Moments in Texas History ~ 6/1/2011

Folk Festival inaugurated in Kerrville

June 01, 1972

On this day in 1972, the first Kerrville Folk Festival opened in the Kerrville Municipal Auditorium. The three-day festival was the outgrowth of several Austin musical events held during the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. That first festival drew 2,800 fans and featured thirteen performers. By 1973 the event had expanded to five concerts over three nights, and 5,600 people jammed the overcrowded Kerrville Auditorium. The next year, the festival was moved outside, to a newly acquired sixty-acre site nine miles south of Kerrville. The warm ambience of the festival, the campfire singing, and the quality of the performers attracted worldwide attention. By the 1990s the festival had expanded to an eighteen-day schedule over three weekends, and attendance had grown to 25,000. By 1993 more than two dozen of the early "unknown" performers at Kerrville had earned national recording contracts.
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Partisan leader promoted

June 01, 1864

On this day in 1864, celebrated Confederate partisan Adam Rankin (Stovepipe) Johnson was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. Johnson was born in Henderson, Kentucky, and moved to Texas in 1854. There he gained a reputation as the surveyor of much virgin territory in West Texas, as an Indian fighter, and as a stage driver for the Butterfield Overland Mail. With the outbreak of the Civil War Johnson returned to Kentucky and enlisted as a scout under Nathan Bedford Forrest. His subsequent exploits as commander of the Texas Partisan Rangers within the federal lines in Kentucky earned him a colonel's commission in August 1862 and a promotion to brigadier general in 1864. One of his most remarkable feats was the capture of Newburgh, Indiana, from a sizable Union garrison with only twelve men and two joints of stovepipe mounted on the running gear of an abandoned wagon. This episode won him his nickname. Johnson was blinded and captured at a skirmish at Grubb's Crossroads in August 1864. Upon his release he returned to Texas, where he lived for his remaining sixty years and founded the town of Marble Falls, "the blind man's town."
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posted by Jeff ~ 6.1.2011
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