The ones who stood up for this place

Lance Rosier, “Mr. Big Thicket”

Lance Rosier grew up in his aunt’s boarding house in Saratoga and never had much use for hunting game or chasing a paycheck. He hunted flowers. He’d wander the Thicket for days, and with no formal schooling he came to know just about every plant in it. By the 1960s, conservationists and politicians who wanted to understand the Thicket had come to know him.

He spent his life pushing to protect it from the timber and oil companies, and he died in 1970, four years before the preserve became law. The largest unit of Big Thicket National Preserve carries his name.

The neighbors who wouldn’t quit

In October 1964, local people met at the Saratoga Methodist Church and started the Big Thicket Association. Botanist Geraldine Watson, who grew up in the region, fought beside Rosier, Ned Fritz and Maxine Johnston, and later became the preserve’s plant ecologist. Senator Ralph Yarborough and Congressmen Bob Eckhardt and Charlie Wilson carried it in Washington. On Oct. 11, 1974, it became law.

Ten years of meetings, letters and showing up. That’s the playbook. It still works.

Dempsie Henley

Lance Rosier recruited him to lead the new Big Thicket Association. In 1965 Henley invited U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough to come see the Thicket for himself, with Rosier as the guide. That trip is what persuaded Yarborough to push for protecting it in Washington. Sometimes the most important thing an advocate does is get the right person into the woods.

Maxine Johnston, the godmother of the Big Thicket

A librarian. She joined Lamar University’s library in 1955 and became its director in 1980. She joined the Big Thicket Association in 1964, served as its president twice, from 1972 to 1975 and from 1994 to 1998, edited its newsletters and led people on tours of the Thicket. Rosier and Geraldine Watson were her friends.

She also did what librarians do best: she saved the record. At Lamar she built an archive on the Big Thicket that runs to 25 collections, and she arranged for Larry Jene Fisher’s photographs to land there. In 2024, at 95, Texas Monthly reported she was still at it.

Larry Jene Fisher, the man who saved the Thicket’s faces

An organist, aviator, playwright and filmmaker who moved to Saratoga around 1940 and lived there about 15 years. Through the 1930s and ’40s he photographed Big Thicket people living the old way: syrup mills, deer hunts, rooter hogs, railroad tie making, barrel staves. He knew that way of life was ending, and he made sure it was recorded. His photographs of the Thicket’s plants and animals helped the first push to protect it.

His pictures sat neglected for nearly 50 years until a 2000 exhibit brought them back. Lamar University now holds thousands of them, and many are free to view online.

See his photographs on the Portal to Texas History

Antonio Gil Y’Barbo

When Spain ordered East Texas settlers to abandon their homes in 1773, Y’Barbo kept petitioning to bring them back. In 1779 he led them home and rebuilt Nacogdoches. Plenty of people talk about loving a place. He walked a whole town back to it.

Kenneth Schustereit

The San Antonio Current called him “the gender-switch Erin Brockovich.” Kenneth Schustereit was an industrial electrician and pipe fitter from Victoria with a high school diploma. He got into water the hard way: a man working on his parents’ well told him that someday he’d have to put a meter on it and pay for the water under his own land. So he started reading.

He’d come to public meetings in his blue work clothes, straight off a nine-hour shift, carrying photocopies of Chapter 36 of the Texas Water Code. The state’s experts brought laptops. He brought the law. He fought “the GBRA deal,” a plan to pump 94,000 acre-feet of Guadalupe River water a year more than 130 miles uphill to San Antonio. He pushed the Texas Water Development Board to account for leaking oilfield injection wells in its groundwater models. When voters in Victoria, Lavaca, Colorado and Comal counties turned down the proposed groundwater districts in November 2001, the Victoria Advocate credited him by name.

A retired civil engineer on San Antonio’s water advisory panel met with him and vouched for his facts. He was still speaking up during public comment at Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority board meetings in 2015.

You don’t need a degree to read the law. You need a copy of it and the nerve to stand up.Our takeaway from his story

W. Goodrich Jones, the father of Texas forestry

A banker, not a forester. In 1898 he rode horseback across East Texas to see the timber for himself, and came back with a bleak report. In 1914 he gathered about 20 people in the Carnegie library in Temple and founded the Texas Forestry Association. A year later the Legislature created the state’s forestry department, which became the Texas Forest Service. His motto was simple: for every tree cut, plant a tree.

Ned Fritz, the father of Texas wilderness

A Dallas lawyer who retired from his law practice in 1974 and spent the rest of his life fighting for Texas land. He founded the Texas Committee on Natural Resources, now the Texas Conservation Alliance. In 1976 he sued the Forest Service over clearcutting in our national forests, and he kept suing for decades. His endangered species case, built around the red-cockaded woodpecker, ended clearcutting on 200,000 acres of Texas national forest land and set woodpecker habitat rules across the Southeast.

He also fought for the Big Thicket and helped win five wilderness areas in East Texas. Two of them, Turkey Hill and Upland Island, are in the Angelina National Forest, right here at home.

Dwight K. Shellman Jr.

Everybody knows Don Henley helped save Caddo Lake. Fewer know the Colorado lawyer Henley recruited to do the work. Dwight Shellman came in December 1992, moved part time to the lake, and made friends with the people who lived there. Through the Caddo Lake Institute, the lake was named a Wetland of International Importance in 1993. He organized the first real scientific study of the lake, and pushed for years to turn a closed Army ammunition plant on the south shore into a wildlife refuge.

When Caddo Lake National Wildlife Refuge finally opened in September 2009, he was too sick with ALS to attend. The visitor center there carries his name.

The folks who kept the Neches running

For decades the state had the upper Neches marked for a Dallas reservoir called Lake Fastrill. In 2006 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved a 25,281-acre wildlife refuge in the same footprint instead. Dallas and the Texas Water Development Board sued. East Texans fought back, led by the Texas Conservation Alliance under Janice Bezanson and the Friends of the Neches River. They argued Dallas could get its water from reservoirs it already had. In February 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case, and the refuge stood.

Sound familiar? A big city wanted East Texas water, and the state’s water agency was on its side. Neighbors who did their homework won anyway.