After listening to testimony on Allen’s Creek Reservoir in the Texas House Natural Resources Committee this session, water attorney, Vanessa Puig-Williams, was reminded of a poem her Great-, Great-Aunt Grace Keelan, wrote about the Brazos River.
As a child, Vanessa remembers weekend trips to her Aunt Grace’s farm in Navasota. Grace was born in 1893 in Cheyenne Wyoming, moving to Texas with her family as a child, ultimately buying land in Navasota in the 1930’s, where she lived on her own until her death at 100 years of age in 1993.
A former legal secretary and an avid reader and writer, Grace raised pigs on her farm and grew her own produce, hand pumping water from a well on the property for all of her needs. Although there is no date on this poem, Vanessa believes she likely wrote it in the late 1930’s after the Brazos River Authority was created and before Possum Kingdom was built.
