History of Tu-Bears

Tu*Bears was first concieved in the fall of 1999. We wanted to bring
the culture of SouthEast Texasin with the dawning of a new age,
so the search was on for the "perfect spot" on which to buid such
a grand place. After concidering several possible places , one
place seemed to stand out more than the rest. It had such an
intoxicating feeling about it... this was the place. As we planned
our new adventure ,the land seemed to welcome us to this particular
place. We set about to find some of the history surrounding this
piece of Texas, what we found only made us feel that we had
put ourselves right where we needed to be.

The Mexican State of Coahuila and Texas granted 4428.4 acres
[a league] to a widow, Jane Taylor, on March 21, 1835.
The Colonization Law of said state allocated one league of
land (4,428.4 acres) to heads of household, including widows.
The petition section of the title issued to Taylor indicates that
she was a widow and had seven children. Details are
sketchy ,but she did have 7 children and was unable to sign her name.
In the years that followed, Texas became an independant nation,
joined the union,then succeded, joined the confederate states, and
finally became the state we know today.

Tu*Bears is located on the Jane Taylor survey in a vanished
comunity that was known as Harmony, Texas. Harmony, on
Farm Road 256 six miles southwest of Woodville and two miles
south of U.S. Highway 190 in Tyler County, is centered around the
Harmony Baptist Church. It lies near the old Spanish road running
south from Nacogdoches past Liberty. Before Harmony was
established around 1890, Martha Wheat, a daughter of early
settler Josiah Wheat, married Andrew George, who had a
tanyard in the vicinity. He manufactured boots and other leather
goods. The old mill that was used to grind oak bark for
tanning the hides was long in the possession of family descendants.
Arnold Rhodes organized a Baptist church at Harmony in 1881, one
of many he helped start in East Texas; his son Jeff served the
community as pastor for many years. Nancy Shivers and her
son R. M. Shivers, the grandfather of Governor Allan Shivers,
were charter members of this Baptist church. The church building,
like most of those built in Tyler County before 1900, was used for
both church and school. The building was moved
several times and was used for both purposes for many years.
Harmony had no post office. In 1835 land grants in the area included
those to Jane Taylor, A. Blunt, and B. Lanier. In 1965 homes or parcels
of land were owned around Harmony by more than a dozen families.
The 1983 county highway map showed a church building at Harmony.
In the mid-1980s Harmony was in a cattle and timber area and because
of its scenic locale was an attractive location for retirement and recreation.

You might say that to stay at Tu*Bears is to stay in Harmony