Who is Fort Worth’s Conner Ave. named after? He was a judge and treasure hunter. Really

East Siders know that Poly High School is on Conner Avenue.

“But who,” they might wonder, “was Conner?”

He was Truman Holman Conner, born in Indiana in 1849. He graduated from the law department of Trinity University in Tehuacana in 1876 and began practicing law in Eastland. In 1887 he was appointed judge of the Forty-Second District Court.

In 1898 Conner was elected chief justice of the Texas Court of Civil Appeals of the Second Supreme Judicial District.

The court was based in Fort Worth, so Conner moved to Fort Worth and began the only job he would hold the rest of his life.

Conner also began to buy land in Polytechnic. About 1911, he platted two eponymous additions — including Conner Avenue — and began to sell lots. He also built a home for himself on Conner Avenue.

When Judge Conner retired in 1933 at age 84, he had served continuously as a judge for 46 years — the second-longest tenure of any judge in American history to that time.

But when this man with the facts-first, buttoned-down brain was not poring over law books and writs of mandamus, he was poring over maps and other documents related to — buried treasure.

Yes, Judge Conner was one of Coronado’s children. The late Texas historian J. Frank Dobie called treasure-seekers such as Conner “Coronado’s children” after Spanish conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, who searched the Southwest and Great Plains — in vain — for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold and Quivira.

Dobie wrote: “These people, no matter what language they speak, are truly Coronado’s inheritors. ... I have called them Coronado’s children. They follow Spanish trails, buffalo trails, cow trails, they dig where there are no trails; but oftener than they dig or prospect they just sit and tell stories of lost mines, of buried bullion by the jack load ...”

Judge Conner searched for “buried bullion by the jack load” in two places: Eastland County and the Pecos River country of southwest Texas.

In 1931, when Conner was 82, the Star-Telegram interviewed him about his quest:

“When Justice Conner was living in Eastland County he met an aged man who had talked to one of a party of Spaniards on their way to Mexico from Oklahoma. With them there was a king’s ransom in coin. The party became sick, and they buried the money. Justice Conner and Judge [probably Eastland County Judge R. M.] Black searched the country, checking it by a map they had obtained. They found a flat rock with an arrow carved in it and other markings. On trees and in fields for several miles they found signs which corresponded to two of the designs on the rock, but they could never find the third emblem. They asked an old Mexican woman what the third emblem meant, and she replied in a hushed voice, ‘Buried treasure.’

“Justice Conner is convinced that where he finds the third corresponding mark, there will be the gold. There is an eager tone in his voice as he talks about it, and his eyes glint with the enthusiasm of the true treasure seeker as he draws a chart of the rock. He knows where the stone is and will start out from there, if he goes back.”

The Star-Telegram also described Conner’s quest for the Castle Gap treasure in the Pecos River country:

“Judge Black had a brother who had talked to a dying prisoner in the jail at Sherman and from whom he had obtained a map. This dying man was one of a group of six or eight who started to Mexico just after the Civil War. Near the Pecos [River] they fell in with a wagon train commanded by a distinguished Spanish gentleman and including a beautiful woman, whom the soldiers of fortune took to be his daughter. The [wagon train] party was supposed to be on its way to Galveston to ship for Spain. The power of the Emperor Maximilian had collapsed in Mexico, and the Americans thought that the old Spanish gentleman had been treasurer and was fleeing with gold. They came to this conclusion after noticing that one of the wagons was heavily loaded.”

Maximilian was an Austrian archduke installed as emperor of Mexico in 1864 by France’s Napoleon III. Maximilian was deposed and executed in 1867.

Today a historical marker at Castle Gap reads: “... legend holds that a treasure-laden aide of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, fleeing the country when the regime collapsed, buried gold and jewels in the area.”

Conner told the Star-Telegram: “At any rate the Spaniards asked the services of the Americans as guides and protectors to the coast, and the [American] men volunteered. A short distance from the Pecos they [the Americans] murdered all of the train and buried the gold to make it safe from marauding Indians until sometime later when they could come back and remove it. A few days later, on the way to San Antonio, the Americans engaged in a battle with a group of soldiers, and all [the Americans] were killed except the one who later made his way to northern Texas near Sherman. There he was thrown in jail on suspicion of horse theft, and it was there that he met Judge Black’s brother. We got the story from him and the map and supplies and set out. We gave up the search when our supplies ran out.”

Judge Conner continued: “I would love very much to take up the trail again. Those events of more than 30 years ago are as clear as if they happened yesterday. ... We found what we thought was the burned remnants of the wagon train near Castle Gap that had carried the money, but that was as close as we got to the treasure.”

Alas, Judge Conner never did “take up the trail again” to search for Maximilian’s treasure.

He died in 1933 at age 84.

He is buried in Eastland County, where he began both his legal career and his search for “buried bullion by the jack load.”

Mike Nichols blogs about Fort Worth history at www.hometownbyhandlebar.com.