Billy W. Mitchell

Originally from Southeast Texas, Billy W. Mitchell moved to San Marcos, Texas to pursue a Bachelor of Science degree in Geography with a minor in Sociology at Texas State University.  His focus has been in Sustainability with an interest in water resources, land management, and ecosystem rehabilitation.  His interests include permaculture, biotecture, and sustainable aternative energy. 

 

He was born Billy Wayne Wells on October 3, 1970 in a hospital in Houston at 7:05 pm and adopted through the DePelchin Faith Home.  He lived with his adopted family in the Sharpstown area of Houston until he was six years old.  In the summer of 1977, he moved onto a 127 acre plot of land approximately 16 miles north of Silsbee, Texas.  It was this plot of land that he came to know as his home and Silsbee became his hometown.

 

When he first moved onto the plot of land there was nothing artificial there except a quarter mile driveway off of what would later be known as Pipeline Road, a lake, and a camper.  The land was bordered on one side by a neighbor and on the other three sides by Beech Creek Hunting Club.  The neighbor’s land was a cattle ranch and had very little plant life other than pasture.  The hunting club’s land was, in large part, leased to the lumber mills in the area to grow trees for their mills.  His land looked like it still had its primary growth because trees there were a diverse mixture of species and some of them were very large.  

 

The landscape was pristine and absolutely beautiful.  The entire plot of land was covered in virgin timber and thicket.  There were longleaf, short leaf, and loblolly pine, oak, magnolia, sassafras, sweet gum, and even hickory trees present.  Blueberry and blackberry bushes grew wild on the property as well as huckleberry trees, Muskadine grapes, and American Beautyberry plants.  There was also good rabbit, squirrel, and deer hunting to be had.  The lake could also be fished for catfish, trout, and sunfish.

           

The lake was man-made.  It was a stream that had been dammed up and built with a spillway, which allowed the overflow to rejoin the stream below the dam and continue on.  There was a little island in the lake where Muskobee and Mallard ducks would nest.  There was even a mated pair of snow geese that would migrate to the lake each year to nest.

           

The nearest neighbor was the Slankard family.  They owned a cattle ranch about 4 miles down the road.  It was only about ¾ of a mile through the woods following the power line to their pastures, though.   There were two separate houses on the property as well as a large barn.

           

The first year on the new property was a true adventure for his entire family.  They lived in 3 campers and there were no electricity, running water, telephone service, air conditioning, or bathrooms (except the camper potties which they used when it was raining or too cold to go outside).  For lights they used lanterns or candles.  They had to haul water up from the lake in buckets to heat over a fire for bath water and then they would bathe in a big aluminum tub.  They would dig ‘cat-holes’, or trenches in the woods, to use along with a portable toilet seat to relieve themselves.

           

During that first year, they had to get the electric and telephone companies to extend their lines out to where the building site was.  They also had to have a contractor drill a well for water and install an electric pump.  They hired another contractor to pour the concrete foundation slab for their house and build the exterior walls, the roof, and the interior wall studs.  Over the course of that year they finished building the interior of the house themselves.

           

Due to the remote location, zoning was a definite problem.  The property was considered a Kountze, Texas address and phone number; however, they fell within the Silsbee school district.  When it came time to start the school year, the school district would not send a school bus to their home.  The nearest bus stop was approximately 6 miles away.  To resolve this problem, his mother took a job driving a school bus and Billy, his brother, and his sister were assigned to her bus route.

           

Growing up in such an isolated environment allowed him to explore the natural world around his house.  He was not one to sit in front of a television all day.  He spent all of his spare time, when he was not doing chores, walking in the woods of their property.  He would also explore the hunting club in the off season.  He would walk to either Village or Beech Creeks to go fishing or swimming.  It was not uncommon for him to wander 10-20 miles in a single day.  He would catch lizards, snakes, and other animals to play with and then let them go when he was done, of course.

           

There were a few times when the hunting club, in collusion with the timber companies, would do controlled burns of the land.  His family had to be extra careful at these times, because these companies did not always consult with them or even bother to inform them.  Luckily, his father had bought a bulldozer for maintaining their driveway, so his father plowed a 10 foot fire break around their property line.  He also plowed secondary fire breaks at various intervals on the property.

           

As his family got to know their neighbors better, they saw that there was a pattern to the settlement of the area.  A few miles beyond their neighbor’s cattle ranch was Mrs. Mary Louis McNealy’s house.  They put their mailbox in front of her house, next to the Slankard’s mailbox, because Mrs. McNealy’s house was as far as the Kountze post office would deliver mail.  The area around her house was known as the McNealy Settlement.  Quite a few of the families living there were related to each other in one way or another.  This was not the only such settlement around the Silsbee/Kountze area or Hardin County.  There are also Drakeville and Caneyhead, which are not actual towns or cities, but they are named with signs and everyone in the area calls these places by these names.

           

In the Silsbee/Kountze area, there are certain family trees whose branches blur together quite frequently.  These families include names such as Willis, Drake, Gore, Rashall, Williams, Stutts, McGallion, Williamson, Keith, Thompson, Leblanc, Caraway, Rodgers, Stelly, Stricklan, Cravey, Crawford, Baumgartner, Sheffield, Parr, and Rasmussen.  They are almost one huge extended family.  The people raised in these settlement areas tend to remain, whereas people from the cities tend to leave the area or even the state when they become adults.

