Santa Fe Annex

About 1912: The white building in the foreground at 201 Rosenberg (25th) is the Santa Fe Annex, 8 floors, 1913, built to house the offices of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad’s Gulf Lines as well as the unified passenger depot for the several railroad lines converging there. Further back the 4-story brick Victorian Romanesque building at 119 Rosenberg (25th) was the previous Union Passenger Depot, 4 floors, 1897, missing the truncated 2 story crenelated tower which was taken off after 1914 (See 25th Street Pier showing the tower intact).

16 September 2001: 124 Rosenberg (25th): Shearn Moody Plaza (Santa Fe Building), 11 floors, 1932. The structure united the 1913 Santa Fe Annex on the south end of the street within a larger building with elements of the Art Deco style in the center block, and matched the Southern annex with a mirrored building on the north side. As the anchor building of Galveston’s Strand Street, it has long been the focus of the district.

Eunice McNeil Cox came to Corpus Christi in around 1912 when she was about 15 years old, and received this postcard shortly after that. ¨Lonesome Jack¨ may have known her there or in Rising Star, Eastland County, TX where she had been living before she moved to Corpus. Her father was William Neal Cox and her mother was Nola Parker who married in Brown County, TX in 1890 [18 May 1890]. Eunice was sister to Estus, 6 years older; Lois, 4 years younger: and Bailey, 9 years younger. After living in Corpus Christi for four years, her father sustained fatal gunshot wounds 28 May 1916 and was brought to the only hospital in town, Spohn Sanitarium where he died. Eunice was not quite 19 and of course this tragedy created a crisis in the family. It soon became important for her to emancipate herself from her widowed mother’s care and strike out on her own. On 20 December 1917 she married Corpus native Clarence Feely, a descendant of Irish immigrant James Edward Feely (1840-1917). James immigrated with his wife Bridget (1849-date), their sons Patrick William (1868-1917) and Terence Francis (1869-1932), as well as her brothers Patrick and Dennis Hart. The families were from Kinlough, Leitrim County, Ireland where Bridget and James were married on 8 October 1866 in 1866. When they arrived at Corpus Christi in 1869, the fledgling port city had a population of 2,160, but it was well-situated for rapid growth. Fifty years later at the time of the 1912 postcard Corpus Christi was a city of less than 10,000 inhabitants, but for several decades afterwards the population would double every 10 years, achieving a contemporary population in 2020 of over 300,000.
Before Clarence married, he served 10 May 1916 until 1 May 1917 as a private in the Federalized National Guard. This was about the time of the Mexican Punitive Campaign of General Pershing against Pancho Villa so perhaps Clarence served as a home guard soldier. Clarence (21) and Eunice (20) took up residence at 505 Staples while Clarence worked for Wells Fargo. Among the things the young married couple had in common was the death of a father by gunshot wounds. In an apparent coincidence, Clarence’s father Patrick William Feely had also died of gunshot wounds at Spohn just 10 months after Eunice’s father did. It is tempting to associate the similar deaths as somehow related, but the deaths were unlikely to have been connected, other than to reveal that Corpus Christi could be a dangerous place to live at this time, but these deaths may have brought them closed together.

On September 14, 1914 a devastating hurricane hit Corpus Christi, destroying many homes and businesses. One of the buildings lost was the 1905 Spohn Sanitarium at 164 Morgan Avenue and Ocean Drive, an essential hospital soon rebuilt at the same site on a larger scale in 1923. The Feely home at 1203 Thirteenth and her mother Nola Cox’s neighboring home at 1924 Craig were 13 blocks further inland and better situated to weather the storm. Eunice and her mother remained neighbors through 1930 as the Feeley family grew: Eugene Clarence (1920), Weyland Blair (1922), Frances Marie (1925), Arlene Bobbye (1928).
Clarence and Eunice moved to 3131 Magnolia by 1950 and remained in Corpus Christi as their family grew up. Clarence, Jr. found a job as a telegraph manager; Weyland married divorcee Margaret Alva Whatley and later lived in Midland, TX; Frances married Charles Alfred Davis, Jr. (1920-1990) and lived nearby at 3137 Magnolia, then later moved to Beaumont; Bobbye Arlene married Corpus bus driver Wallace Barnes (b. 1927), then Charles Edward Thomas.
Many family members are buried in Seaside Memorial Park Cemetery in Corpus: Eunice Mary Cox Feely (1897-1978); Clarence Eugene Feely (1896-1974); Weyland Blair Feely (1922-2000); Margaret Alva Ribble Feely (1922-2007); Frances Feely (1925-1997); Estus Thomas Cox (1891-1975) and his wife Eunice Estelle Miller Cox (1909-1962); Bobbye Arlene’s husband, Charles Edward Thomas (1928-1990). Bobbye Thomas lived as a widow for the next 28 years and is buried at Coastal Bend State Veterans Cemetery in Corpus. Rising Star Cemetery is the final resting place of William Neal Cox (1869-1915), Mary Nola Parker Cox (1868-1962) and their infant son Roy (1905-1905).

