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News Articles 1934
Sweeten Says Dewy Hunt Still Game As He Goes To Chair For Crime
January 4, 1934
Dewy Hunt, charged with the murder of a streetcar motorman in Dallas, ended a loosing fight to escape the electric chair that lasted for more than five years at 12:01 Friday. Eighteen persons witnessed the electrocution of Hunt.
Sheriff Jess Sweeten and Reverend M. L. Fuller were among the eighteen. Hunt maintained his nerve until the last, according to Sweeten. He emerged from the death cell playing “Chicken Reel” on a French harp.
To Sheriff Smoot Schmidt of Dallas he handed a cigar. Hunt had maintained all along that he did not kill the motorman and based his hope for a commutation to a life sentence that he was convicted on circumstantial evidence. He was convicted of slaying Samuel Cole, streetcar motorman, at Dallas who left a wife and two children. Mrs. Cole and children had refused to sign a petition for clemency.
Jess Sweeten Asks Re-Election as Sheriff
January 25, 1934
To the voters of Henderson County: “In asking the people of Henderson County to re-elect me as sheriff for a second term I am not unmindful of the fact that my tenure of office has not been perfect. I have tried to fill the office in a fair and impartial manner and I am sure the experience I have gained during my first term will make it possible for me to make you a better sheriff the next two years.
The sheriff is charged with the duty of only making the arrests; convictions are in the hands of the court. I have never been too busy to respond to the call of the people either day or night and that shall continue to be my policy if re-elected.’ ‘For the past year the sheriff’s department has centered its efforts on keeping the county free from hijackers, burglars and cutthroats, and we shall continue to put forth our efforts to make the county a safe place in which to live.’ At the proper time I will campaign throughout the county and hope to see every voter and place my claim for office before him. In the meantime I shall appreciate your support and influence and if re-elected will endeavor to fill the office to the very best of my ability,” Respectfully’ Jess Sweeten
A. Pierce, a Palestine man wanted for horse theft, was arrested at Bruce Hodge filing station here Sunday afternoon at 3:00 o’clock when he stopped to refill his truck in his flight from Anderson County. Sheriff Boyd of Palestine had phoned ahead to Sheriff Jess Sweeten. Sweeten and Deputy Dallas Cramer started out toward Palestine but sighted the fugitive at a gas station. Sheriff Boyd who came here after him returned him to Palestine.
Sheriff Gets Angry; Promises Lickings For Parts Thieves
April 12, 1934
Furious over the continued depredations of automobile parts thieves in Athens, Sheriff Jess Sweeten this morning promised “a personal beating” for every person attached to what appears to be a ring of thieves working here. “I know of no class of law violators that it would give me more pleasure to apply my fists to than these sneak-thieves who persist in invading premises in the shadow of the midnight hours,” Sweeten said. Pushing his investigation of the thefts of Wednesday night, Sweeten Thursday had a Tyler expert take pictures of fingerprints, which one thief had left behind on the J. B. Henry car, one of those stripped.
Posses Look for Barrow at Peeltown
April 12, 1934
Joining a posse of twenty Dallas and Kaufman County officers at Kaufman Wednesday afternoon, Sheriff Sweeten and Deputy Dallas Cramer invaded the Peeltown area and the Trinity river bottoms in that vicinity in a sweeping hunt for Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, notorious Texas killers. The two bandits, however, were never sighted. Commenting on the search Sweeten said: “Let me tell you that members of the State Highway patrol are really after that rat, following the slaughter of two patrolmen at Grapeland last week. They are conducting one of the most determined manhunts I have ever known of.”
Sheriff to Pay for Tips on Liquor Retreats
May 3, 1934
“I will pay a reward of $25.00 to any citizen for information which will enable us to capture a whiskey still in operation in this county,” Sweeten said this morning in launching a new campaign against the liquor traffic in Henderson County. “If we can get to a still in operation we can get the men connected with it,” he commented. “Names of those furnishing the tips will not be revealed,” he said.
