Copyright © 2009-2010 Bishop Centennial Celebration, Inc. All rights reserved. Updated December 5, 2009

Bishop, Nueces County, Texas 1910 - 2010  One Hundred Years of South Texas Heritage!

Mr. and Mrs. Otto Kieschnick and sons Walter, Otto,

Louis Arthur, Edwin and John and daughters Selma

(Mrs. L. H. Krause) and Laura (Mrs. E. O. Dube)

came from Thorndale to Bishop in 1912.

The farm that Mr. Keischnick had selected was a

mile and a half northeast of town and on this tract

he built the two story wide-galleried white house

that stands there today.

Mr. Kieschnick was a first-rate farmer, and in later

years he was often greatly disgusted at the way

farm hands did the job. Members of the family

recall that after his 80th birthday, he protested over

the hand pulling instead of picking cotton, so he

strapped on a sack and picked five bales just to

show them how it should be done.

John Kieschnick, the youngest son, has an early memory of a "six-foot rattlesnake, coyotes caught and put in cages,

pack rats that picked cotton from the open bolls and piled it three feet high along the farm fences".

"In that day", says John, "the best of the mules were shipped in during harvest season from Oklahoma, and auctioned off

every Saturday on the lot off the main street. A top pair of mules would bring $700".

Bishop’s First Families

James Norman (Joe) Price, Sr. came to the Bishop area in the early part of October,

1911, and operated four steam plows, breaking land all over the Bishop community

and around Robstown. With most of the land in cultivation he started farming land

he bought on the old McElroy place west of Bishop.

In 1917 he married Annelle Massey, a member of the G. P. Massey family, who had

moved to Bishop from Lott, Texas in September, 1912.

Today, Mrs. Price and her son, J. N. Price, Jr., make their home on Sixth St., just

across the street from land the Prices farmed for years. The things she enjoyed

most, Mrs. Price said, was meeting all the new people, and taking part of the

activities of the First Baptist Church.

[The following are from the Bishop News of 1960 in a series written by Mrs. Gail Tubbs for Bishop's

then upcoming Golden Jubilee celebration.]

The R. R. Menn family which moved here in 1911 always "took the cake" for having the largest family in the

community. There were 14 children, several born at the farm home west of Bishop. Mrs. Menn and 13 of the

children still live here or in surrounding towns. One has a hard time telling exactly what a Menn boy's name really is,

since all of them have nicknames. The oldest members of the family served in World War I, and youngest, including

one daughter, Alvina, were in the armed forces during World War II. The Menn farm was a "plowed island in a

vacant prairie" for a long time, and mud between there and town was so deep it took a span of mules to pull

stripped-down wagon runners to town for the necessary groceries that couldn't be raised on the farm. Mrs. Menn

and two sons still live in the original farm home, with a quarter-mile long palm-lined driveway.

Jim Ross came to Bishop in December, 1918, from Mexia, and as

a youngster drove a tractor that broke some of the first land for

cultivation, working under a Mr. Cobb, who later was the first man

to be buried in the present Bishop Cemetery.

Mrs. Ross, who was the former Ruth Richardson of Alice, writes

that as a point of local interest that father and three daughters,

Jimmie Ruth, Janie, and Patricia, all graduated from Bishop High

School.

"We took part in the first 'Coronation of the Queen' pageant ever

staged in the Bishop schools", Mrs. Ross writes. "This was in 1936,

and Jeanette Haralson (Mrs. E. C. True) was crowned queen and J. D. Howard, Jr., was king. The former Evalyn

White, now Mrs. J. E. Smith of Beaumont, staged the coronation".