Old Joe From Rockwell

There is a book that was published in 1971 called Off the Beaten Trail the author is Edward Sayers or otherwise known as Ed. This book was a beacon for me when I came to Texas. Everything in Texas was new to me and I loved it. part of discovering my newfound town was reading books. This was before the internet. I would take out the maximum number of 12 books that you could check out at the library on Texas history and read them during all of my free time. It was while reading Ed’s book that the idea of traveling Texas with tourism was born. Ed was an adventurer he went to far reaches unknown places and discovered unknown stories and talk to the people that had true history or even Legends that may have not been accurate but nonetheless enduring for time. he talked to the regular people who just loved his history for history sake and kept those stories alive through writing it down and just storytelling. 

 

Off the beaten Trail was the inspiration for the beginning of my business Haunted Texas.

 

 One of the short chapters in his book is called the Great Wall of Texas. He goes to Rockwall Texas where he interviews  a man named Joe Wanderer. At the time Joe was living in what Ed describes and I quote  ‘he lived in the crowded little room behind his mobile station, back there with a lot of growing things and the musty scents of recollections tucked away in old drawers. He was heavy set 80 with a good, seamed face that matched his name, which matched his living since he came from the old country and tried Arkansas and Arizona before he moved TO Rockwall Texas.’

 

 Joe insisted that the wall was built by an ancient civilization. He had pictures proving his point. They were pictures of strange designs that he believed looked like different images. He dreamed of the rock wall of ancient times as a tourist attraction and he had even written and printed a manual; his plan was to give all the money that was made to a local orphanage.

 

How have the internet and I looked up Old Joe Wanderer. he died in 1966 when he was 85 years old in Rockwall Texas where he’s buried. I discovered more about Mr. Joe. He once had a wife a bit younger than him and a daughter. Both were killed in 1949 in Santa Fe New Mexico in a car accident where the car which was going very fast hit a school bus. The mother and wife were killed instantly and the daughter died the next day in the hospital and Mr. Joe moved to Texas. When Ed Sayers refers to him as from the old country he means Germany is where Mr. Wanderer was born in 1882.

 

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/44819646/joseph-wanderer

 

The rock formations and mysterious shapes today According to the Texas Time Traveler created by the Texas historical Association ‘ The citizens of Rockwall have been debating the source of their “rock walls”, subterranean sandstone dikes and surface outcrops that look like human-made walls, for almost a century. The “walls” are, of course, naturally occurring, a fact made all the more reasonable when confronted with counter theories presented by characters like “Count Bryon de Prorok” who, after examination of an exposed section of a wall in 1925, concluded that they were constructed by a prehistoric race. Despite a complete lack of royal titles among them, Texas geologists have since suggested otherwise. It is a natural formation of the fault line that runs through the county.