Copyright 2006 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
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The long decline of the small town of Ringgold is likely to accelerate on the heels of a devastating blaze
By THOMAS KOROSEC
The Houston Chronicle (Texas)
RINGGOLD, Texas — Even before the fire, the dusty one-room office of the Ringgold Volunteer Fire Department was the place in town where people could gather around a coffee pot, stamp their feet against the cold and, as they say, visit for a while.
“Whether someone’s put in their winter wheat, there’d be talk like that,” said Tom Stillwell, 66, a Ringgold native who left for a career in teaching and returned to ranch in this gently rolling grass country five miles from the Oklahoma line.
The fire department - three hand-me-down trucks and a handful of volunteers - was again the center of activity last week as locals mingled with state workmen who arrived to haul off debris left by a New Year’s Day grass fire.
The blaze leveled more than 80 percent of the habitable structures in Ringgold and charred nearly 40,000 acres of rangeland, according to Jimmie Badgett, an emergency-management officer with the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The wildfire, which moved as a swirling wall 30 to 40 feet tall, began about five miles west of Ringgold. A sparking power line is the suspected cause.
Pushed by 40-mph winds, it headed east across thigh-high fields of bluestem and other grazing grasses and straight into town. There, it took less than an hour to destroy 58 homes, 57 barns and storage sheds and six businesses along U.S. Highway 82, Badgett said.
As front-end loaders piled charred bricks, bicycles, the remains of a decorative wagon wheel and other ash-gray debris into Texas Department of Transportation trucks, residents wondered what will become of their long-fading town and who, if anyone, will rebuild.
“A lot of them won’t be back. This is going to be a smaller place,” Stillwell said.
“Many of these were older people. Many of them were poor people,” he noted. “They’re gonna need help wherever they go.”
Larry Fenoglio, 52, is a rancher and volunteer firefighter who, in the absence of government in the unincorporated town, was given the task of contacting property owners and obtaining their consent for the cleanup.
“The majority of the houses that burned, they were older, in borderline condition, and a lot of them were rentals with no insurance,” he said, adding that perhaps five of the 30 inhabited houses carried coverage.
“With no insurance, they’re not going to rebuild. Maybe three or four will move back in,” he said. “The rest of them, I don’t know.”
New town, new home
The displaced have moved temporarily to Wichita Falls, Nocona, Henrietta, or Bowie, where the Red Cross arranged temporary housing.
Among them are Fenoglio’s parents, whose house across a wide field from his burned to the ground when sparks falling from a front-yard pine tree ignited the roof.
“First day, I couldn’t answer my phone I got so many calls from friends and family who wanted to help,” he said, explaining that his parents had relocated for a while to Nocona. “We sent them away so they wouldn’t have to look at all this.”
The fire went right over Fenoglio’s one-story brick house, which now sits in an expanse of black, wind-blown dirt. It killed his dog, Duke, a yellow Lab who was penned in the yard, and several calves that were on the 800 acres of his pastures that burned.
“After the shock wore off, people realized we’re all here alive and able to sift through that debris,” Fenoglio said. “I don’t know if anyone has figured what’s next.”
Here and there, one can find people who vow to rebuild and keep Ringgold on the map, even as they concede it has been on a long, slow fade.
“We’re stout. We’re close together. We’re gonna have a town here no matter what,” said Darrell “Wig” Fuller, 70, a lifelong resident who lost his metal shop in the fire and says he will rebuild.
Founded in 1893
Fuller and others remember a time, 50 years ago, when Ringgold had a grocery store, eight service stations, a doctor and a dentist and several thriving businesses, including a cotton gin and a lumber yard.
Founded in 1893 by merchants who set up shop at the intersection of two railroad lines, the Katy and the Rock Island, Ringgold once was the largest town in Montague County, according to the county historical society.
But fires in 1939 and 1958 destroyed its old main street, where in its early 20th-century heyday stood two hotels and a newspaper office. The difficult economics of ranching and flight of younger people to the cities in the past half-century eroded the rest of the town’s center.
