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Parts of the country were quite chaotic during 1968, as assassinations, riots and the Vietnam War dominated the national news (although I remember that the Apollo 8 lunar orbit on Christmas Eve helped end the year on a high note). Things in Llano County, on the other hand, seemed to be going along quite smoothly. The lead headline in The Llano News on January 4, 1968, was “1967 was Generally Good and Prosperous.” Among the bits of evidence cited to back up that statement w ...

After learning a little more about Darrell Staedtler’s accomplishments last week, I decided to look at copies of The Llano News in 1983 to see how much of a stir his Number One hit, A Fire I Can’t Put Out, made in Llano that year. For the surprising answer, read on. The year started calmly enough.

Lone Grove is one of the oldest communities in Llano County; it got its name from a grove of pecan trees between Dreary Hollow and the Little Llano River, about eight miles northeast of where the town of Llano would be built a few years later. John Coggin opened a stage stop and store there in 1852, and a short time later the Carter brothers (George, Doc and Ben) settled nearby.

Joe Randerson is a charter member of what Tom Brokaw so famously calls “The Greatest Generation.” You’d never guess his age if you just happened to see him riding by on his motorcycle, but he was born around 1922, and grew up during the depression on an 80-acre farm about five miles south of the capitol building (a farm long since engulfed by the spreading city of Austin.

Charles Haynes was born on September 12, 1814, in Brattleboro, Vermont. Orphaned at an early age, he went to New York City, where he learned the trade of a mechanic. As a 22-year-old working in Cincinnati, he enlisted in the Texas army at a recruiting station set up by an emissary of General Sam Houston.

For the last 36 years, according to the Texas Department of Agriculture website, the Family Land Heritage Program has been honoring farms and ranches that have been in continuous agricultural operation by the same family for 100 years or more. As of 2008, a total of 39 Llano County ranches had been among the honorees, starting in 1974 with the Leifeste Ranch (founded in 1852, on the west side of Llano County) and the M.L.

In 1943, when I was five years old, my mother and I moved to Llano, and lived with my grandfather, Sid Smith, and “Granny.” This arrangement was not unusual in those days because a woman living by herself was frowned upon by society, and could rarely make a living wage.

The old “Red Top Jail” is one of Llano’s greatest historic treasures, and one of the most dramatic remaining evidences of the boom town that exploded out of the “wild, wild west” in the early 1890s. But to Crime Stoppers Coordinator Janie Prew, the Llano County Jail was also a wedding chapel, a workplace and a home. Janie married Ken Rhoades, whose sister and brother-in-law (Ben and Betty Graham) were the jailers, in 1970.

Forty-five years ago (in January, 1965), Gale Ligon took the oath of office as the new sheriff of Llano County. Carlos Ashley Jr. was named county attorney. The Llano News announced that Llano county had received 35 inches of “badly-needed rain” in 1964, and plans were announced for a new Catholic church in Kingsland.

More than one hundred and forty years ago, in the days before barbed wire fences, John Oatman Jr. chose a fairly smooth and open spot on the south bank of the Llano River to build cattle pens for his own western-style “stock brokerage” business. Here he would buy, hold and sell herds of cattle for those who wished to drive them “up the trail” to markets in the north. As the country became more civilized, the spot became the home of Isaiah Robinson, who used it ...