TOMBSTONE TUESDAY: Charles Everett Fisher (1874 – 1958)

TOMBSTONE TUESDAY: Charles Everett Fisher (1874 – 1958)

I have always loved history. It is a cornucopia of exciting events and amazing people. Texas history is always my first choice to find myself, but my favorite is when I get the opportunity to discover the colorful, adventurous lives found in our local history. When it comes to colorful and adventurous, Charles Everett Fisher is certainly one at the top of that list. 

It was February 27, 1874, in the town of Rollo, Missouri, that Charles Everett Fisher made his debut. His father was James Nathan Fisher, 21, and his mother, Mollie Clementine Martin Fisher, was 18. My guess is that they never could have even entertained the idea that their little baby boy would be the whirlwind that he was. The old saying of someone was “born to be,” was the true description of their little boy. 

When Charles was 7, yes 7, he ran away from home. At that time, he was the eldest of 5 children. His family moved to Texas after that, and the family grew with the birth of 4 more siblings. 

Heading out as Tom Sawyer, he had the spirit of Huck Finn, and he lived the adventures of both for 10 years. Traveling to new and faraway places, he would hop freight trains. No doubt he met interesting folks from places across the country that stoked his quest for exploration. 

To pay for food and other necessities Charles would work at jobs suitable for a boy of his size and age. He worked as a shoeshine boy, sold candy as a “butcher boy” on the train, and even worked as a water boy for Southern Pacific Railroad bridge over the Devil’s River. 

When his journey over land had quenched his thirst, he knew his next expedition would be on the high seas. Taking a job as a hand on a ship he sailed the seas from South America all the way up to Alaska. The many different landscapes, languages, and cultures had to have opened and expanded his mind giving him the ability to learn in a tangible way. The lessons we experience are better learned because they become a part of us. No amount of reading or memorizing can come close to it. Charles was attending school in his own way. Two of the more memorable adventures he had stand out as amazing at any age, but to a young man in his teens it had to be the pinnacle. While in Alaska, Charles tried his hand at digging for gold, but for all the work, it did not pan out in return. How could any of Charles’s children watch Death Valley Days on TV without visualizing their father perched on top of that Borax wagon holding the reins of the 20-mule team that pulled it, knowing that he did do exactly that. 

When Charles was 17 years old, he returned to Texas and to his parents who were living in Temple at that time. Not one to sit on his laurels, he enrolled in Galveston Business College. It was there that he met Kittie Grace Moss. Kittie was a teacher at a school out in the Seguin area, and it was in Seguin on the 5th of December in 1898 that the two were wed. The couple settled down in Temple and Charles took a job running a store. 

Charles and Kittie were happy together and together the couple welcomed sons Everett, born in 1900, Leonard Moss in 1902, and James in 1906. For Charles, life with a family was a whole new adventure, but a happy one. In 1908 the family moved to Calhoun County. True to character, the family arrived in a big way with two boxcars full of the family's possessions, and another car carrying some of their cattle. The family settled in, and Charles opened a variety store on the corner of Main and Colorado streets. When the opportunity came to enter the seafood business he did so with the same zeal he had always taken throughout his life. 

He opened his seafood business at the old Smith Harbor, and he quickly worked his way to success. All the adventures on trains and on ships were lessons he would pull from throughout his life. He became the first to ship shrimp out of the county by boxcar. 

Charles incorporated his business in 1919 under the name of Fisher Channel and Dock Company. It was a well-known business in the city, the county, and beyond. Over the years the warehouses were severely damaged in the hurricanes that travel through Matagorda Bay. Fisher had to rebuild his somewhere around six times due to storms. In 1961, 3 years after Charles had passed away, one of the worst storms to ever hit the Texas Gulf Coast, Carla, a category 4 storm, took it all completely out. 

Kittie and Charles added their 4th son to the Fisher family with the birth of King, who was born in 1916, just prior to the birth of Fisher Channel and Dock Co. To me the name King was a very unusual name as it was certainly a name of opulence and grandeur, but when added to the surname of Fisher, it seemed like a perfect choice for the son of an adventurous lover of the sea. In retrospect it did indeed serve King well in life. In fact, all the Fisher boys lived up to the heights their father had lived. It is still a name that is found in Calhoun County, though through the decades it has woven itself into a thread of other family names that are known here today.

Charles served in this community as a charter member of the Rotary Club and served as the president for several years. He was also a proud member of the Knights of Pythias and Woodmen of the World. Perhaps he is best remembered by those locals who knew him as the man who could add large sums of figures in his head faster than they could be totaled on any adding machine, and the man who gave a silver dollar to every child born in Port Lavaca.

Charles chose to bring his family and live out his life in our little city of Port Lavaca. It seems like a sleepy little place to finish out the days of a life so immersed in the quest of adventure. What he did was bring that adventure to us, through the person he was, and the sons that he had. Someone who well deserves to live on in memories. Thanks to him choosing our city, we have a story of a true adventurer, a Huck Finn, to revisit with today.                    

RESOURCES                           

Shifting Sands of Calhoun County

Port Lavaca, Texas 1840-1990

The Corpus Christi Caller

The Victoria Advocate