Raymond Hamilton, Desperado, Tells Sheriff Sweeten That He Always Dodged Athens
May 3, 1934
“I always dodge Athens,” Raymond Hamilton, Texas No. 2 bad man, told Sheriff Jess Sweeten in the Dallas County jail Friday afternoon when Sweeten asked him if he had participated in the robbery of the Athens Coca Cola plant in the summer of 1931. Gene O’Dare, former husband of Mary O’Dare, now being held as Hamilton’s companion in recent crimes, was convicted and given five years for the Coca Cola plant robbery here. Mary O’Dare, mentioned in newspaper accounts, visited her husband here while he was awaiting trial in 1932. Sheriff Sweeten and Deputy Sheriff J. W. Karnes had a long talk with Hamilton in the Dallas County jail Friday.
Hamilton admitted that the wide publicity given Sheriff Sweeten and his machine gun had caused him to give Henderson County a wide berth. Hamilton said he also was aware of Sweeten’s marksmanship. “Clyde has been avoiding your county too,” he told the sheriff.
Sheriff Jess Sweeten Hurt in Accidental Explosion of Gun
May 17, 1934
Sheriff Jess Sweeten, sustained a painful wound in the right leg early today when a shotgun exploded in his hands as he started to question a man who was asleep in a car on the Tyler highway. The large shot which penetrated his leg was a double naught buck shot, about the size of an English pea. He is resting well and the injury is not believed to be of a serious nature. Sweeten and other officers had approached the car in the belief that the driver was Clyde Barrow.
The occupant of the car was sound asleep when the officers reached it, Sweeten’s gun going off just as they reached the car, the shot glancing from the pavement. Flying flakes of concrete sprayed Deputy Sheriff Dallas Cramer, inflicting a number of painful, but minor body-wounds. “Boys, he got me!” Cramer is reported to have said as the concrete flakes struck him. It was several minutes before the excitement subsided.
Badly frightened the suspect “bad man” hastened to reveal his identity, giving his residence as Kilgore and his occupation as an oilman. He said that he had simply stopped his car to get some sleep. With Sweeten and Cramer at the time were Deputy Sheriff M. G. Jepson, Cramer and Elton Corley.
Follow up to previous article is one from the Palestine Herald Press, dated Thursday – December 16, 1976
Man Was Mistaken For Barrow Jack Meeker of 919 Hilltop Drive, retired oil and gas industry veteran, recalls a scary night in the early 1930s when he was mistaken for a brief time for outlaw Clyde Barrow.
That happened soon after Jess Sweeten had become the youngest sheriff in Texas in Henderson County. “I was in charge of drilling a well for my brother, the late Julian R. Meeker of Ft. Worth, on school land near the old Cayuga School,” Mr. Meeker recalls. “I had gone to Kilgore in my yellow-wheeled Model-A Ford sedan to get some equipment for the well. Returning on Highway 175, I stopped east of Athens, pulled off the highway, locked my car doors and went to sleep.”
He was worn out from long hours and travel on the drilling job. He was awakened by a shotgun blast just outside the locked car door. Sheriff Jess Sweeten and three other deputies, all heavily armed, had surrounded the sleeper. Holding a sawed-off shotgun while trying to get the car door open, Sweeten’s shotgun went off accidentally, some of the pellets wounding the young sheriff in the right foot, Meeker relates.
When Sweeten let the others know he had been wounded, Meeker said a senior officer of the four, who cautioned the others to “wait”, saved his life. They got the car doors open and asked, “Where’s the woman?” meaning Bonnie Parker. Meeker finally succeeded in convincing the posse of his true identity. The oilfield equipment he was carrying in the car could have momentarily been mistaken for weapons. “When they told me to drive on, I was so confused and frightened I didn’t know which way to go to Cayuga,” Meeker recalls.
A University of Oklahoma graduate with a degree in Business, Meeker became first an oilfield roughneck and later an engineer with a wide-ranging career in oil patches throughout the Southwest and South. His career in the oil industry spanned 43 years, 1926-69, before he retired to live in Palestine.
