The Magnolia Standard in 5 Minutes
Issue 40: The Old Plantersville Road Edition

This is The Magnolia Standard in five minutes. It's Tuesday, September twenty-ninth.

Three stories today. A Yankee buried in Montgomery, and the day his story gets told out loud. A new water tower, with a price on being late. And three restaurants on the way.

Two of them happen on the same road. Old Plantersville Road, in Montgomery.

Start in the five hundred block. That's the New Montgomery Cemetery, founded in eighteen sixty-eight. Buried there is Norman Branch. He pitched for Montgomery High School, then for the University of Texas, then for the New York Yankees.

His big league career was short, and it was real. Thirty-seven games over nineteen forty-one and forty-two. Five wins, two losses. And in forty-one, the Yankees won the World Series.

On Saturday, October seventeenth, someone will stand in that cemetery and tell his story in the first person.

It's called Voices from the Past. The Montgomery Historical Society runs it, and this is the seventh year. Local actors in period clothes take on the lives of settlers, statesmen and pioneer women buried in two of the town's oldest cemeteries. The other one is the Old Methodist Churchyard Cemetery, at Pond Street and Eva Street. It was founded in eighteen thirty-eight, seven years before Texas was a state.

One of this year's stories is small, and hard to shake. Around nineteen ten, a Montgomery teenager named John Bowe Addison was shot while hunting rabbits. A wound like that usually killed people then. The town doctor worked on him all night. He lived. He lived to eighty-four, in fact. A young actor plays him.

Come early if you can. At eleven that morning, an hour before the tour, the society dedicates a bench at the New Montgomery Cemetery for Pat Spackey. Around the county, she was the Texas Flag Lady.

She descended from Doctor Charles B. Stewart, who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence and moved to Montgomery in eighteen thirty-seven. The town credits him with drawing the Lone Star flag. Flag historians still argue about that. Montgomery doesn't.

The tour runs noon to three. It's free. Donations are optional. And wear shoes you can walk grass in.

Now, a short way off that same road, something new is going up.

On September twenty-second, the Montgomery City Council hired a builder for Water Plant Number Four. That's a new well, and a water tower that holds five hundred thousand gallons. The site is near Old Plantersville Road and Old Dobbin Plantersville Road.

Six companies bid, and the low bid won. Schier Construction, at eight million, three hundred fifty-four thousand dollars. The design engineer had estimated about nine point one million. So the winning bid came in roughly seven hundred forty-six thousand dollars under.

Then there is the clock. The contract gives the builder five hundred days. The city first looked at four hundred twenty, but contractors said a tighter deadline would push the bids up.

After day five hundred, the builder owes the city two thousand five hundred dollars for every day it runs late. That number is agreed in advance, so nobody has to fight in court about what a late water plant cost.

The clock doesn't start at the vote. It starts when the city gives the go-ahead, after the paperwork and bonds are signed. If that happened November first, day five hundred would fall in the middle of March, twenty twenty-eight.

One more detail. The tower will be plain tan. Painting the city's name on it would have cost about seventy-five thousand dollars, and the council left that out.

Last story. Food.

Breakfast is coming to F M fourteen eighty-eight. The Flying Biscuit Cafe, a Southern breakfast and lunch chain from Atlanta, has a Magnolia spot at fifty-six sixty-seven F M fourteen eighty-eight. The company lists it for the last three months of this year. Community Impact reported the target is November.

Think biscuits and gravy, chicken and waffles, shrimp and grits. It's a breakfast and lunch place. Their Richmond location closes at two on weekdays.

Olive Garden has an actual date. October twenty-sixth, at the Grand at two forty-nine, in Tomball.

And in Montgomery, a Texas Roadhouse has filed state paperwork to build on Eva Street. The filing lists construction from May to October of twenty twenty-seven. No opening date yet.

A filing like that is a plan, not a promise. The address usually holds. The dates tend to move.

So, in order: Olive Garden has a day. The Flying Biscuit has a season. The Texas Roadhouse has paperwork. We'll tell you the Magnolia opening date when the company sets one.

One reminder before we go. Voter registration for the November election closes next Monday, October fifth.

The full stories, with every source, are at the magnolia standard dot news. That's the Magnolia Standard in five minutes.

Thanks for riding along. See you next edition.

Written by our newsroom, voiced by computer.