Sosebee's Bluff
Donated by Carolyn SosebeeThis was written in the early 50's after the Whitney Dam was completed.
(George Washington Sosebee was my husband's great grandfather. There is a sign there now that says Sosebee's Bluff, but the other sign saying Soldier's Bluff still stands. The Corp still will not let the name be changed even though all federal maps now say Sosebee's Bluff. Efforts are still being made for name change.)
The following article concerning Sosebee's Bluff was taken from a Whitney, Texas newspaper (Whitney Star) several years ago. When the Army Corp of Engineers was constructing the dam, they mistakenly named this bluff "Soldier's Bluff".
"No one knows just when George Washington Sosebee's parents left South Carolina to settle in Georgia where George was born, August 15, 1850. He was too young for participation in the Civil War, but the Reconstruction world he grew up to face gave him all of that era he ever wanted.
Reconstruction reached its most odious stages in the mid '70's and George Sosebee determined that he could stand no more of it. On the raw frontier, he reasoned, there must exist a place where no Reconstruction Official or carpetbagger would venture.
His exact date of departure is unknown, and he may not have come directly to the Whitney area, but he was here by 1875, where he married Alice Catherine Pierce on the 7th day of February, 1876.
Sosebee had found his Reconstruction retreat.
He built his home on the Bosque County side of the Brazos River in the overhang of a sheer limestone precipice just above the mouth of the Big Rocky Creek.
The Sosebee home site was then one of the most picturesque in Central Texas. The imposing cliff, which afterwards came to be called Sosebee's Bluff, curved for a distance of several miles in and out of coves and canyons, its massive white walls pocked with seams and caves that were just beginning to yield their archeological secrets when Lake Whitney sealed them shut.
The house stood in the bottom land forest on a point of land between the Brazos and the place where Big Rocky came tumbling down its gorge through the bluff.
It was a hunter's paradise and a fisherman's dream.
The Brazos was fordable at that point, but it was not a regular crossing.
Sosebee found a place just above his house where a wagon could, with care, be maneuvered up and down the bluff. He improved the natural cut as best he could, and often used it when cutting poles and posts in the cedar brake above the cliff. The place, now federal land, is still marked by the scars of Sosebee's wagon wheels. Few others except his sons ever dared it, and not even the Sosebees could descend loaded. They could take an empty wagon up the bluff, cut and load cedar poles, then haul them to the edge and throw them down. The sheer drop was then about 90 feet.
G. W. Sosebee died January 18, (1897), while still in the vigor of his manhood. He left a (39)-year-old widow with small children, Walter, John and Mattie, to make a living for themselves on his wilderness farm. With the assistance of her family, the Pierces, and of neighbors, the family made a go of it, but it could not have been easy.
Walter Sosebee, after his marriage to Lottie Overton, made his home in his mother's house and raised his family there, where his only son, Donald Sosebee, became the last Sosebee, to intimately know the caves and winding chasms of Sosebee's Bluff. Walter took his family to live on another farm in 1922.
The old Sosebee Cabin was salvaged before the lake was filled, and various parts of it still exist.
When the Corps of Engineers was attempting to familiarize itself with local names in 1949-1950, a verbal misunderstanding somehow occurred when they asked about th e great rock bluff that would anchor one end of their dam. They recorded the name as Soldier's Bluff, and so has remained to this day.
Present Corps officials acknowledge that an error was made, but they question the wisdom of changing the name after all these years. They point out that the change would cost a surprising sum of money-they estimate several thousand dollars-and would cause a great deal of trouble. They say such a move would be considered only if a large number of citizens should officially request it. The probability is that pioneer George Sosebee has forever lost his remarkable monument."