(The following story by Beth Foley appeared on The Palestine Herald website on February 18. W.L. Broughton is a retired member of BLET Division 194 in Houston, Texas.)
PALENSTINE, Texas — For 97-year-old W.L. Broughton, horses of one kind or another have been a big part of his life for since he was a youngster on his father’s farm near Palestine, raising cotton and corn.
“I’ve been in the horse business since I was a young boy,” Broughton said Saturday, sitting at his kitchen table chatting with visitors while rain fell outside.
“I used to come to town with my daddy in a buckboard,” he said, recalling dirt streets and globe lights along Front Street in downtown Palestine.
For someone born Jan. 10, 1911, horse and wagon were the way you went to town in an age when automobiles had not yet come to Palestine, the Wright Brothers were just getting started and World War I would not begin for three more years.
But it was a horse of a different color — black iron — running through town that would shape much of Broughton’s life.
After graduating from Chambers School, a small country school near Walston Springs, Broughton wanted to go to work for the International Great Northern Railroad.
“I hired out on the IGN at 19 years old,” he said. “But I couldn’t work. They didn’t have any work.”
Instead he headed south to Houston to live with an aunt and uncle and work for a grocery company. He returned to Palestine to work for a concrete company lining forms in front of the machines pouring concrete to form roads from Elkhart to Palestine and from Tucker to Palestine.
When the opportunity came in 1941 to sign on with the Missouri Pacific Railroad he took it and spent the next 34 years around trains, first as a fireman, then as a locomotive engineer, driving trains out of Houston for a few years before transferring back to the Palestine yard.
“I started firing locomotives for seven or eight years until I was promoted to locomotive engineer,” he said. “I had to go to Houston for seven or eight years before I returned to Palestine and became an engineer.”
Broughton drove trains from Palestine to Taylor, Houston and Longview, and later to Texarkana while his wife Ola, now 94, raised their children, sons Dave and the late Roy Broughton and daughter Beverly Lively.
While working for the railroad may have kept him away from home quite a bit, it also kept him from shipping out to fight in World War II.
“I got the notice that I was drafted into the Army but the railroad got me out,” Broughton said, explaining that men working for railroads were considered to be serving their country by keeping the nation’s freight and troops moving. “They had to have their men. They couldn’t turn them loose.”
After retiring from MoPac in 1975, he and Ola moved to Ben Wheeler where W.L. raised horses and cattle, and competed with cutting horses.
They eventually moved back to Anderson County in 1985 to the house where they now reside, near the Palestine Depot of the Texas State Railroad.
Although he hasn’t driven trains for a living for many years now, Broughton still finds himself drawn to them.
During a recent photo day at the railroad park, Broughton donned his engineer’s cap, bandanna and gloves and climbed into the cab of Engine 610 to regale rail enthusiasts with stories of driving the huge steam locomotive more than 40 years ago.
He also plays the role of Old West gunfighter “Cactus Jack” as part of a group of re-enactors who stage gunfights at the Palestine Depot for tourists at the railroad park.
The Broughtons celebrated their 76th wedding anniversary last June, having married on June 3, 1931 during the Great Depression. He also has been a member of the Masonic Lodge since 1935, serving as Master of the lodge in 1994-95.
“I’ve worked hard all my life. She has, too, raising the children while I was gone with the railroad,” Broughton said. “She was a teacher , a Sunday school teacher at Southside Baptist Church.
“It seems like a long, long time but it’s passed pretty fast.”