The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 29, July 1925 - April, 1926 Page: 51

The Cily of Kent

THE CITY OF KENT1
DOROTHY WATIES RENICK
There was a city of dreams built among hills, and there were
dreamers who came to live there. Tattered and torn by the chat-
tering teeth of Texas northers, the fabric of the dream lasted one
brief year. And another Utopia was lost in Texas, swallowed up
so that even the memory of their having been such a place as
"The City of Kent" is gone from the minds of the very children
whose fathers and mothers came to America to establish the colony.
The long limestone hills of torth Bosque County remember, at
whose feet the Brazos curls like a red snake. There are farms
between the hills now, but the razor-back ridges of rock weather
slowly. Just where the northern boundary of the present Bosque
County touches the Brazos, the river swerves in a great horseshoe
known since the days of the Republic of Texas as Kimball's bend.
The water flows eighteen miles in making the curve, where, had
the limestone permitted a direct course, it need have flowed but
two. The rich alluvial land within the horseshoe made a sort of
oasis for agriculture even in Indian times.
The whole country is beautiful with a sort of half-rugged, care-
less beauty. Here the colors are more vivid than in the plain
country, the skies bluer, the piling clouds whiter, the hills glazed
with blue-green like fine pottery or the sea in placid moods. At
the lower end of the bend, there is one cliff higher than the others,
called since the days of the dreamers, "Solomon's Nose." The
7J. C. Frazier before his death dictated an account of the lost colony
to his youngest son, Frank Frazier. The older Mr. Frazier was surveyor
with Jacob De Cordova and afterward De Cordova's partner. Although
he spent a part of his life in Waco, where he was a member of law and
land firm "Renick and Frazier," lihe traveled all over Texas, and was espe-
cially familiar with the country in central Texas. When he and De Cor-
dova divided their land in Bosque County, he received the larger part of
the present Frazier ranch as it now stands. His wife, Mrs. Emily Frazier,
now in her eighty-sixth year, still lives there. Since her marriage, ex-
cept for the period in which she moved to Waco to educate her children,
her home has been on this ranch.
The material for this article came from Mr. Frazier's account, supple-
mented with newspaper notes supplied by Dr. Charles Ramsdell, with
letters from Alistair Mackenzie, the youngest son of the leader of the
colony, and by relatives of the Pidcocke family in England.
The author has made several visits to the site of the colony in company
with Mr. and Mrs. Frank Frazier.