Plug pulled on East End landmark

(An uncropped version can be found at Wikipedia. Official license.)

According to today's Chronicle, the neon Maxwell House sign is no more. The plant was sold to another company. The sign wasn't part of the sale and is actually a trademark belonging to the previous owner, Kraft Foods.

The article states that Maxwell House moved to the Harrisburg site in 1947. Originally, the location was home to a Ford assembly plant.

Personally, I remember seeing it when I used to look out over Prairie Street from the Wortham Center. It certainly was a distinctive sign at night.

A Hanging in Harrisburg

On June 29, 1859, the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph reported the lynching of George White.

White, a railroad laborer standing over six feet tall, was accused of seizing a 12-year-old girl near Harrisburg and raping her. He fled to Galveston, where he was taken into custody and brought before a magistrate two days later.

Arrangements were made to take White to Houston and put him in jail. Accompanying him were Galveston's deputy sheriff and a constable from Harrisburg.

The newspaper account continues:

About a mile and a half from Harrisburg they were surrounded by forty or fifty men in disguise, who tied the deputy sheriff and constable, and seized upon the prisoner and hung him to the branch of a tree.

Indignant at the dispensing of mob justice, the newspaper concluded:

Whenever the law is taken into the hands of the people its moral force is weakened, and a too frequent resort to lynching will break down all regard for the laws of the land. We can accord no praise to the executioners of White, though we cannot say that he did not deserve the fate he came to.

The newspaper published the name of the 12-year-old victim -- something you wouldn't see in today's media.

The race of the victim and the suspect were not provided, so I'm not sure the lynching was racially motivated.