Grogan’s Mill

There’s a small rural community near Houston, TX that my wife and I frequently passed by on I-45 on the way from Houston to somewhere else.  We never stopped by to actually see the town and what it might be like.  We just appreciated the name, Grogan’s Mill, and would occasionally consider its origin.  Truth be told, though, we were just passing the time on our way to wherever.  Usually the ride is a bit boring, as anyone who has ever traveled I-45 well knows, so a little idle chatter is typical along this highway.  My wife, Mo, who I love dearly for her wonderful mind (not so much its depth, though that is there, too, but more for its playfulness) respects the depth and breadth of my knowledge of trivia; she never knows what bit of minutia I might dredge up and slip into the conversation.  She is, however, disinclined to accept my claptrap as gospel — after so many years together she has been suckered in too many times.  Still, we loved to open our minds to each other while traveling on this tedious stretch of road — the hum of our tires on the asphalt is conducive to free association and such.

On our springtime drives we would notice that the grasslands around Grogan’s Mill would burst into a vibrant yellow display of color as far as the eye could see, and the pancake flatness of the topography of the area allowed one to see quite some distance.  It was a breathtaking sight that would turn that portion of our tortuous drive into a wonderland of whimsy.  On one such occasion I thought I would enlighten Mo on the history of Grogan’s Mill.

Houston, of course, was founded many years before Grogan’s Mill, which was far past where even the most remote of present-day Houston’s suburbs sit, and Houston has some pretty damned remote suburbs due to the surrounding flatlands that are extremely conducive to urban sprawl.  In any event, it was many years before anyone even thought to settle the area so far north of Houston where  Grogan’s Mill now sits.  When the time came, however, settlers were attracted to the yellow fields — hundreds and hundreds of acres of them.  As it turns out, that sea of yellow was a manna from Heaven to the early settlers of the area.  These pioneers were told by the indigenous tribes that they called the plant “gro Gan”, meaning “food of Gan”.  Gan was their Mother Nature.  The flowers could be ground and made into an extremely healthy and hearty flat bread.  It seemed that the more it was harvested, the more lush the gro Gan fields would be the following year, so it was an extremely plentiful and sustainable source of nourishment.  A mill was soon built to grind the flowers into the amazingly nutritious gro Gan flour, which they would transport to the, by then, bustling town of Houston.  They named the town after the flower and the mill, Anglicizing it as “Grogan’s Mill, and because of their seemingly unlimited supply of gro Gan flour, the town prospered greatly.  The newly wealthy townsfolk eventually tired of the dust created by and around the mill and relocated a short distance upwind settling in the beautiful woodlands nearby.  (And that, by the way, is how the still prosperous community of The Woodlands came to be.)

The gro Gan mill is long gone, as is the little-known story of the area’s early settlers, but the beautiful yellow fields can still be seen by anyone enduring that otherwise dismal stretch of highway in the springtime.

Mo was astounded by my knowledge of the local history, and thought it a lovely story.  And she knew that was all it was, a special story to help the time pass on that particular journey to wherever.