Shearn Moody

Shearn Moody (1933-1996) was the scion of the Moody Family, one of Galveston’s most enterprising families. His grandfather was Colonel William Lewis Moody (1828-1920), a University of Virginia lawyer who first came to Texas in 1856 and settled in Fairfield, Freestone County where he went into business with brothers David and Leroy. When the Civil War began he organized and became the captain of one of the first companies in Texas. Company G of the 7thTexas infantry mustered into service Oct. 2, 1861 and joined the battle lines further east. Captain Moody was captured and made a prisoner of war, incarcerated for six months at Camp Douglas, Camp Chase and Johnson's Island. Moody was part of a prisoner exchange in September 1862, and the 7th Texas Regiment was sent to Clinton, MS where Captain Moody was made lieutenant colonel of the regiment. He was seriously wounded at Jackson, MS on July 19, 1863, then promoted to a full Colonel and assigned to post duty at Austin, TX, where he remained until the end of the war. In 1864, he came to Galveston and established a cotton factorage business, W. L. & F. L. Moody. He entered politics and was elected to the reconstruction legislature of 1874-1875, and later appointed by the governor as financial agent of the state of Texas. In his capacity as chairman of the Galveston deep water committee, he spent much of his time in Washington in 1882 in the interest of the development of a deep water port on the Texas coast. Back in Galveston he organized the Galveston Cotton Exchange, and served as its president for many consecutive terms. At his death in 1920 he was president of the banking institution, W. L. Moody & Co., as well as the Galveston Compress and Warehouse Company and the W. L. Moody Cotton Company.

Colonel Moody’s son William Lewis Moody, Jr. came to control much of the family wealth after the death of his father. In 1942 he and his wife Libbie Rice Shearn Moody incorporated the Moody Foundation, a philanthropic organization which continues to promote education, social services and community needs. Libbie was the granddaughter of Charles Shearn (1794-1871), an Englishman who came to Texas in 1834 and fought in the Texas Revolution. Coming to Houston in 1837, he became a prominent businessman, served 6 years as Chief Justice of Harris County, and founded a Methodist Church which would come to bear his name, Shearn Methodist Church. The Moody Foundation bought the Union Station Building in 1976 and rehabilitated it to include one of the largest railroad museums in the US established to educate the public about the role of railroads in development of the island economy. The Sante Fe Building was renamed Shearn Moody Plaza to honor the grandson of William Lewis Moody, Shearn Moody (1933-1995), who would soon be featured on the cover of Texas Monthly as "the sleaziest man in Texas." From his youth Moody had been widely known for his unconventional and even bizarre behavior, eccentricities which included building a slide from his bedroom window to a swimming pool where he kept pet penguins, wearing house slippers wherever he went, and throwing wild parties at his west Galveston Island ranch. After a decade-long investigation, Shearn was convicted of bankruptcy fraud in connection with misappropriation of Moody Foundation funds, and was sentenced to 5 years in federal prison. He served little time and was released on parole in 1991, after which he led a reclusive life with his long-time partner, Jimmy Stoker, a former dancer and choreographer from Las Vegas. In his last years Shearn developed Moody Gardens, a theme park and Rainforest Pyramid which became a popular attraction to the city. Shearn suffered from chronic high blood pressure and kidney disease and received regular dialysis treatments before his death in 1995 at his parents home. Jimmy Stoker had to resort to a lawsuit to obtain control of the ranch he had been promised.