomberlain, a historian of Atlanta, and former Naples man, is attempting to show the
location of Wheatville in Morris County to Cass County Genealogical members. The
village is now vanished, but Tomberlain knows its history. His descendants lived there.
Wheatville
The town that moved
and became Naples
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Wheatville, though now having ceased to exist, will be
remembered as the birthplace of its most famous native,
U.S. Senator Morris Sheppard, born there in May of 1875.
By Neil Abeles
Monitor Correspondent
Wheatville no longer exists. It
picked up, moved itself and be-
came Naples.
Historian Patrick Tomberlain
enjoys bringing the village back
to life. Several of his relatives
lived there. He visited them as a
child and for many years after-
wards, enjoying the attention of
his grandmother Lillie Vissering
who lived to be 94 in 1971.
Tomberlain recalled memories
for a recent meeting in Naples of
the Cass County Genealogical So-
ciety. The vanished Wheatville
was located nearby, just three or
four miles away.
The Vissering family cemetery
is next to the Wheatville Cem-
etery. These are the only physical
evidence left of the town. The rest
is memory and imagination.
Tomberlain gave colorful ac-
counts of life on the Vissering
farm with its several buildings,
working fields and a race track as
well for entertainment.
He traced the official back-
ground of the town that used to
be Wheatville was settled in 1852,
named for the family of William
Wheat.
It was a time before railroads,
when wagon roads crossed the
prairie carrying goods and people.
Travelers needed to camp out.
The Wheats were said to have
opened a store in a log house to
sell canned goods, cheese and
whiskey. They prospered.
When the Rev. Sam Morris
came from Alabama, he found
four villages in the area, each
without a school or church. He
organized one in each, and later
Morris County, which would be
carved out of Titus and thus where
Wheatville was originally located,
would be named after him.
W. B. Sheppard became a
leader in the area and helped
form two units of Confederate
volunteers, most of whom were
enthusiastic about going off to
fight. But many never returned.
Capt. Sheppard himself died well
away home.
"Wheatville lost leaders like
Sheppard to the war, but so much
suffering occurred. His wife Mary
Elizabeth lost their three year-
old-son in 1863, and his is the
first known burial in the old
Wheatville Cemetery that has a
marked grave," Tomberlain said.
Tomberlain somberly told
some of these stories and showed
Civil War equipment to the crowd
of about 35 attend ing.
Wheatville got a post office in
1868. Life bustled for awhile.
Two of its main contributions
were political, Tomberlain told.
John Sheppard, an early citizen,
was elected to the U.S. House of
Representatives. John Morris
Sheppard, who was born at
Wheatville, would be elected to
the House as well as to the U.S.
Senate from 1913 to 1941.
"Senator Sheppard's visit to
Germany before the war was so
important that his warning to
President Roosevelt about the
Luftwaffe's strength helped start
a modernization of our Army Air
Corps," Tomberlain said.
Wheatville was gone by the
time of Sheppard's elections, how-
ever. The town began to close up
when the Texas and St. Louis
Railroad decided it could not lay
track in those hills and moved
three miles to the south.
This new town was known as
Belden first and then became
Naples.
The railroad decision had oc-
curred in the late 1870s, and, by
1882, the post office was trans-
ferred.
Today, the region is green and
quiet, well off the beaten path.
The cemetery, however, has
an official state historical marker
and is tended by an association
led by Mrs. Ora Whitecotton
Clubb.
Family names here are of
Whitecotton, Pope, Matthews,
Wright and Heards. Descendants
are still in the area.
But this town in time, like
many others of its era, has ceased
to exist.
Yet not only the town is gone.
When the trains came, the roads
gave up, too. They lost their im-
portance. Travel by them had
been difficult. They were often so
bad that it was easier to walk or
ride by the side of the road, along
the edge of the cotton fields.
The paths are still memorable,
however, and where they can be
located a sense of history is en-
gendered. Wheatville had been
at the crossing of the Fulton, Ark,
to Sulphur Springs and the
Jefferson to Clarksville wagon
roads.
Tomberlain, the popular his-
tory teacher for Atlanta High
School, is retired now, but his
knowledge of this region is so
extensive that each time he
speaks a crowd gathers.
His signature presentations
are about family, close associates,
neighbors and local places.
For his Wheatville talk, for ex-
ample, Tomberlain drew upon his
Vissering family histories. His
mother was Rose Evalyn Vis-
sering Tomberlain. His grandfa-
ther Pieter Jacobus Vissering had
come from Germany to be a Texas
cowboy. Stories around this are
many. Vissering is a prominent
name in the Naples area.
"Everyone knew Papa as H. J.
Vissering for he had changed his
German name from Pieter Ja-
cobus to sound more American,"
Tomberlain said.
"He had a cousin up north
named H. J. Vissering who be-
came a millionaire CEO of
Goodyear Airship Corporation,
and there is a story about him
ridi ng in the Graf Zeppelin and
insisting that it land and depart
in a way that kept the Nazi Swas-
tika away from the crowds."
In its day, the H. J. Vissering
Farm and Ranch employed all
the family and up to 12 tenant
families. In the 1930s, it was
known for the horse breeding of
Hambletonian trotter horses for
harness racing and buggy trot-
ting.
"That legacy is still alive,"
Tomberlain concluded. "Today I
have 11 buggies myself and still
enjoy working horses."
Tomberlain's writing of the his-
tory can be found online by search-
ing for the computer website
"visseringfamily.com" and seeing
his article on the family geneal-
ogy.
On his website, Tomberlain
says he has a "hundred years of
our family in genealogy and pho-
tographs ... I wish everyone of the
younger family members could
have experienced all this. There
is nothing like those fresh Elberta
peaches in ice cream or those
singings around Aunt Hattie's
grand piano or just all the kids
playing together in the big hay-
loft and down to the ponds.
"I will never forget the first
time I could relate some event in
Texas or American history I had
first learned about from Mama
(Lillie) on that big old cool front
porch of a summer afternoon."
This marker is one of the few physical remains that helps
to locate where the old village of Wheatville used to be.
Jonathan Tomberlain, an Atlanta High graduate and now an educator for the Pleasant
Grove ISD, as his mother, Sue, and father, Pat, were for Atlanta schools, stands beneath
the cemetery arch of his relatives, the Visserlngs of the Wheatville area of years past.
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Pat Tomberlain shows an old photo of the H. J. Vissering farm and ranch as it was in the now-vanished village
of Wheatville. Vissering is a well-known family name in the Naples area, and Tomberlain is a descendant.
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Craig, Morris. The Naples Monitor (Naples, Tex.), Vol. 126, No. 30, Ed. 1 Thursday, September 6, 2012, newspaper, September 6, 2012; Naples, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth291753/m1/2/: accessed June 13, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Atlanta Public Library.