Word: stricklands
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...Texas originally gave title to the land in question to an illiterate young Southerner named Wilson Strickland who had migrated west, presumably had fought in the Texas revolution. The tract was hilly, bone-dry, good for nothing except a scrubby growth of pine, and Strickland never bothered with it. He left Montgomery County, vanished into mists of hearsay; some people said he had been shot to death. In 1847 a Portuguese freebooter and slave trader named Allen Vince sued him for a $200 debt, got a judgment against the land. But Vince never bothered with it either...
...bought up leases based on one deed, of doubtful origin, which had been ticking around Texas for 40 years. The company also tracked down some 60 descendants of old Allen Vince, paid them $300,000, gave them royalty rights. But Bumble's lawyers were still worried about Wilson Strickland. They cut off the Vinces' royalty payments, invited them to start a lawsuit which would settle title for once & all, advertised for heirs of Wilson Strickland to join in the suit...
...advertisement produced startling results. When the trial began in Conroe, some 5,000 people claimed to be heirs. They traced their family lines back to various different Wilson Stricklands who had migrated to Texas from the Southeast, tried to prove that their Wilson Strickland was the right one. As evidence they introduced 1,000 Bibles with family histories on the flyleaves, old letters, snuff boxes, muskets, a muzzle-loading shotgun, other heirlooms...
There are 13 Atlantas in the U. S., but only one mattered last week.* Atlanta, Ga. was the place where Gone With the Wind opened (see p. 30); where Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh passed by and the Negroes said: "I seen 'em!"; where Banker Robert Strickland wept for Melanie and said: "By God, I'm not ashamed"; where young ladies in their grandmas' crinolines and young bucks in fawn vests and pantaloons skittered through Peachtree Street and Henry Grady Square at dawn; where old, old people remembered the Battle of Atlanta and Sherman and the flames...
...Strickland Gillilan of Washington, D. C. is a veteran newspaperman, onetime president of American Press Humorists, best known as author of the line: "Off agin, on agin, gone agin, Finnigin...