He pioneered or helped pioneer many oilfields. A well he put down in Parker County discovered the Meeker Field that now has spread as a productive gas field into adjacent counties. The pay is 125-foot-thick sandy shale at 4,000 feet nicknamed “pregnant shale” highly susceptible to frac treatment. The gas now brings $2.16 per mcf. From wells in the Long Lake area, Meeker piped gas that supplied among other things, what now is the Glass Containers, Inc., Plant in its early years.
When the glass plant shut down around Thanksgiving to renew a kiln, Meeker had to cut down the pressure on the line, resulting in complaints from owners of homes his firm was serving they would say, “We’ve got a turkey in the oven and now we can’t bake it.” Born in Cotton County near Temple, Oklahoma, Jack Meeker recalls his boyhood on the farm. “At age 7, I had six cows to care for. Our pond dried up. I had to drive those cows to and from the town pump for water, then milk ‘em.’ ‘It would start snowing up there in November. I’d leave the warm fireside at night and climb the stairs to bed in a cold room upstairs.’ ‘Meat and sausages were cured in the family smokehouse.”
One well Mr. Meeker brought in around Conroe produced $750,000 worth of oil, but much of the time oil brought ridiculously low prices. Meeker doesn’t believe what is said about there being plenty of natural gas left. “I’ve bought a wood-burning Franklin stove for my home. If necessary, we can cook on that,” he says.
Ballow and Smith Win; Sweeten Lacks 274 of Securing Majority; Nelson-Davis in Runoff for Supt.
August 2, 1934
John W. Ballow was re-elected county judge by a majority of 1467; Miles B. Smith defeated both his opponents for county attorney to decide the only two races in the Democratic primary Saturday. In the race for Representative Lucas led from the start and for a time it looked like he might secure a majority over both opponents but late boxes brought the vote of Coker up. Sheriff Jess Sweeten failed to secure a majority over his three opponents and there will be a run-off between Sweeten and Hardwick.
The votes for all county offices follow: Representative Jap Lucas 2587 J. L. Mitcham 828 Glynne R. Coker 2145 District Attorney C. W. Kennedy Jr. 1930 Tom Pickett 3539 County Judge H. E. Blythe 2030 John W. Ballow 3497 County Attorney C. W. Allison 914 A. D. Boyd 1651 Miles B. Smith 3008 County Clerk Mrs. Ann Payne 542 Horace Johnson 1179 Marvin Johnson 473 W. A. Walker 176 C. C. Knight 363 Will Wofford 466 J. L. Warren 428 Jack Owen 629 Mrs. M. E. Edgar 713 Mary Johnson 492 Sheriff Jess Sweeten 2569 K. C. Davis 815 Lee Wright 767 Will Hardwick 1261 County Superintendent J. B Frizzell 1281 J. U. Nelson 1725 Frank J. Davis 1670 Belle Easterwood 941 Lucas, Johnson, Sweeten, Davis, Mitchell Winners
August 30, 1934
Saturday’s primary election in Henderson County determined the nominees for four county offices in this county. The winners for county offices are: Representative Jap Lucas 2985 Coker 2528 Superintendent Frank J. Davis 2974 Nelson 2540 County Clerk Horace Johnson 3148 Edgar 2366 Sheriff Sweeten 3041 Hardwick 2489
Jess Sweeten Breaks Into Dallas News After Legal Controversy
October 4, 1934
Sheriff Jess Sweeten of Athens got his name in the Dallas News Sunday when he figured in a controversy which occurred there on Saturday. The news recorded the event as follows: A legal battle raging in two counties for several days got to the boiling point Saturday in Judge A. Rawlins County Court and for a time threatened to end with Sheriff Jess Sweeten of Henderson County being held in contempt of court. Judge Rawlins got as far as dictating an order fining Sweeten $25.00 and ordering him to jail for a day for contempt because the sheriff did not obey an order directing him to deliver an automobile in Athens to S. M. Ray, receiver appointed by a local finance company. Before the order was entered, however, Sweeten and his attorney capitulated and had the car brought to Dallas. Back in Athens Sunday Sheriff Sweeten explained that he was holding the car until he could decide what action to take after learning that the holders of two first mortgages had demanded the car.
