Harriet Zumwalt was born in 1921 in Philadelphia and trained as a nurse at Lankenair Hospital and Nurses Training school in Philadelphia. Upon graduation from nursing school in 1943, she was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant in the U.S. Army Nurses Corps. By the end of the war, she was a 1st lieutenant. Harriet was assigned to the USAHS Seminole, an Army hospital ship, which supported the Italian invasion. While stationed on the Seminole, Harriet made fourteen Atlantic crossings caring for both wounded soldiers and prisoners-of-war.

Numerous destructive storms have passed through Grayson County, but one of biblical proportions is known as the Canaan Cyclone of 1919. It was part of a storm system which spread death and destruction from Hunt County, Texas to Ada, Oklahoma.

Elden “Buddy” Gray Nash Clayton was born in Bonham, TX, to Jessie Mae Nash and George Poe Clayton on September 29, 1926. After graduating from Bonham High School in 1943, Buddy joined the Army Air Forces and served from 1943-1946, becoming a 1st Lt. during WWII. He then attended Texas A&M University, receiving a bachelor’s degree in mathematics before joining the Air Force as an officer and jet pilot from 1950-1956.

Genie (Emma Gene Broadfoot) Chance graduated from Bonham High School in 1941 and from North Texas Teachers College (now the University of North Texas). She married William Chance in 1947 and they moved to Anchorage, Alaska in 1959, where Genie was one of the first women in Alaskan broadcast news. She was elected to the Alaska House of Representatives in 1968 and served for three terms and served a two-year term in the Alaska Senate.

Judge Albert Sidney Broadfoot, Sr., was born in a two-log cabin to Emma Pitt and W.A. Broadfoot in the community of Self in Fannin County, TX, on May 18, 1885. After graduating from East Texas Normal College (now East Texas A&M University in Commerce), he taught at the Emberson school in Lamar County, TX, and then became a teacher and superintendent in Leonard, TX. He attended the University of Chicago law school and the University of Texas law school, and joined the Texas Bar Association in 1912.

As the nation eagerly prepares to celebrate the America 250 milestone, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) stand at the forefront, continuing a tradition of service, remembrance, and patriotism begun in 1898.

The Orphan Train Movement sent abandoned or homeless children from Eastern cities of the US to foster homes in rural areas. An estimated 200,000 children were involved in the program. On November 18, 1898 a train carrying boys aged between 12 to 16 years arrived in Bonham. John E. Dibley (age 15) and his brother George Dibley (age 7) arrived on this train.

At the age of 20, in 1935, Wilbur Dean Chambers joined the Army and became a radio operator. Three weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, Dean volunteered to go with General Joseph W. Stilwell to Southeast Asia. On March 12, 1942 they were ordered to Burma where Japanese military groups had managed to slowly take control. To escape the Japanese, General Joseph W. Stilwell and 112 other people consisting of Stilwell’s army staff, British commandos, mechanics, nurses, civilians, a newspaper reporter, and a Chinese general and his personal bodyguards began walking 250 miles from central Burma to India. This event was later known as the Walkout.

Lelia Roberts became a Methodist missionary and worked in Mexico for 43 years, from 1887 to 1930. Lelia wrote in a letter to the newspaper, the Bonham Daily Favorite, on April 12, 1918, that “just one month has elapsed since Uncle Sam, at the earnest request of the Chaplain of the U.S. Senate, granted me a passport to Mexico, the first American woman, I am told, who has been thus favored.”

William (Bill) Alford was born in 1920 and grew up in the Panhandle. He joined the Army before World War II and when the war broke out he volunteered for combat and entered pilot training. He served as Captain of B-24 Liberator bombers and again volunteered, this time for a unit called "the Carpetbaggers," an elite secret unit of the OSS, forerunner of the CIA. After leaving the Air Force, he became a pilot for Braniff Airlines and after retirement he bought a cattle ranch near Windom.

Savoy, Texas native Margaret Carver joined the U.S. Navy as part of the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). She graduated from the Naval Post Graduate School in 1954 with a Master’s Degree in Aerological Engineering (meteorology). During her career in the WAVES and regular Navy service, Margaret worked around the world, including Rhein-Mein, Germany, in 1948 as the only WAVE operating in support during the Berlin Airlift. Later in her career, Margaret was assigned to the staff of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Atomic Energy in Washington, D.C. She retired in 1965 with the rank of commander.

John H. Floyd was born in Tennessee in 1850 and moved to Fannin County with his family in 1859. At the age of 15 he began to work small quarries of stone and “succeeded . . . in developing of the finest industry of the kind in north Texas. . .[H]e has furnished more building material of the kind than any other man in the State. The town of Honey Grove is built up almost exclusively with stone from his quarries. He has furnished material also for public buildings, court houses, jails, etc., for nearly all the county seat towns in north Texas. . . He has shipped extensively to Dallas, the Merchants’ Exchange there being built of material from his quarries.

