Susan Marie "Sue" Beckwith
Interviewed by Jacque Smith
Sue Beckwith is a long-time resident of Elgin, Texas, who has been deeply involved in community initiatives concerning local food, historic preservation, and the sustainable development of rural cities, like Elgin. She worked closely with her dear friend, former Mayor Marc Holm, on various projects, including the restoration and preservation of the original homestead of Mary Christian Burleson. Sue is responsible for efforts to establish local food initiatives. These efforts include farm-to-kids after-school programs in the Elgin Independent School District, agricultural programs at the Austin Community College campus in Elgin, and the establishment of the Elgin Local Food Center for several years. Sue was the start-up manager for Coyote Creek Organic Feed Mill, the first commercial organic feed mill in Texas, and Jeremiah Cunningham’s World’s Best Eggs, both in Elgin. Sue is the founding Executive Director of the Texas Center for Local Food, a non-profit organization headquartered in Elgin, focused on supporting local food economies across the state.
The interview was conducted on December 17, 2022, by Jacque Smith, who has lived in Elgin since 2015. Jacque has enjoyed a rich career as a teacher, writer/editor, trainer, and an award-winning visual artist. She has generated a body of contemporary abstract art that has been exhibited across Central Texas. In 2012, she joined Carol Ikard to co-write “Touching Fiber Arts,” a coffee table book chronicling national exhibitions during the first five years of the Texas Museum of Fiber Arts. Jacque served on the board of directors of the Elgin Oral History Project from 2022 through 2024 and continues to be engaged with the organization through volunteer activities.
Interviewer:
Okay. I think we're going here, actually. So, I'm going to put you right here. Okay. Now we're safe. Okay. So, this first part is your consent.
Sue:
Okay.
Interviewer:
And so, what we need to do is put all this information here. Okay. And we'll need to get a picture of you as well before you leave.
Sue:
Can I just send you one a better picture?
Interviewer:
Sure. Yeah, that'd be great. And then I have to . . . I'm just going to read this. This is the legal part.
Sue:
Okay.
Interviewer:
The purpose of the interview is to include your story and our social history of Elgin for current and future residents through the Elgin Oral History Project. And I have some questions for you, but mostly we'd like you just to tell your stories about your Elgin experience. And would you state your full name, please?
Sue:
Susan Marie Beckwith.
Interviewer:
Marie? I didn't know your name was Marie.
Sue:
I'm a Marie after my great aunt, Marie.
Interviewer:
Marie. Well, Sue, we're really excited about having you come in and talk to us today. Are you comfortable?
Sue:
Yeah.
Interviewer:
Okay. So, you live in Elgin, correct?
Sue:
Yep.
Interviewer:
And you live on, what street do you live on?
Sue:
Eighth Street—East Eighth Street. Eighth Street.
Interviewer:
And that's kind of a magical place, is it not? Do you agree?
Sue:
I think there's magical aspects to all of Elgin really.
Interviewer:
How so?
Sue:
Well, I mean, the people here generally care about each other. I have people I enjoy who are living here, and I would like for more of them to move here because there are people who I don't enjoy who live here too, and I would like them to move away, go find another place happily ever after. Far from me.
Interviewer:
Yeah. How long have you lived in Elgin?
Sue:
Since 2013, so it's 2022 now, so I guess eight, nine years.
Interviewer:
And what drew you to Elgin? Why did you want to live here?
Sue:
I worked in Elgin starting in 2007. I was the startup manager for Coyote Creek Organic Feed Mill, which is in Elgin, and it was the first commercial organic feed mill in Texas, and the World's Best Eggs, which is a large pastured organic egg farm just outside of town, off Klaus Lane. And so I was familiar with Elgin, and we were farming in Paige and needed to not be doing that anymore and needed a place to live that we could afford and didn't want the noise of the city, the big city, but we wanted to be close enough to it to take advantage of the arts, music, and food that the big city of Austin offers. And so, we chose to live in Elgin. I was pretty close with the then mayor of Elgin, Marc Holm, and he encouraged me to move here and do some work on local foods. So that's what we did.
Interviewer:
Yeah, you and Marc were great friends.
Sue:
We were very close.
Interviewer:
Yeah. Well, let's talk about him for a second. We don't have to go into great detail, but just tell us about Marc, who he was and what he did for Elgin.