January 4, 1934
Dewy Hunt, charged with the murder of a streetcar motorman in Dallas, ended a loosing fight to escape the electric chair that lasted for more than five years at 12:01 Friday. Eighteen persons witnessed the electrocution of Hunt.
Sheriff Jess Sweeten and Reverend M. L. Fuller were among the eighteen. Hunt maintained his nerve until the last, according to Sweeten. He emerged from the death cell playing “Chicken Reel” on a French harp.
To Sheriff Smoot Schmidt of Dallas he handed a cigar. Hunt had maintained all along that he did not kill the motorman and based his hope for a commutation to a life sentence that he was convicted on circumstantial evidence. He was convicted of slaying Samuel Cole, streetcar motorman, at Dallas who left a wife and two children. Mrs. Cole and children had refused to sign a petition for clemency.
Jess Sweeten Asks Re-Election as Sheriff
January 25, 1934
To the voters of Henderson County: “In asking the people of Henderson County to re-elect me as sheriff for a second term I am not unmindful of the fact that my tenure of office has not been perfect. I have tried to fill the office in a fair and impartial manner and I am sure the experience I have gained during my first term will make it possible for me to make you a better sheriff the next two years.
The sheriff is charged with the duty of only making the arrests; convictions are in the hands of the court. I have never been too busy to respond to the call of the people either day or night and that shall continue to be my policy if re-elected.’ ‘For the past year the sheriff’s department has centered its efforts on keeping the county free from hijackers, burglars and cutthroats, and we shall continue to put forth our efforts to make the county a safe place in which to live.’ At the proper time I will campaign throughout the county and hope to see every voter and place my claim for office before him. In the meantime I shall appreciate your support and influence and if re-elected will endeavor to fill the office to the very best of my ability,” Respectfully’ Jess Sweeten
Fugitive From Nearby Town Is Nabbed Here
February 1, 1934A. Pierce, a Palestine man wanted for horse theft, was arrested at Bruce Hodge filing station here Sunday afternoon at 3:00 o’clock when he stopped to refill his truck in his flight from Anderson County. Sheriff Boyd of Palestine had phoned ahead to Sheriff Jess Sweeten. Sweeten and Deputy Dallas Cramer started out toward Palestine but sighted the fugitive at a gas station. Sheriff Boyd who came here after him returned him to Palestine.
Sheriff Gets Angry; Promises Lickings For Parts Thieves
April 12, 1934
Furious over the continued depredations of automobile parts thieves in Athens, Sheriff Jess Sweeten this morning promised “a personal beating” for every person attached to what appears to be a ring of thieves working here. “I know of no class of law violators that it would give me more pleasure to apply my fists to than these sneak-thieves who persist in invading premises in the shadow of the midnight hours,” Sweeten said. Pushing his investigation of the thefts of Wednesday night, Sweeten Thursday had a Tyler expert take pictures of fingerprints, which one thief had left behind on the J. B. Henry car, one of those stripped.
Posses Look for Barrow at Peeltown
April 12, 1934
Joining a posse of twenty Dallas and Kaufman County officers at Kaufman Wednesday afternoon, Sheriff Sweeten and Deputy Dallas Cramer invaded the Peeltown area and the Trinity river bottoms in that vicinity in a sweeping hunt for Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, notorious Texas killers. The two bandits, however, were never sighted. Commenting on the search Sweeten said: “Let me tell you that members of the State Highway patrol are really after that rat, following the slaughter of two patrolmen at Grapeland last week. They are conducting one of the most determined manhunts I have ever known of.”
Sheriff to Pay for Tips on Liquor Retreats
May 3, 1934
“I will pay a reward of $25.00 to any citizen for information which will enable us to capture a whiskey still in operation in this county,” Sweeten said this morning in launching a new campaign against the liquor traffic in Henderson County. “If we can get to a still in operation we can get the men connected with it,” he commented. “Names of those furnishing the tips will not be revealed,” he said.
