Thomas W. Milburn in San Antonio

When Thomas Milburn died on 12 November 1944, the Dallas Morning News printed only a short death notice. “Milburn, Thomas W., passed away at residence, 3519 Lindenwood, Sunday. Survived by wife, Mrs. Anna Milburn; one daughter, Mrs. R. C. Mynatt; one son, J. D. Milburn; two grandchildren, Miss Dorothy Ann Mynatt, Mrs. Cathryn Milburn Cate; two great-grandchildren.” There was no obituary (that I've found) in the Dallas papers. Nor was there any in San Antonio, where Thomas lived before he moved to Dallas.

Here’s an early mention in a newspaper. Printed in the Galveston Daily News on 29 August 1878, in a series of items from San Antonio: “Miss Annie Pollmar and Thomas W. Milburn were married this morning [the 28th]. The bride is the daughter of Mr. Pollmar, printer, of this city; the groom is one of the telegraphers at this place.” (It’s interesting to me that their marriage was deemed worth reporting in Galveston. Was it the Pollmar family, or was it the telegraphy?) So Thomas was at that time associated with the telegraph, a fully standard piece of communication, unlike the very new-fangled telephone.

Looking at Morrison & Fourmy’s 1881 San Antonio city directory you can find the listing for Thomas Milburn which tells that he was simply a clerk at the Signal Office, which is to say a telegrapher. The same volume, in a sort of preface called San Antonio: Future Commercial Metropolis of Texas, carried this brief article pointing to the future.

THE TELEPHONE EXCHANGE

A few months ago a telephone exchange was established in this city, under the management and control of Mr. J. K. Dunbar, and the patronage already extended to it makes its success a foregone conclusion. The present number of subscribers is about one hundred, and this number can be increased indefinitely. The lines are already extended all over the city, and into the suburbs, and it is safe to say that no one now enjoying its privileges would consent to give up this great aid to the business and professional man as well as private citizens.

Thomas took his experience of wired communications to a position working for Mr. Dunbar at the young telephone company. These were hectic years when the monopoly telephone system was taking shape, merging and acquiring and reorganizing its holdings over and over, doing battle with rivals like Western Union. Thomas was soon managing local and then regional operations, promoting long-distance service and encouraging the proliferation of exchanges in towns across Texas.

Thomas Milburn in the 1880s.

And Texas was booming. After 1877, when the railroads connected Texas cities, the population swelled rapidly. Galveston had for a long time been the largest city in the state, but now San Antonio, which had been second, came to be for a while in first place. Before the Civil War a little more than 8,000 people lived there; by 1910 there were over 96,000. New people and new businesses, and sooner of later they all required telephone service. The growing telephone company was called early on the Erie Telegraph and Telephone Company. By the turn of the century it was known as Southwestern Telephone and Telegraph. It must have seemed as if the “indefinite increase” was the surest thing in the world.

An early title for T.W. Milburn at the phone company was South Division Superintendent. At some point he came to be called Circuit Manager. Thomas began, after some years in the operation at San Antonio, to shift toward Dallas. Newspapers in the mid-1890s talk about his travels around Texas, and little items mention him in Dallas in this period. He starts to show up in Dallas city directories. In April of 1899 it was announced in the Dallas Morning News that T.W. Milburn would shortly be taking the position of General Superintendent of the North Texas Division.

Someone made this picture of Texas telephone men meeting at the Akard Street headquarters in Dallas. An arrow points to the figure of Thomas Milburn standing somewhat apart on the steps near the doorway.

Managers meeting at the Telephone Building, Dallas, about 1900

In 1900—the year, more or less, when this photo was made—the census records Thomas boarding at a Dallas hotel. His daughter Pamelia was with him. (The children must have accompanied their father to Dallas from time to time. Jack at fifteen was eager to follow his father into the modern world of telephones.) Anna, however, was still living in the house in San Antonio. She may have been reluctant to give up her life there, or she may have remained behind to care for her father who was ill (he died in 1902). But sometime shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, probably by the time that Pamelia married in 1903, Anna followed Thomas to Dallas, and the Milburn family was gone from San Antonio.