Sue:
Oh, Marc Holm. He was, I believe, a three- or four-time mayor, a reluctant mayor and just a real natural leader. He was so kind and gracious with everyone. He was mayor during a time when the country and the town and the state were becoming more and more divided, and he was just gracious with everyone. He and I were like brother and sister really. I saw him, I don't know, several times every single week. I had keys to his house. He was a strong advocate for the people of Elgin, and he was, especially in my world, an especially strong advocate of local food and farms, and he was the lead, really the leader of getting local food work going in Elgin. We were able to progress with that from about 2011 when we got our first little $11,000 grant to do a local food kind of research project to gauge interest and connect farms with City leadership and people in town. And then that grew. We got a little bit more money every year, and then we were building up to the building of the Elgin Local Food Center when he moved away. Then he passed away and City leadership changed, and that project abruptly ended by the new mayoral administration.
Interviewer:
Sadly.
Sue:
It was sad because we got a little bit more money from USDA every year. We still to this day have the plans ready to go to build the Elgin Local Food Center, which was going to be a shared, maybe someday, use commercial kitchen so people can start their own food businesses either full-time or part-time. On evenings and weekends, there was going to be a gathering place for people to come and learn about local food, a teaching kitchen, and also a teaching kitchen for kids with safe knives, safe equipment, and low countertops so that a third grader wouldn't have to stand on a stool to cook; also a community space for teaching and learning in addition to a place where people could sell their food. Little popups. So especially during events, people wouldn't necessarily even have to have a food truck. They could just open the window and sell their food with the certified commercial kitchen right behind them. It was really envisioned as an anchor for the heart of downtown right across the street from Veteran’s Memorial Park.
Interviewer:
And we have a new mayor, a new administration. You think there might be some renewed interest now with this new group of people.
Sue:
No, no. We have the same city manager, and it is the city manager who really makes those sorts of decisions. And we have the same economic development director, and they both treated me very, very badly. They yelled at me, slammed my office door, banged on my desk, things like that. It was really pretty awful. And I think, not sure, but I think that they made up some story about me that I did something bad that I didn't ever do.
Interviewer: As the reason for not supporting the project, you mean?
Sue:
This is the fall of 2019. I had been diagnosed with breast cancer at the same time—that August. Then Marc died in December.
But I still worked very hard on the Elgin Local Food Center project. We had the Moody Foundation come and do a site visit, and they were very excited about pitching in $800,000. And the City EDC agreed that if I could raise 800 that they would put in the property and another $800,000. I think the City wanted to use that money for supporting development along the highway and wanted to find a reason to not invest in downtown. A place like the Elgin Local Food Center would bring in people from across Elgin, which was a part of what we hoped would happen—that it would be a place people can bond and get to know one another through food. And the economic development director told me we don't want those people in downtown. So, there was clearly an interest in not having what I and Mayor Marc had hoped for, which was a place that people could gather together and tighten community across race and across class. But I don't know what happened with the Moody Foundation because all of a sudden, they stopped returning my calls.
So that was unfortunate. I don't know what happened. I don't have any idea. I just know that I was treated disrespectfully, which is really quite an understatement. And I wrote a letter of complaint about Owen Rock to the EDC, and they didn't do anything about it.
Interviewer:
But your project now, tell us about that.
Sue:
Well, the whole time we were building the Texas Center for Local Food, which is a statewide nonprofit organization to support local food economies across Texas. Elgin was my pet project, of course, because I live here. Texas Center for Local Food was born here by farmers around Elgin who wanted an organization that would support the economic piece of local food. There were organizations supporting farmers, the Texas Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association—how to be a better farmer, and there were organizations working on food policy at the State Capitol and nationally to make sure that the food safety rules and all the other rules related to food take into account the low margins of small farmers, but there was nobody working on consumer education and really business development. And so that's why the Texas Center for Local Food was founded in 2016 here in Elgin.
We are continuing to work on that in the midst of continuing to work on the Elgin Local Food Center. We have had for six years now an after-school program at Elgin ISD that was strongly supported by former superintendent Jodi Duron, also very close to Marc Holm. It was really me and Marc and Jodi who got that after-school program started and got the Austin Community College bonds passed that included the sustainable agriculture program that is a blessing to the State of Texas and certainly to Elgin. That was Marc Holm. Austin Community College wanted to build a campus here. And he said, I will only support it if it includes a sustainable agriculture program.
