Calder (Cotton) Square

Duane's take

Here's how the marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna tell it to you. There's a square in Lufkin, right in the heart of Angelina County, that has seen just about everything a Texas town can throw at a piece of ground. Cotton and horses and fire engines and politics and music, all crowding into the same few acres.

That's Calder Square, and its story starts back in 1882. That's when this patch of earth became the city's hub, and it did not take that job lightly. Cotton buying was happening here, the kind of commerce that moved a whole region's fortunes.

Horse trades were struck on this ground, the kind where you'd better keep one eye on the horse and one eye on the man sellin' it. Band concerts rang out across it. Political rallies fired up crowds here.

And railroad trains were switched right through the area, iron and steam making themselves at home alongside the merchants and the music. By the early nineteen hundreds, this square was teeming. That's the word, teeming, full to the edges with life and noise and business.

A fire station stood here. A standpipe rose up on this ground. And then in 1933, a memorial library was built here, named for a lumberman by the name of J.

H. Kurth, who was born in 1857 and died in 1930. The library bearing his name opened in 1933, a tribute planted right in the middle of all that history.

Now, the square itself carried a different name before it carried the one it wears today. In 1961, it was renamed for a man named Louis Calder, born in 1879, out of New York, who died in 1963. The marker tells us Calder was a friend of the Kurth family.

That connection, a friendship between a New York man and a Texas lumberman's family, is what put his name on a square in Angelina County. Cotton square to Calder Square. Same ground.

Layers deep.

What the marker says

City's hub, 1882- early 1900s, teeming with cotton buying, horse trades, band concerts, political rallies, switching railroad trains. Site of fire station, standpipe, 1933 memorial library named for lumberman J. H. Kurth (1857 - 1930), Square was renamed 1961 for Kurth family friend, Louis Calder (1879 - 1963) of New York.