Raymond Hamilton, Desperado, Tells Sheriff Sweeten That He Always Dodged Athens
May 3, 1934
“I always dodge Athens,” Raymond Hamilton, Texas No. 2 bad man, told Sheriff Jess Sweeten in the Dallas County jail Friday afternoon when Sweeten asked him if he had participated in the robbery of the Athens Coca Cola plant in the summer of 1931. Gene O’Dare, former husband of Mary O’Dare, now being held as Hamilton’s companion in recent crimes, was convicted and given five years for the Coca Cola plant robbery here. Mary O’Dare, mentioned in newspaper accounts, visited her husband here while he was awaiting trial in 1932. Sheriff Sweeten and Deputy Sheriff J. W. Karnes had a long talk with Hamilton in the Dallas County jail Friday.
Hamilton admitted that the wide publicity given Sheriff Sweeten and his machine gun had caused him to give Henderson County a wide berth. Hamilton said he also was aware of Sweeten’s marksmanship. “Clyde has been avoiding your county too,” he told the sheriff.
Sheriff Jess Sweeten Hurt in Accidental Explosion of Gun
May 17, 1934
Sheriff Jess Sweeten, sustained a painful wound in the right leg early today when a shotgun exploded in his hands as he started to question a man who was asleep in a car on the Tyler highway. The large shot which penetrated his leg was a double naught buck shot, about the size of an English pea. He is resting well and the injury is not believed to be of a serious nature. Sweeten and other officers had approached the car in the belief that the driver was Clyde Barrow.
The occupant of the car was sound asleep when the officers reached it, Sweeten’s gun going off just as they reached the car, the shot glancing from the pavement. Flying flakes of concrete sprayed Deputy Sheriff Dallas Cramer, inflicting a number of painful, but minor body-wounds. “Boys, he got me!” Cramer is reported to have said as the concrete flakes struck him. It was several minutes before the excitement subsided.
Badly frightened the suspect “bad man” hastened to reveal his identity, giving his residence as Kilgore and his occupation as an oilman. He said that he had simply stopped his car to get some sleep. With Sweeten and Cramer at the time were Deputy Sheriff M. G. Jepson, Cramer and Elton Corley.
Follow up to previous article is one from the Palestine Herald Press, dated Thursday – December 16, 1976
Man Was Mistaken For Barrow Jack Meeker of 919 Hilltop Drive, retired oil and gas industry veteran, recalls a scary night in the early 1930s when he was mistaken for a brief time for outlaw Clyde Barrow.
That happened soon after Jess Sweeten had become the youngest sheriff in Texas in Henderson County. “I was in charge of drilling a well for my brother, the late Julian R. Meeker of Ft. Worth, on school land near the old Cayuga School,” Mr. Meeker recalls. “I had gone to Kilgore in my yellow-wheeled Model-A Ford sedan to get some equipment for the well. Returning on Highway 175, I stopped east of Athens, pulled off the highway, locked my car doors and went to sleep.”
He was worn out from long hours and travel on the drilling job. He was awakened by a shotgun blast just outside the locked car door. Sheriff Jess Sweeten and three other deputies, all heavily armed, had surrounded the sleeper. Holding a sawed-off shotgun while trying to get the car door open, Sweeten’s shotgun went off accidentally, some of the pellets wounding the young sheriff in the right foot, Meeker relates.
When Sweeten let the others know he had been wounded, Meeker said a senior officer of the four, who cautioned the others to “wait”, saved his life. They got the car doors open and asked, “Where’s the woman?” meaning Bonnie Parker. Meeker finally succeeded in convincing the posse of his true identity. The oilfield equipment he was carrying in the car could have momentarily been mistaken for weapons. “When they told me to drive on, I was so confused and frightened I didn’t know which way to go to Cayuga,” Meeker recalls.
A University of Oklahoma graduate with a degree in Business, Meeker became first an oilfield roughneck and later an engineer with a wide-ranging career in oil patches throughout the Southwest and South. His career in the oil industry spanned 43 years, 1926-69, before he retired to live in Palestine.
