Having fled Mexico in 1913, to escape the revolution, my family returned to their ranch in 1921, to reclaim their property, and rebuild and restore the rot and ruin both nature and man had wrought in the eight years of their absence. I was five in 1921, and the earliest recollections I have are of talk of going to Mexico; of what it was like when the family lived in that wild country before the revolution; of our preparations to return; and the return journey itself.
As a boy, I knew many of the principle colony members and lived some of the story myself. My grandparents, both paternal and maternal, were charter members of the Blalock Mexico Colony, and their son and daughter, meeting for the first time on the special train that took them to Mexico, were married there, built a home, reared a large family, died and were buried in the colony cemetery along side my grandparents who had preceded them. Indeed, the bold venture of the founders of the colony became destiny for their descendants, touching and molding their lives in ways a world apart from what they would otherwise have been.
As I watched the last of the original founders pass from the scene, then a growing number of the second generation take with them their story to the grave, I began to fear the story would not be told as I wanted it to be. For that reason I resumed the task, which I considered a labor of love, very nearly an obligation to those beloved relatives and old friends, whose story is surely worth this telling.
".remember that there we spent the years of our youth; we will never ever forget that in these lands are the remains of parents, relatives and friends. So today we want to live again some memories of our life in that colony."*
George P. Taylor
*George P. Taylor, Blalock Mexico Colony, a speech written in Spanish for a reunion of the Blalock Mexico Colony in 1976 in Tamaulipas, Mexico. Mr. Taylor began research in 1957 for a Blalock Mexico Colony book. He searched the National Archives for information and documents and gathered primary data from original colonists and their decedents through oral interviews and written questionnaires. He corresponded with government officials in the United States and in Mexico attempting to locate colony documents. Unfortunately, due to a terminal illness, Mr. Taylor never finished the project he began. His wife Mary-Agnes Taylor passed his research to the authors of this book.
Mr. Taylor spent his early years living in Chamal, Tamaulipas, Mexico and as a young adult he taught in the Blalock Mexico Colony School. He is the son of Blalock Mexico Colony members: Ashley Taylor and Sylvia Penix Taylor.