And so today we have, I think it's an eight- or nine-acre student farm off County Line Road. We have full facilities for welding for supporting the farm. It's included with the veterinary assistant program, and they share a lot of the space. It's a wonderful program, and it's growing and graduating potential farm managers—people who understand local food systems that'll form a foundation for future generations to have something to eat. I mean, we're building houses all over farmland and what is it we think we're going to eat? And that's, I think, an awakening that needs to happen amongst realtors and bankers because they're really the ones that control development outside of urbanized areas as county authorities really have no land use authority,
Interviewer:
Right? Yeah. There's just so much construction going on 290 between Elgin and Manor.
Sue:
Yeah, we knew it was going to happen, and it's important to plan for it. And I think in some ways, the City of Elgin's economic development strategy is really no different from many, many cities of our size around the country. And what we end up with is kind of rubberstamp America. You drive down the highways outside of cities and what do you see? You see the same thing in every single city.
You see the big box stores; you see the tractor supply; the big grocery store; you see the fast-food restaurants, one after the other. And that's in my mind, and I've done a fair amount of reading and studied urban policy in college, and in my mind, that's kind of 1990-style development. So, it's important. I think it's valuable to follow the money who used to own that property—where the Walmart is and what's the association with the various banks and real estate companies here in town. Who's on the economic development corporation, and what land do they own? What land do their families own? There's really just a handful of people who control all of this, like ten. And so, I'm not begrudging them the money that they have. I am, though, questioning where their vested interest is. Is there a vested interest in the health of the community—economic, physical, and social, or is the vested interest just in pure cash and power?
Interviewer:
Interesting questions. You also were involved in the Mary Christian Burleson Foundation.
Sue:
I was in the early days.
Interviewer:
Tell us about that. Well, first of all, who was Mary Christian?
Sue:
Mary Christian Burleson was a woman who lived in Elgin when, gosh, before Elgin was Elgin, right? I'm not that good with dates. Her family gave the land that the city of Elgin currently sits on and had something to do with the right-of-way for the railroad. And it was the railroad, of course, that was the catalyst for Elgin becoming a town. Towns and cities are predominantly built on transportation lines. If you just look at cities, they are built on transportation lines, whether it was waterways, navigable waterways, or whether it was roads or two tracks, stagecoach lines. That's where the towns came up at the crossroads usually. So, rail was a big piece of why Elgin is here. She was pretty brave. She was married twice, and both her husbands died. She lived in Bastrop and also had the place here in Elgin, just east or northeast of downtown. And that street
Interviewer:
Is what? Louise?
Sue:
Louise, Louise Street, yeah, right. Louise just off Lexington. So, she ended up really . . . she had all these kids because women had all these kids back then. They didn't really have a lot of say. And she raised those kids by herself for the most part. And one of the stories that I liked the most about her is there were a lot of indigenous people who lived here and who came passed through here—Apache tribes, Tokawah, and other indigenous folks, passed through on their way to the river, of course, because pecans grew along the river, and they followed the food sources. And she understood that it was important to coexist with those folks. And so, there are some stories—who knows if they're true—about her putting people up and helping people out, and then someone bringing her back skins and hides in exchange for her graciousness. Runaway slaves from time to time came through here and were fleeing from the deep southeast coming westward. And there are stories that some runaway slaves came and that she helped look after them. There's another story, and there's no evidence of this found, to my knowledge, it'd be cool if there was that she actually started a school between Elgin and Bastrop along what's now 95, and that the school was specifically intended to educate both girls and boys. So that gave us the impression that she was a strong supporter of education of women and girls.
Marc Holm was very interested in history. I was not. And he drove me by [the homestead property], and he said, “Sue”—and he's the mayor, right; and I love him, and I want to please him, and I want to support him—and he says, “I want you to take on this project.” And that was, I think, 2013. The Mary Christian Burleson nonprofit organization had been chartered in 2011 by several of the leaders around Elgin—women leaders around Elgin, Sydna Arbuckle and others. So, he drives me past this overgrown yard with this falling down wooden building on it, and he says, “Sue, I want you to work on this project. This is the Mary Christian Burleson house, and I want you to lead the project to restore it.” And I just about spit! I was just like, “Marc, I don't know anything about history. What am I going to look at this place? A big wind comes along and the whole place is going to go.” “But Sue,” he said, “it's one of the oldest, if not the oldest, homes in Elgin.” It has been here for, I guess at that time, close to a hundred years. Marc continued, “it's really important that we preserve this home and Mary Christian Burleson's legacy so that future Elginites and certainly the women of Elgin and girls will see Mary Christian Burleson as this “shero” who helped found the city in which we live. And it's important for us to all have pride, and we can have that through understanding the history of our town.” So, I said okay, and joined the Mary Christian Burleson Foundation board in 2013 and became president.
