It was clearly metal. Heavy. About the size of a chess board’s king, albeit swollen in a clump of dirt. As Steve Smith rolled the obscure object over in his hand, bits of the compacted grime flaked off.
“I thought, maybe a piece of a car or truck,” but, no, “It just didn’t look right.” His hands quickly picked up the stain of the hunk he’d dug out of the earth north of Gladewater’s railroad tracks down. “As I was cleaning it off, I saw something; I knew there was something there.”
An Athens resident, Smith’s a regular visitor to Gladewater, every other week or so to visit friends.
He’s been metal detecting for about 15 years – “Adventure-seeking, treasure-hunting… I was always the one who would go into the house no one else wanted to, see if I could find some piece of history.”
His latest find two months back, though, came after a bit of a gap; Smith hadn’t picked up a metal detector for months before. His weapon-of-choice is a Garrett Ace 250, featuring eight sensitivity levels for differing ground conditions as well as a continuous depth indicator.
His target was familiar territory for hobbyists: the land near a railroad often yields interesting finds, especially if there is (or was) a depot nearby.
“People, on and off, reaching in their pockets, they’re going to lose things… There’s gotta be history here,” Smith knew, as old as Gladewater is, as long as Union Pacific’s tracks have been here. It took a little effort to find the wayfinding details he needed; Gladewater Museum turned up the necessary clues: “It was a little difficult. I couldn’t find the maps that I wanted. Finally, I was here when the historical society was open. I got a really good idea,” seeking the lost footprint of the old depot east of Main Street, north of the tracks.
Smith soon set to work with his yellow and black detector.
“I was finding some trash and a few modern coins. I noticed where the street was it sloped down. In the old maps, it was all flat.”
Smith concluded – correctly, it turned out – he needed set the device to look deeper, under decades of sediment.
“There’s something, but it’s deeper,” and he delved further into the slope. “A few minutes later, I got a really good signal. My gut said, ‘Dig it.’
“I got home, got it cleaned up. I thought it might have been a door stop.”
That didn’t seem to fit the time period or the location, though. Smith kept scrubbing through layer upon layer of time.
“I could kind of start to make out what it was,” and the word ‘Bank’ was eventually revealed in the center of the object’s face. More scouring. A needle helped pluck out some stubborn bits. “I finally got it legible enough,” and by the time all was said and done ‘Citizens National’ and ‘Longview, Tex.’ were plain to see. “I was intrigued. What was it doing in Gladewater?”
With all the right clues uncovered – and with some key assistance – Smith made short work of the mystery, tracing the metal seal back to LJ Everett, Gladewater resident, founder of two Citizens National operations and frequent railway commuter.
“He lived on the corner of Quitman and Main,” Smith says, an easy stroll to the downtown depot before hopping on to morning train to Longview, home of one of the two institutions he’d established in the early 1900s.
“He would take the train, daily, over there,” Smith said, and undoubtedly carried his custom-made, official seal regularly. “They think it was a personal one for him,” crafted for wax before rubber stamps became vogue.
“It’s believed that while he was waiting, meandering around, maybe digging in his bag, pulling papers, this dropped on the ground and he lost it.”
Smith’s return trip to Gladewater Museum yielded more details – including on display (a donation from Betty V. Cook) a handbill with Everett’s portrait. Likewise, the local attraction possesses a banker’s ledger contains entries by Everett from 1922.
Smith’s since donated the seal to the museum, but there’s another key element he’s still seeking.
“I have not found a document this seal has been applied to,” he said, turning to social media to spread the word and seek out Everett’s descendants or old records from Citizens National – leads should be emailed to damscotsman@hotmail.com.
Notably, Smith did discover a grand (great-grand?) niece of Everett’s wife, another sort of treasure for the seeker.
“It brought back some memories and brought people together. I thought that was neat,” he says. Smith’s glad the seal now has a home in the care of the museum’s docents. “I have no use for it. It’s a great collectible and a great talking piece, but I think the city will get more use out of it through the museum as part of their history.
“It belongs to the town.”