Thomas W. Milburn in Dallas

My mother’s paternal grandfather was named Thomas William Milburn. Here he is in 1920, holding my mother, Cathryn, in the crook of his arm.



Anna, Dorothy, Thomas, & Cathryn, 1920

Thomas has closely trimmed hair, rather bushy, overhanging eyebrows, and a small mustache, all silvery-white. His chin is slightly pointy, and his nose is long and high-bridged. (That nose perplexes me, since I don’t know anyone in the family who inherited it.) Standing behind Thomas in the photo is Anna, my mother’s grandmother. The little girl at the left, sitting on a stool and holding a toy chicken, is Dorothy Mynatt, my mother’s cousin. Everyone—even the chicken—is looking at the baby, propped comfortably on her grandfather’s lap.

(Missing from the picture, you might say, are the children’s parents. Dorothy’s mother Pamelia was the older of Thomas’s and Anna’s children. She was married to Dick Mynatt. Pamelia’s brother Jack Milburn and his wife Cogee were Cathryn’s mother and father.)

My mother kept the group photograph hanging on the wall in the house where I grew up. And that’s how I came to learn about Thomas Milburn, from seeing the picture and asking about it. Mother was dearly fond of her grandfather, and always liked telling about him.

When Mother was born she and her parents lived with her Grandfather Thomas and Grandmother Anna in a house Thomas owned on Corinth Street, south of downtown Dallas. There was a short period when her parents took her to live in Kansas City, but after only about a year they came back to Dallas, and back to live on Corinth Street.

She remembered her grandfather as kind and gentle with her, and funny with a mild, whimsical sense of humor. Thomas smoked cigars and sometimes a pipe, and she liked the way he smelled. He would bring treats for her in his jacket pockets, and he called her by the pet name Katrinka. She’d sit with him while he read the funny papers out loud, and they’d laugh over, say, Maggie and Jiggs. It was different, though, with her grandmother. Anna Milburn was a demanding woman who became more and more difficult as she grew deaf in her old age. Mother was a little afraid of her.

Thomas was retired. He had been a telephone company man, a manager for ever-growing Southwestern Telephone and Telegraph until the end of 1909. After that Thomas and Anna did some traveling. There are records showing a trip to Europe in 1910, a passage from Cuba to Boston in 1914 (just as the First World War was beginning), a trip to California, and one to Minnesota where Pamelia was convalescing at the Mayo clinic. Sometime in the middle ’teens Thomas bought the Corinth Street house. His son, Jack, back from Chicago in 1918, brought his bride to live there, too.

Mother’s birth certificate mentions a “½” address for her parents, so maybe the house was a duplex, or maybe they simply divided it. The Corinth Street house no longer exists. I remember that a very long time ago my mother took me down to see the place. It surprised me to find out that she’d lived there as little girl. I think I can remember a dilapidated frame house with two broad porches, upper and lower, that ran the width of the building. The place was painted white but peeling badly.

After the Great War and into the 1920s “everybody” was beginning to move farther away from downtown Dallas. Mother’s parents built their cottage-style house in Highland Park in, I think, 1927. And the Mynatts moved up north, first to the Lakewood neighborhood, and then they, too, bought a house in Highland Park on Lindenwood. In about 1932 Thomas and Anna left Corinth Street, and came to live with their daughter. Really, they were all very close again since 3519 Lindenwood was just a block from Jack’s house at 3701 Gillon.

Gizmo-crazy Jack Milburn had a movie camera. Cogee must have shot these bits of a family party in the back of the Gillon house about 1929. We see Thomas and Anna begin to dance, and immediately they are joined by Dorothy with her Uncle Jack, then Dick and Pamelia Mynatt, and at the end, Cathryn and an unknown friend of hers. (Cathryn’s the taller of the two girls, with a ribbon in her very dark hair.)

Milburns dancing, 1929

Close to the end of his life Thomas had occasion to be photographed again with a child and a baby. This time the young pair were his great-grandchildren, Richard and Carolyn.

Thomas with Richard & Carolyn, 1942

The place is Jack’s house again, at the edge of the covered porch. It’s a dappled afternoon. The picture has no date, but it must be from about the summer or fall of 1942, the year Carolyn was born. Everbody’s smiling. Thomas is eighty-seven years old.