Interviewer:
Yeah, not just join, but became the president!
Sue:
Well, everybody else was pretty tired and worn out by then. And these were the same group of women who were being called on for the Elgin Historical Association and various other things. And so, a lot of them left shortly after I came in. They're like, oh, good. It's handled. And we were able to have a lot of success. I remained president for, well, that was what? Seven years. And we were able to get support from the Texas Historical Commission. Several of the early board members helped us do that. We were able to get funding to get the underpinning of the house done. It was old burdock beams or piers, excuse me, underneath the house. That stuff just doesn't rot. It had to be replaced. Of course, it was close to a hundred years old, and we had to replace it with cedar because we couldn’t find burdock. We did get money to make it level again, not tear it down, make it level again, which of course was a precarious undertaking because it might fall down. It all had to be shored up. And then Hurricane Harvey came, and what happened in Elgin is we got really, really strong winds, straight line winds, and tore off whole parts of the roof. So, we were patching it and trying to figure how to keep it dry because if you don't keep it dry, it deteriorates a building really fast—any leak in the roof at all. We did get some more funding from Texas Historical Commission to finish the outside, and I was able to leave the project in the good hands of Jake Carter. He and his wife Joy Casnovsky, moved from Austin, I don't know, in 2020, maybe 2018 or 2019, something like that. Jake is a really good project manager. I know him pretty well. And so I felt good enough to turn it over.
I was pretty burned out by then and pretty busy. Pretty busy. So, it's in good hands, and the vision for it, and hopefully the crew, will remember that the vision is really about remembering and celebrating the strength of women in Elgin. It's not just any historic building, and it's intended to be a small event center, not a history museum that people walk through and can't touch anything. The intention is for it to be a community event space for Girl Scout troops and Boy Scout troops and other community organizations, and hopefully, to be a place where the various races in Elgin can come together, because that's a shared value that Marc and I both held, as I was saying earlier, with the Elgin Local Food Center and with Mary Christian Burleson, that we create these spaces, these public and quasi-public spaces where everyone feels welcome. I think what's going to bond the people of Elgin together.
Interviewer:
And do we have that now?
Sue:
Maybe we have it at the rec center. I don't know. I don't go to the rec center very often. I wish that they didn't charge a fee to be a member of the rec center to use the facilities. I just don't think that's fair because public money paid for it in the first place. Elgin is a working-class town. A lot of people live really close from paycheck to paycheck, and our tax money paid for that recreation center and still pays for it today. And I don't understand why local government feels that they need to charge a fee for it. When I spoke to one of the, at the time, City Council members, it was first opened, when I spoke to them about the fee. What I was told was it was designed to keep certain people out.
Interviewer:
Who are the certain people?
Sue:
Well, I guess it's people who . . . I guess they were equating people who can't afford the hundred dollars a year with criminal behavior, which is a faulty assumption. It is a wrong assumption. And it was from a City Council member who had spent their career in criminal justice as a probation officer, I think, or something like that. I think that they were probably jaded as so many in criminal justice become, because all they see is criminals all day long and potential criminals all day long. And that becomes the paradigm of associating low income with criminal behavior. And I think it's a fatal flaw. It's a fatal, fatal public policy and public paradigm flaw.
Inteviewer:
Is that City Council members still on the Council?
Sue:
No. These are, in my mind, bigger issues that I think are worthy of City Council attention, and I haven't seen that in a long time in Elgin. I don't participate, other than voting in City elections. I don't participate in City work anymore. I gave a lot to City work. I worked for free for two years on the Elgin Local Food Center almost full-time. And then I worked on it full-time for all of $30,000 a year trying to get federal funding for it and succeeded. Then the project was killed, nonetheless. So, I don't really know what to say about that, except my advice to any former or potential City Council member who's listening to this is pay attention to who you're hiring to be city manager. What's your vision for Elgin? And allow yourself to vision. I don't know if you remember when Elgin created the Sustainable Places Plan.
We created a Sustainable Places Plan in the mid-teens with community gatherings, and we've all looked at maps and we made decisions together about what we believe downtown Elgin should look like and be like. And we have a document called the Sustainable Places Plan. We were chosen of only one of three cities in our whole region to devote resources to helping us do this. And it included the Elgin Local Food Center in the heart of downtown, there by Veterans’ Memorial Park. What is our heart? What is the center of our place going to look like and feel like and sound like and be like, and what's it going to be like at night and what's it going to be like in the day? We asked all those questions. Seventy people came to these various charettes at the high school with giant maps and diagrams laid out on the tables, and then the city manager was hired and ignored it.
