Our Waco Halloween story this year involves well-known attorney Col. James M. Norris — at least, he was well-known in the first 25 years or so of Waco history.
Norris is prominently featured in Waco and McLennan County, Texas, Containing a City Directory of Waco, Historical Sketches of the City and County; Biographical Sketches and Notices of a Few Prominent Citizens (John Sleeper and J.C. Hutchins, 1875); “Types of Successful Men of Texas” (L.E. Daniell, 1890); “Memorial and Biographical History of McLennan, Falls, Bell and Coryell Counties” (Sleeper and Hutchins, 1893); Waco Bar and Incidents of Waco History (Sleeper and Alan D. Sanford, 1941); and even The Handbook of Waco and McLennan County, Texas (Dayton Kelley, ed., 1972), among others, so he must have been big deal.
But what set Norris apart from the host of excellent attorneys in Waco history are the unsettling events of April 1874.
Sleeper and Hutchins begin the section on Norris in their 1875 compilation this way: “No man was better known, in what were the frontier counties a few years ago, than he whose name heads this article.”
Like many frontier families in the America’s early days, while James was born near Greenville, South Carolina, on November 13, 1819, the restless Norris family moved to East Tennessee when he was 5. He attended school for a few months before his 10th birthday and never darkened a schoolroom again.
At age 12, he went to work as an itinerant farm laborer, following the fruit and vegetable harvests along the East Coast and Tennessee River Valley. Sleeper and Hutchins write that he was unable to return home more than once a year. Along the way, Norris became a passionate reader of books and by age 16 vowed to attend law school, walking from Greenville to Columbus, Mississippi to clerk at a law firm and study their law books. At age 18, the authors write, he was licensed as a lawyer.
In 1840, Norris married Sophronia E. Robinson and then, using their meager funds, set out on foot for Texas, where his new bride’s late father, William Robinson, had been awarded acres in Washington County by the Republic of Texas. But once they arrived, Sleeper and Hutchins report that a local court voided William Robinson’s will, leaving the couple penniless.
According to Sleeper and Sanford, Norris opened his law firm in the county anyway and “followed the circuit” to different, sometimes distant, area courtrooms. “He had no horse,” the authors note, “and he did not then, and never afterwards, believe in borrowing. When the Judge and the other lawyers started out on their horses to an adjoining county to hold court, he would start on foot amidst the jests of some of the thoughtless.”
Still, he prevailed. Sleeper and Hutchins described Norris as possessing “excellent common sense,” and a “hard worker” who “prepared his cases well.”
Eventually, after 10 years in Washington County, the Norris family moved to Burleson County for six years and then Coryell County for 12 years. During the Civil War, according to Kelley’s book, Norris enlisted in the Confederate cause and was named a colonel in the Texas Frontier Regiment, stationed at Camp Colorado.
But a bad investment in Gatesville before the war again left James and Sophronia destitute at war’s end.
Shortly thereafter, the couple moved to McLennan County. Sleeper and Hutchins write that when Norris opened his practice in Waco in 1868, he was determined to rebuild his family’s fortune and, “by unusual energy and economy, he did much towards accomplishing his purpose.”
In addition to his law practice, Norris invested in land, including a large farm on the east side of the Brazos River, a plot of land at a low-water crossing on the Brazos at the terminus of Jackson Avenue (which once extended to the river), at the M-K-T Brazos River Railroad Bridge. He charged a modest crossing fee for pedestrians and wagons to ford the river when it was at its lowest — in direct competition to the fee charged by the new Waco Suspension Bridge, which had opened January 6, 1870.
But Sleeper, in the transcript of a speech that he delivered in 1927 (and reprinted in Waco Heritage & History 50 years later), noted that Norris’ entrepreneurial streak brought him in direct conflict with the powerful financial forces supporting the Suspension Bridge. The Waco Bridge Company urged “brick manufacturers, the cotton mill, and the stage line” to exclusively “do all their crossing over the bridge.”
When this failed, the Bridge Company convinced a judge to order Sleeper to close his ford. The legal pressure continued, but Norris fought back and managed to hold out for several more years.
In April 1874, Norris was involved in a difficult, important case in Belton that lasted more than week. Sleeper and Hutchins write that Norris “displayed unwonted zeal on behalf of his client, and made what friends said was the best speech of his life and was successful.”
But during his impassioned summation to the jury, Norris was suddenly struck blind, rendering the jury “invisible” to him…and yet he somehow continued his argument, though no one in the courtroom was aware of his sudden affliction.
The authors write that Norris’ friends afterward carried him back to his boarding room in a carriage.
Here’s where the story takes a strange twist:
That night, his vision slowly returned. As was his custom in significant cases, Norris then wrote out his lengthy trial notes, ending the document with these chilling words, “I made the strongest effort of my life in this case, and I am ruined.”
Back at home in Waco, suddenly “impressed with the conviction that he was very near death’s door,” Norris called his family together, talked about his “apprehensions, and advised them as to their future interests.”
The following day, April 21, while talking with his wife Sophronia, Norris suddenly suffered a massive stroke and died on the spot.
As Sleeper and Hutchins report, “the voice of the strong man was instantly hushed in death.”
Norris was buried in the oldest part of the beautiful First Street Cemetery, not far from the old Waco Tourist Information Center.
Before his death, Norris had left instructions for his wife to continue resisting the political, legal and public pressure to close his Brazos River crossing. Finally, in 1876, while representing the Waco Bridge Company, banker William A. Fort, bought the land from Sophronia for the then-significant sum of $500.
A notice from 1883 located by historian T. Bradford Willis reveals the fate of the rest of the Norrises’ Waco holdings: “Mrs. Sophronia Norris has sold her farm lying opposite the city on the east side of the river to Mr. C.J. Faulner for $9,000. This farm is one of the choicest and most valuable in the county.”
Norris’ foresight had provided his wife with a nice nest egg for the future.
Sophronia died in 1901.
Incidentally, the name “Norris Ford,” used to describe the slight downslope in the river’s bank on the east side of the Brazos River at the end of Jackson Avene, persisted in local use at least through the 1970s…a tribute, of sorts, to Col. James M. Norris, the man who may have had an eerie premonition of his own impending death.