He pioneered or helped pioneer many oilfields. A well he put down in Parker County discovered the Meeker Field that now has spread as a productive gas field into adjacent counties. The pay is 125-foot-thick sandy shale at 4,000 feet nicknamed “pregnant shale” highly susceptible to frac treatment. The gas now brings $2.16 per mcf. From wells in the Long Lake area, Meeker piped gas that supplied among other things, what now is the Glass Containers, Inc., Plant in its early years.
When the glass plant shut down around Thanksgiving to renew a kiln, Meeker had to cut down the pressure on the line, resulting in complaints from owners of homes his firm was serving they would say, “We’ve got a turkey in the oven and now we can’t bake it.” Born in Cotton County near Temple, Oklahoma, Jack Meeker recalls his boyhood on the farm. “At age 7, I had six cows to care for. Our pond dried up. I had to drive those cows to and from the town pump for water, then milk ‘em.’ ‘It would start snowing up there in November. I’d leave the warm fireside at night and climb the stairs to bed in a cold room upstairs.’ ‘Meat and sausages were cured in the family smokehouse.”
One well Mr. Meeker brought in around Conroe produced $750,000 worth of oil, but much of the time oil brought ridiculously low prices. Meeker doesn’t believe what is said about there being plenty of natural gas left. “I’ve bought a wood-burning Franklin stove for my home. If necessary, we can cook on that,” he says.
Ballow and Smith Win; Sweeten Lacks 274 of Securing Majority; Nelson-Davis in Runoff for Supt.
August 2, 1934
John W. Ballow was re-elected county judge by a majority of 1467; Miles B. Smith defeated both his opponents for county attorney to decide the only two races in the Democratic primary Saturday. In the race for Representative Lucas led from the start and for a time it looked like he might secure a majority over both opponents but late boxes brought the vote of Coker up. Sheriff Jess Sweeten failed to secure a majority over his three opponents and there will be a run-off between Sweeten and Hardwick.
The votes for all county offices follow: Representative Jap Lucas 2587 J. L. Mitcham 828 Glynne R. Coker 2145 District Attorney C. W. Kennedy Jr. 1930 Tom Pickett 3539 County Judge H. E. Blythe 2030 John W. Ballow 3497 County Attorney C. W. Allison 914 A. D. Boyd 1651 Miles B. Smith 3008 County Clerk Mrs. Ann Payne 542 Horace Johnson 1179 Marvin Johnson 473 W. A. Walker 176 C. C. Knight 363 Will Wofford 466 J. L. Warren 428 Jack Owen 629 Mrs. M. E. Edgar 713 Mary Johnson 492 Sheriff Jess Sweeten 2569 K. C. Davis 815 Lee Wright 767 Will Hardwick 1261 County Superintendent J. B Frizzell 1281 J. U. Nelson 1725 Frank J. Davis 1670 Belle Easterwood 941 Lucas, Johnson, Sweeten, Davis, Mitchell Winners
August 30, 1934
Saturday’s primary election in Henderson County determined the nominees for four county offices in this county. The winners for county offices are: Representative Jap Lucas 2985 Coker 2528 Superintendent Frank J. Davis 2974 Nelson 2540 County Clerk Horace Johnson 3148 Edgar 2366 Sheriff Sweeten 3041 Hardwick 2489
Jess Sweeten Breaks Into Dallas News After Legal Controversy
October 4, 1934
Sheriff Jess Sweeten of Athens got his name in the Dallas News Sunday when he figured in a controversy which occurred there on Saturday. The news recorded the event as follows: A legal battle raging in two counties for several days got to the boiling point Saturday in Judge A. Rawlins County Court and for a time threatened to end with Sheriff Jess Sweeten of Henderson County being held in contempt of court. Judge Rawlins got as far as dictating an order fining Sweeten $25.00 and ordering him to jail for a day for contempt because the sheriff did not obey an order directing him to deliver an automobile in Athens to S. M. Ray, receiver appointed by a local finance company. Before the order was entered, however, Sweeten and his attorney capitulated and had the car brought to Dallas. Back in Athens Sunday Sheriff Sweeten explained that he was holding the car until he could decide what action to take after learning that the holders of two first mortgages had demanded the car.
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