So, to what extent is the City Council willing to push back and support that Sustainable Places Plan? A lot of us had input into that, and I don't know whether it's a lack of a fear of confrontation that causes people to not hold the city manager accountable for past policies. I know that after Marc Holm was no longer mayor, he term-limited out, and Mayor Chris Cannon came in. I do know that Mayor Chris Cannon was very, very much opposed to anything that had the word “sustainability” in it, and he was specifically opposed to the Sustainable Places Plan. And so maybe that's when the table turned, but where are those seventy people? Where are they? Why didn't they come and speak up and say, I was a part of this. I gave my input for this. This was a co-creating process. Did you just bamboozle us again, like happens in city after city all the time? You ask for public input, you make a plan and then ignore it. So, we have a plan, this local food and sustainability piece and creating a multicultural community, which already exists in Elgin. It just needs some glue, which was a part of the vision under Marc Holm, Mayor Marc Holm. And since 2019, it has been shelved, ignored as if it never happened.
Interviewer:
I wonder if the new council knows about it. I mean, did they participate?
Sue:
Some of them did.
Interviewer:
Interesting.
Sue:
But who holds them accountable? I mean, I think that sometimes the city councils in towns our size feel powerless, and they're not. They get to say what our town is going to look like. If they ask for public input and then ignore it, then as far as I'm concerned, that's irresponsible elected official behavior. They hired this city manager who came from Buda, I believe it was, got run out of Buda for almost bankrupting it and getting them into so much debt. I haven't looked in a couple of years, but at one point, Elgin's bond rating had fallen so low because our debt was so high. We were the 11th most-in-debt City of our size in the State of Texas, about $3,000 for every man, woman, and child in Elgin under the city manager. So, did they know that the city manager had been pretty much run out of Buda for almost bankrupting the City? Did they ask that question? The city manager before him was the city manager in, I have to think of the name of the town. Was it Jasper, Texas where the black man was dragged behind a truck and murdered?
Interviewer:
Yes.
Sue:
He was the city manager there. I'm not saying that any of what happened to the black man is the city manager's fault, but what I will say is that is a very much known super racist klan is an active part of the State of Texas. When you're hiring someone who's been a city manager there for over a decade, there are some questions that need to be asked if we want them to come and be a city manager in our multicultural town. There are some questions that need to be asked. And I don't know whether they were asked or not. There was the Blue-Ribbon Committee put together to choose the new city manager and all that sort of thing. Were they all white? I don't know who was on that committee. How did these choices get made?
Interviewer:
It'd be interesting to know.
Sue:
Yeah, I hope somebody will look sometime.
Interviewer:
Well, this is really interesting. What else would you like to say to future Elginites about our town and your hope for the future? Do you have any words of wisdom?
Sue:
I mean, I have my values of the kind of place I want to live. My partner now, my wife and I moved here because it's a multicultural town and we didn't want to live in a monocultural town. I would say whatever you can do to create social structures and places that bring people of all races together, do it and use food as a way to bring people together because that is effective. And to understand the city manager form of government and understand that you have the authority to create the town you want Elgin to be and to have that vision. Don't be shy. You want it to be rubber-stamp America? That's fine but have the honor to say it out loud. Have the self-respect to say what it is you want out loud. Then have a conversation about that. You want to live in a town with everything out on the highway and a half dead, continuing to struggle, downtown with turnovers of small businesses every few years. Then say that out loud. If that's the economic development strategy, then say it out loud, but don't bullshit people and include them in some mock public process for something that you have no intention of implementing.
Interviewer:
Okay. Very wise words. Okay. Thank you so much, Sue. We really appreciate all your work over the years. And I know personally that you have worked hard on this for a very long time and now it's kind of coming together and finally for you. I’m really happy for you.
Sue:
Yeah, I mean after what fell apart in 2019, I mean, our work for the Texas Center for Local Food, which is headquartered in Elgin, is to work with people and organizations who share our vision and values, and we're starting there. We're not going to convince people to change their minds. We will work with the school district. Our Farm-to-Kids Texas after-school program is flourishing. Hopefully, in a few years it'll be in other school districts around the state and people will know that it was born in Elgin, Texas.
Interviewer:
Cool. Okay. Thank you very much.
Sue:
Thank you, Jacque. That was easy. I hope I didn't shoot my mouth off too much. I'm glad I remembered about the sustainable places.