Transcript:
This is just some background on the song "Now There's Nothing." That song was inspired, not based on, but inspired by the history of the small town that I live nearby, Sutherland Springs, Texas. A very old town. It was first founded...well it was two reasons. One because they knew the railroad was going to come through here, and there's a creek. And also because the creek had a very large hot sulfur springs, which a man named John Sutherland turned into a very famous resort spa. He built a huge hotel...here's a couple of pictures of the hotel...that's a pretty good picture there...and then here's another picture, not quite so good, but you can see it's got all those trees with Spanish moss hanging from them and everything. And here's a picture of the pool, full of people having a lot of fun long, long ago. They had a pool, they also had the hot springs, where people would come from all over the country to soak in those hot springs, because, you know, it was believed, and many still believe, that it helps to cure various ailments or at least make you feel better. I know it makes you feel better. I went into a hot springs once, it was in Colorado, not here, and it's a very pleasant experience.
You can see on this photo here, it's kind of hard to see all those small photos around the edge, but in the middle you can see a big blurb for Sutherland Springs. You could catch a train from San Antonio or Victoria, I think, and come here. The train would drop you off pretty close to the hotel, probably.
Here's a picture of the old depot, Sunset Depot. None of these buildings are here anymore. They're all gone. There are a few buildings left. There is, well I couldn't find a good picture of it. There's only two buildings left of Old Sutherland Springs. One is...it probably was a general store or something like that, and for some reason it's still standing. It's on private property now, even though you can drive right up to it and look at it, it's not fenced or anything. Somebody probably uses it to store their tractor or something, I don't know.
The other building was the bank. I mean, it is the bank, or it was the bank but it's still standing. Here's a picture of it with a bunch of the local bigwigs standing outside. And then, here's what it looks like now. It's an interesting spot. I've been in it, even though it's on private property. It's also not fenced. It's not protected in any way and the road drives right by it. I went in there because there's supposed to be a geocache in there, and back when I was geocaching I went in there looking for it. Couldn't find it. But I poked around inside. Of course, there's trees growing up inside and everything now too, and the vault is still in there, the door is standing open, and that's pretty creepy. I poked around in the vault with my flashlight and there was some little animal that scurried off into the corner and I think there was a bat hanging from the ceiling or something like that.
Now, what happened to the old town...the springs had already...oh, before I go into that I should say that Sutherland Springs was the original county seat of Wilson County. But during the Civil War, the city of Floresville became much larger and more the center of commerce of the county, so after the Civil War the county seat was moved there, and it's still there.
Now, what happened is that before the Civil War, there was not a lot of farmers around here, it was mainly a tourist destination, and the only "farm" anywhere around was a cotton plantation owned by James? I think his first name was, his last name was Polley. And he built this big mansion, which most people around here now refer to as "the Polley Mansion," although he called it Whitehall. And here's an old picture from back in the black & white days, I don't know, probably back in the 50s or 40s, maybe. Here's a picture of it now, this is a very current picture. It went through...oh I'm skipping ahead again.
So what happened is after the Civil War, when slavery was no longer legal, and the plantation didn't have a lot of cheap labor to grow cotton, all the lands were sold off, except for just where the house is, to a lot of farmers, and there was a huge influx of farmers all over the area, not just on the old plantation, but everywhere around here, and all the new farmers used a lot of water to grow their crops, and it caused the water table to start falling and the springs started drying up. And then in the late 1800s there was a really terrible flood which wiped out everything except for those two buildings that I mentioned, the bank and the other building. And the flood also choked off the hot springs...they were gone. They're no longer there. So what little was left was condemned and torn down, so where the old hotel used to be, that's all gone. It's not there anymore. And also it's on private property and you can't just go poking around on it.
So that's what happened to the old town. The people who were left just kind of moved up the hill and rebuilt the town, so most of the stuff here now is up on the hill above the creek where it's safely out of the flood plain. Some people do still live down in the flood plain, and when we had that bad flood in 1998, which was much, much worse than the old 1900-or-so flood, there was some houses destroyed, some houses flooded and refurbished so they could be lived in again.
So, this song was just sort of a flight of fancy, not based on anything real but just sort of a story of a ghost...who just wanders the creek banks and the woods...forever, I guess. So that's what it was all about. I guess that's all I have to say about it. Thank you.
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