July 26, 2015 - There is still one more upcoming issue of “We the People of Shelby County” about our historic square. After that, we’ll feature the many small communities in the county, some still in existence but all an historic part of the fabric of Shelby County.
For example, the tiny community of Bobo (four miles west of Tenaha) was established about 1885 when the Houston, East and West Texas Railway was completed near the northern border of Shelby County. Located near the tracks and its creation simply due to the railroad, it nevertheless had a post office and a general store at the end of the 19th century. We also know that, well into the 20th century, at least two cemeteries, a church, a sawmill, and a few houses were clustered in the area, even after the railroad no longer functioned. Now, it remains virtually unknown except for a song and a cemetery.
There are many of us in Shelby County who know Bobo only because Tex Ritter made it rather famous with his song. “Tenaha, Timpson, Bobo, and Blair.” A few others, especially those who have ancestors named Bowlin, Brit, Brookshier, Courtney, Ferguson, Garrett, Green, Jolly, Nichols, Risinger, Roberts, and Wood, know Bobo as the location of the Bradley Springs Cemetery.
Even those of us who know Bobo because of Tex Ritter’s song don’t generally know as much of its history as we know about Tenaha, Timpson, and Blair. We know these communities are all on the same railroad and generally near to each other. But what is not so clear are the origins of their names.
Hearing the name Bobo brings an erroneous link to mind: hobo, a word which sounds very similar and has only one different letter (and the thought triggered by the fact that hobos hitch train rides). However, much easier to trace is Tenaha’s origin as a Caddo Indian term (meaning muddy water), also used to identify the much larger Tenaha District in pre-Republic times. And it is properly reasoned that both Blair and Timpson were family names.
Just by accident, one theory of the derivation of the name Bobo surfaced during my genealogical research in the Spartanburg (SC) Public Library. My wife and I were looking for South Carolina families who eventually moved to Shelby County, just a few of the many including the Cooks, Halberts, Penningtons, Collins, Thomasons, Ramseys, Pages, and Swanzys. As I breezed through the A-C surname folders, the name Bobo caught my attention.
Originally from France, the Huguenot (French protestant) family of Beaubeau moved to Maryland and Virginia by the early 18th century. Over the next century and after anglicizing their name, many of them moved to South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. These states, then, are where the Bobo surname is found today. It seems reasonable, then, to assume that our Bobo community was named after a Bobo family, arriving as a part of the mix of many families who settled in the northwestern part of Shelby County in the last half of the 19th century.
