So fun story on that: nearly a century ago, we had a Great Depression. Many are saying it was the best Depression. It came at the end of a half-century of nearly uninterupted Republican government. Many people don't know that.
Anyway--I digress.
My family has had a few tracts in Bell County for a very long time. I didn't really know how long. I knew it was family land and that was it. Cotton farming, mostly. But Cotton is hard on the land; for the last 20 years it's been corn. And corn doesn't make very much money. So we leased the upper tract to a solar outfit to build a solar farm.
A few months ago, Oncor came asking for an easement to run transmission lines across the lower tract. There was some family discussion, but at the end of it we decided to go ahead. There was some discussion about the fact that my grandparents had kind of envisioned that as the bug-out property. Papa worked for the DOD and figured it might be good to have a place of last resort if the end of the world came about. And these days, . . . .
But in that discussion, I asked how it came about that the family owned this random property (or really set of properties) in Bell County. And it turns out that my great-great grandfather was a soon-to-be-retired teacher in the very early 1930s, and as local farmers went bankrupt he would buy their tracts for virtually nothing from the local bank (which itself was about to (and ultimately did) go bust).
So yeah--we leased out that tract to Oncor. It paid for my son's first car: a new BMW. There's plenty left over for his sister's car in a couple years. And along with it comes a lesson in family history. And why the family's crest ought to feature a vulture.