Mexia's Little Juarez & Shotgun Alley

- November 14, 2018

Little Juarez was the section of Mexia west of the railroad tracks that sprang up between the town and the oil fields. It was notorious for the makeshift tents and wooden "buildings" housing the boom chasers who knew they would never be staying.

The photo above has "Pistol Alley" with the arrow pointing down Commerce at Belknap, although the only newspaper matches are for "Shotgun Alley" instead, so choose your weapon. You might need it, particularly when the sun went down and the vice turned up.

From the Sanborn map of 1922, these would be the businesses along that stretch:

This panorama shows the tents and ramshackle buildings between the tracks and the field, on News Years Day 1922

And the Sanborn map even noted this corner was called Juarez

The nadir appears to be right at the close of 1921 and opening of 1922.

In the Canton Herald edition of December 9, 1921 one Mr. Joe Sappington visited Mexia and its booming oil fields and wrote the following about the town:

And now just a word concerning what was once the peaceful little town of Mexia, with its schools and churches and orderly Christian citizenship, transformed as by magic into a conglomerated maelstrom of seething humanity, where vice and disorder is rampant, and every incoming train adds to its turbulent ranks. The old town of Mexia has been lost in the shuffle, swamped, submerged, overwhelmed. It now has its Juarez, a district peopled with gamblers, bootleggers, painted women, blear-eyed dope fiends, the riff raff and rabble brought together in common sympathy. The once well-kept streets are now a succession of deep holes and ruts, and an endless line of trucks and auto that scatter dust and grime throughout the livelong day. And this is Mexia the oil town, the magnet, the mecca to which the eyes of the continent are now turned.

A month later, Martial Law is declared the second week of January, and the proclamation sounds very much like Sappington's account with its enumeration of highway robberies, murders, gaming houses, intoxicating liquors, with the "multitude of unfortunate women [who] ply their nefarious business in houses of ill fame."

(we'll take up newspaper coverage specifically regarding the weeks of Martial Law

in another post!)

A few months later, at the start of summer 1922, Mexia High School writer Lurlie Betts covered the Point of Interest Around Mexia and was sure to include Juarez and Shotgun Alley, right between boat rides and the ballfield.

Every city has its alley or dark place where crooks, murderers, hijackers and card sharks have their hang outs. Mexia, claiming all the attractions of a city, has her "Shotgun Alley," which cannot be rivaled, even by Petticoat Lane in London, or the Bowery in New York City.

Juarez, which was named after Juarez in old Mexico, is the suburb of Mexia. It was, before martial law was declared, full of liquor booths, gambling dens and no telling what else. It is the lodging house for all the tougher element of humanity.

At the end of summer, the Bryan Rotarians visited and declared it "The City Beautiful"

Also in August of that year, the problem of Juarez was discussed in an editorial

September 1922

In October of 1922, Juarez gains a mention in the city history

Juarez, the shack city west of the railroad spread for three miles out the Tehuacana road and back of that Desenberg City and West Mexia. Shack colonies were dotted in every available space in the main city. . . . Juarez has shrunken until it [now] looks like a skeleton.

Also in October:

On Armistice Day of 1922 there was a proclamation in the Mexia Evening News that it was A New Mexia, noting

The western limits of the new paving, which was first completed, reached right to the front door of "Juarez" and from it drives off across Belknap into "Shotgun Alley" known to "Juarez" however, more because of its mud than for its shotguns.