Also in Wright Plaza are 4 smaller murals on what appears to be arched windows on history in a brick and stone building. The perspective work on these murals are very well done. The airplane appears to be flying through the window over your head!
This mural celebrates Cleburne's Texas League baseball history, as well as the city's firsts in the air and on the ground.
On the left of the mural is a Cleburne Railroaders baseball player playing left field during a home baseball game. He is wearing the heavy wool baseball uniforms common at the turn of the century. The big letter "C" for Cleburne. The fence behind him preserves the name of Hulen Park, home field for the Cleburne Railroaders. The Cleburne Railroaders played in the AA Texas League.
A fun newspaper article from the Cleburne Times-Review details the brief and volatile history of the Cleburne Railroaders, who played one season in 1906, and won the Texas League pennant: (
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Unfortunately, financial difficulties cause the team to fold after they won the pennant. Their players scattered to the winds.
Inset in the foreground is a larger portrait of Tris Speaker, in a blue Cleburne Railroaders uniform. He played for Cleburne in 1906. When the team folded in 1907, Tris Speaker went to the Boston Red Sox, where he eventually led them to two world championships.
Speaker is easily the most famous player who had ever played in the Texas League. He is considered the best offensive and defensive center fielder in baseball history. After a stellar major league career, he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937, 21 years after his single season at Cleburne.
Speaker never forgot his local roots. Through all the years he was in baseball, in the off season he returned to his ranch in Texas, not far from Cleburne near Lake Whitney. He died there in 1948 and is buried in Hubbard TX. For more on Tris Speaker, see (
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Next to Speaker stands the delivery truck for A. J. Wright's store on Main Street. The significance of this vehicle is that it was made in Cleburne. A man stands slightly behind the truck, with his hand on the right passenger-side fender. He is looking out of the mural, and since it looks to us like he owns the car, Blasterz will guess that the man is A. J. Wright himself. Wright built the buldings that form this plaza, which also makes us think this is him.
The mural brochure by the Chamber of Commerce (not available online) does not say for sure if the man on the mural is car builder Luck or car owner Wright, so we are still going to guess that it's Wright.
Another long but worthwhile article from the Cleburne Times-Review details the history behind Cleburne's brief existence as an auto manufacturing town: (
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The airplane soars over the head of the baseball player and Mr. Wright and his truck. The airplane looks very like the model first flown by the Wright brothers. A man is scrunched in a single seat in front of the motor. He is waving at us as he flies by, and out of the mural. The plane has three wheels under it, and three large cloth wings with a cross-shaped tail. Blasterz agree that we would not fly in it on a dare!
We thought at first that this might refer to a visit by one of the Wright Brothers to Cleburne, but we discovered something even cooler: This airplane is named "Old Soggy No. 1", and was built by "Slatts" Rogers and John Fine in 1912 in Johnson County. Rogers was the first aviator oreceive his pilot's license in Texas. The plane was built in Keene, then brought to Cleburne and launched.
For more on this plane, see (
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