His tombstone at Willow Wild Cemetery reads: “In memory of Lt. James Marcum Hardaway, who was born in the state of Georgia, 22d Sep 1825. of the Texas Rangers: and was killed in a fight with the Guerillos at Popajia, on the Road from Camargo to Monterey [Mexico] in the month of August 1847. he was Commanding an Escort with the mail. He was one of the many who have laid down their life for their Country."

Robert Samuel “Bob” Weddle was born in 1921 in Fannin County and attended school in Bonham. After attending Texas Tech University, he entered the US Navy during
World War II. After the war he finished his degree at Texas Tech. He learned to read Spanish and French handwriting. He received a grant that allowed him to spend a year working in the Spanish archives in Seville, Spain. In Madrid he found the journal of Juan Enriques Barroto, who had served as pilot for a Spanish expedition in search of La Salle’s Texas colony that had entered Matagorda Bay and discovered the remains of La Salle’s Texas colony and the remains of the Belle in 1867.

Max Levine was born on June 21, 1863, in New York, NY. His parents Jacob Levine and Bertha Bach were likely born in Kórnik, Prussia (modern-day Poland), and immigrated to the U.S., Jacob arriving in 1856 and Bertha bringing herself and four of her children a couple of years later. In the late 1800s and into the twentieth century, a number of Jewish merchants and their families moved to Bonham and engaged in the mercantile trade, the cotton business and bought and sold real estate.

Joseph Fenner, then a teenager, left Alabama in 1835 with his brother Robert to fight for Texas Independence under Captain Jack Shackelford as part of the Alabama Red Rovers. Both were at Goliad when the other soldiers, including Joseph, surrendered and were later massacred. However, Joseph was out on patrol at the time of the surrender and escaped being killed.

It was the late 1980s when Bonham residents Vera Ross and Mae Helen Higgs, sisters, were browsing through old family photographs, letters and other memorabilia that belonged to their parents, the late Sam and Marie Smith. Some of the items got them to wondering about interesting rumors that they had heard since childhood about their family. The rumors had always been surrounded by mystery.

Born in Bonham on April 2, 1908, Addison Bailey was the son of Annie Brandon and Bonham mayor Leonard Bailey. He was an accompanist to singer Eddie Davis of Leon and Eddie’s Night Club (a speakeasy turned restaurant and bar after the end of Prohibition in 1933) in New York City, NY, from 1930-1942, served in the China-Burma-India Theatre as part of Major General Claire Chennault’s Headquarters Staff in Kunming, China and went on to tour as an accompanist to Ethel Merman after the war photos courtesy of Fannin County Museum of History

Roberta Dodd (1895-1954) was born in the Tanktown section of Bonham. She attended Washington School and later worked as a waitress at Curtiss Boarding House. As a youth she sang in local churches, the Opera House and the Alexander Hotel. Benefactors in Chicago arranged for her to travel to Paris for study where she was trapped when the Nazis occupied France in 1940.

Earl “Red” W. Young, son of Carrie Wright and Isom Young, was born in Ravenna, TX, on August 2, 1919. Red joined the Army medical corps on May 2, 1944, and served in the European Theatre with the 120th Evacuation Hospital in General George Patton’s 3rd Army during WWII. He was with the 3rd Army when they liberated Buchenwald Concentration Camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945, and found about 21,000 people there. (photo from The Men and Women in World War II from Fannin County)

Cleo Morrison was born in Telephone and educated in Telephone, Bonham and Greenville schools. She graduated at East Texas State and did postgraduate work at UT in Austin.

Smith Lipscomb and Sallie Gouldelock Lipscomb. Smith Lipscomb was at Fort Sumter, perhaps as a civilian, in South Carolina on April 12, 1861, when the Confederate States of America military forces attacked the U.S. military forces at Fort Sumter, beginning the Civil War (1861-1865).

Locals from northeast Texas will find the initial 2026 programs presented by the WWII History Roundtable, Audie Murphy Chapter, to be exceptionally linked to the region. One of those WWII participants spotlighted will be Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s co-pilot, the late Richard E. "Dick" Cole (pictured), who was interviewed in 2009 by Dr. Sloan as part of Baylor’s Institute of Oral History. This will be fodder for the April 23 program to be given by Columbia University Professor and Attorney Michel Paradis.

The era of great trail drives was ending, and Erwin Smith was determined to document the open-range lifestyle before it disappeared completely. He visited and worked on ranches in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, documenting the cowboy way of life at the time when the open range was disappearing.

Alonzo “Daddy” John Wemple was born on October 1, 1833, to Phoebe Chadsey and John Bunyon Wemple in Schenectady, NY. When he was 17 years old in 1851, Alonzo joined a career in the railroad industry in New York. He watched the industry change, from burning wood to coal and from trains having names to numbers. In 1865, he piloted the train carrying former President Abraham Lincoln’s body from Schenectady to Troy, NY.

Honeycomb salami at Fischer's Meat Market in Muenster, Texas. Think of it as a trip to the Hill Country, minus the trip and, well, there really aren't any hills, either, come to think about it. What you will find in Muenster, Texas is a little bit of Bavaria just south of Red River.