Today, five years after the Bonham Grocery and a Fina station closed, a can of soda or gallon of gas is five miles away, in Terral, Okla.
The post office, which burned but was replaced within a week by a new, gray modular building, two churches, the fire department and the 47-student regional Ringgold Elementary School are the only public buildings left.
The school, just north of the burn path, draws from a broad area, so enrollment has not been affected by the fire, said teacher Kristi Caldwell.
“We only missed one day of school,” Caldwell said.
But children - or even adults young enough to be parents of children - are scarce in Ringgold.
“It’s very hard to keep young people here,” said Fenoglio, whose family roots in the area go back to the late 1800s. He is the youngest member of the board that oversees the local cemetery. The next-youngest is 78.
Fenoglio blames the town’s decline on ranching’s poor returns and a rural lifestyle that many find dull.
“The last three or four years have been good for ranchers, but there are a lot of lean years in between,” he said. “Me and another boy out here my age are the youngest ones I know trying to make a living at it.”
As for entertainment, Fenoglio said, “We hunt and fish. But if you want to see a movie, Wichita Falls is 30 miles away. McDonald’s is 20 miles away. There’s no Starbucks.”
In this regard, Ringgold shares its fate with thousands of small towns in Texas and beyond.
The number of Texans living in towns with populations less than 2,500 dropped from 19.7 percent of the state population in 1990 to 17.5 percent in 2000, the U.S. Census shows.
Losses in what Texas A&M University sociologist Rogelio Saenz calls “hard-core agricultural areas” are even more pronounced because some small towns with scenic or recreational attractions are gaining population.
“Young people have been leaving the Ringgolds,” Saenz said. “It’s a trend that hasn’t reversed.”
Fire followed drought
For the ranchers who remain in town and in the surrounding countryside, the fire has only compounded difficulties presented by months of severe drought.
In Montague County, where the Ringgold fire burned a strip 17 miles long, ranchers lost their grazing grasses and hay stocks, said Justin Hansard, the county agricultural extension agent.
“You can’t find hay at any price, so right now we’re in the process of trying to put a couple of loads together from Kansas,” Hansard said.
“It won’t go far,” he admitted, “but it will be enough to help some of these guys hang on a little longer.”
Johnny Reynolds, 51, a Ringgold resident and county director for the federal Farm Service Agency in neighboring Clay County, said emergency agricultural programs that could help ranchers buy feed or repair fences were depleted by last year’s hurricanes.
The blaze destroyed between 300 and 500 miles of fences, which cost about $8,000 a mile to replace, he said.
“Unless they get more appropriations, the feds aren’t the answer,” said Reynolds, who suffered second-degree burns on his hands and right arm when a wall of flame engulfed a fire truck he was riding on as he fled his house on the western edge of town.
And the threat of more fires remains.
The tragedy in numbers
Grass fires since December have killed three people, burned more than 200,000 acres and destroyed at least 250 homes across Texas, state officials say. Harder hit than Ringgold was Cross Plains, 130 miles west of Fort Worth, where two women died and 120 homes were destroyed.
At the door of the fire department’s garage last week, Reynolds got a little help from 62-year-old Rick Alexander as he applied some tape to the gauze bandages on his hands. Alexander wore bandages, too.
“I got burned here (on his hands), underneath my arm, both ears, around my neck and the top of my back,” said Alexander, a volunteer firefighter. “It happened so fast I really don’t know how it happened. We were there in the smoke, and all of a sudden I felt heat. We took off, but it caught us.”
A lifelong resident of Ringgold, he makes a 40-minute commute to Wichita Falls to his job as a construction worker.
“I expect this will put this town down for a while, but it’ll bounce back,” he said, the white salve on his burned ears glistening in the sun.
“People ask me why don’t I move to Wichita (Falls),” he added. “I say, `Why? All my friends are here.’ ”