           

For about the first 10 years, the Mitchell family  would plant two large gardens equaling a total of about 2 acres.  They would grow corn, sugar cane, potatoes, purple hull peas, radishes, onions, tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, watermelons, zucchini, okra, peanuts, and asparagus.  They also had pear, plum, and cherry trees.  Billy's mother became very good at canning and stewing fruits and vegetables.  They would make their own peanut butter, jams, preserves, and mayonnaise.

           

The main industries in the area of his hometown are the Westvaco Paper Mill in Evadale, Texas and the Louisiana-Pacific Particle Board Plant in Silsbee.  Other jobs in the area include logging, educators for the school district or Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, Wal-Mart in Silsbee or Lumberton, Texas, or working for one of the offshore oil drilling companies in Texas or Louisiana.  Silsbee has been known as the car trading capital of Southeast Texas and has quite a few used car dealerships.  His father worked for the paper mill in Evadale as a draftsman for about 25 years until he finally retired.  His brother attained a computer science degree from Lamar University and worked offshore as a Roughneck for a few years before securing a systems analyst job at the paper mill in Evadale as well.  He worked there for many years before moving to Middleton, Ohio to work as a systems analyst for Honeywell, Inc. in Cincinnati.  Billy worked for a few years at Wal-Mart in Lumberton and also a few years offshore as a Roustabout for Transocean, Global Marine, and TODCO.

           

He started the first grade in the Silsbee Independent School District and attended all the way to graduation.  The only grade that he missed spending in Silsbee was Kindergarten.  Silsbee was a small school district, so everyone pretty much knew everyone else.  The campus’ were Robinson Elementary School (Kindergarten), Kirby Elementary School (1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades), Read-Turrentine Elementary School (4th, 5th, and 6th grades), Silsbee Junior High School (7th and 8th grades), and Silsbee High School (9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grades).  He graduated in the spring of 1989 in a class of only about 150 students.

 

In September of that same year he joined the United States Army and spent the next 10 years living in places such as Fort Benning, Georgia, Fort Drum and Watertown, New York, Muskegon Heights and Monroe, Michigan. While in the military, he got to visit such places as Germany, Puerto Rico, Panama, Honduras, California, and Virginia.  In 1999, he finally moved back to his hometown, but many aspects of his home had changed.

 

There were many changes on the 127 acres since he had left.  The dam had burst causing the lake to drain.  All that was left was the stream.  To make ends meet financially, his mother had gotten the county to re-zone all but the 5 acre homestead into a tree farm.  The property had been clear-cut, wind-rowed, and replanted with new fast growing hybrid pine trees.  Most of the trees surrounding their property in the hunting club had been harvested by loggers, so their part of Hardin County had become very barren and desolate. 

 

Since most of the roads near their property were dirt, the logging trucks had made driving them almost impossible.  The ruts were deep enough that even a 4-wheel drive would scrape bottom.  The sand on the road was so deep in some places that even the logging trucks would get stuck at times.  If there was any substantial rainfall, the flooding on the roads was horrendous.  The areas that were not flooded were so muddy that driving on them was all but impossible.

 

To make matters even worse, there are only 3 ways to get to either Hwy 69 or Hwy 92 from their house and they all go over bridges.  These bridges go over the Village, Beech, and Turkey Creeks.  If there was a lot of rainfall and these bridges got overflowed they  would be stranded at their house until the flood waters receded.  Since they were at the end of the power and telephone lines, if they got flooded in they were more than likely without electricity or communication sometimes for a week or more at a time as well.

 

The property when they first moved there was so different than it is today.  A person would not recognize it if they did not know it was the same place.  With the primary growth gone, the lake drained, and all of the fire damage from the 2010 forest fires that swept through that area, the property has radically changed its appearance.  Having spent so much of his life wandering the wild places of the property and drawing so much of his identity from those experiences, Billy doesn't think that he can call that 127 acres ‘home’ anymore.  ‘Home’, for him, is nothing more than a feeling and a collection of fond memories now.

 

Silsbee, his hometown, has changed just as dramatically.  The Robinson Elementary and Silsbee Junior High School campuses are gone.  There is a brand new elementary school next to Read-Turrentine Elementary School.  The Junior High School is at the old High School campus and there is a new High School on the outskirts of town near the new Wal-Mart building and the new Chili’s Restaurant.  West Gibson’s Grocery store is gone, the public library has doubled in size, and about half of the other shops in town are either gone or renamed.  The artificial lake they knew as ‘The Blue Hole’ was Red Cloud Water Park, but now is Thompson Mobile Home Park.  There is a new water park between Silsbee and Lumberton by the Village Creek bridge on Hwy 96.

 

Before moving to San Marcos, Texas to attend Texas State University, he discovered Permaculture and Biotecture on the Internet.  He watched several videos on YouTube and researched these topics extensively.  He downloaded countless videos and PDF files to watch and read, having come to the conclusion that these methods of living and caring for the environment were crucial to being sustainable in the future.  This was the reason he chose to pursue a degree in Geography and Sociology.

 

Geoff Lawton, Bill Mollison, John D. Liu, and Michael Reynolds became his role models and inspiration.  Their vision for the future and analysis' of humanity's current situation on Planet Earth has led to his dream of eventually founding a sustainabile solutions consulting firm where he can help people design their properties to grow food, have structures that are self-sustaining and off-the-grid, and have a negative or neutral carbon footprint.

 

Their teachings have also led him to begin developing a philosophy he has dubbed "Divinum Sustinieri" (Divine Sustainability) which utilizes spirituality, sacred geometry, the elements, and sustainable life practices (permaculture, biotecture, and alternative energy) as a means of having a symbiotic relationship with the planet.

 

His motto has become:

 

"Sustainability can be our legacy."