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| A. C. Grimland,
long-time resident of Bosque County, was born in Kaufman County in 1868,
the son of Yern and Inger Halverson Grimland, pioneers from Norway. At the
age of six months, he moved to Bosque County with his family. They settled
on a farm along Gary Creek where he was reared - one of seventeen
children. He was baptized and confirmed into the Lutheran faith in Our
Saviour's Lutheran Church at Norse. He married Theresa Jenson in the same
church in 1891. She was born in Bosque County in 1870, the first child of
Jens Jenson and Sarah (Swenson) Jenson. They purchased a farm of 450 acres for $3.00 per acre in Hamilton County - four miles west of Cranfills Gap. While farming, they experienced panic and depression, selling cotton at three cents per pound. Their greatest sorrow was when their oldest child Irvin, eleven years old, died. He was bitten by a rattlesnake as he was hoeing corn. The weather was never too hot or too cold to attend worship at the Rock Church eight miles away. They moved to Cranfills Gap in 1906, where he was manager of a Gin Co-Op and where he was employed as a cotton buyer for G. O. Bronstad. Mr. Grimland was widely known as a baseball player. In 1896, he organized the first baseball team in Bosque County. He was manager, coach and pitcher. John Hollingsworth was the manager of the Lanham team. His teammates got pretty cocky; so Mr. Hollingsworth told his team that he could take Grimland and beat the whole Lanham team - since Mr. Hollingsworth was a catcher. The two men played the Lanham team and won. Mr. Grimland played with the Forth Worth Panthers in 1896 - part of the season on the pitching staff. In 1952, at the invitation of Bobby Braggan, manager of the Fort Worth Cats, a Cranfills Gap Night was dedicated to Mr. Grimland. He was a lover of music and directed the church choir of St. Olaf Lutheran of Cranfills Gap for many years. Once the choir members gave him an organ for a Christmas gift. Then for many years the young people sang at his home on Sunday nights. Many romances can trace their beginnings to a singing in the Grimland home. He also played the tuba in the Gap Band. He was an avid player of dominoes and card games - win or lose. Mrs. Grimland was an expert seamstress. She had a chart by which she would cut her own patterns, from newspaper. This chart is in a museum at Texas Womans University in Denton. Her method of teaching her six daughters the art of homemaking was by having them do the work - all except the churning. She would spend hours churning so she could read at the same time, which was one of her favorite pastimes. She also pieced quilts while she listened to her favorite stories on the radio; she never wanted to miss "Stella Dallas." They were the parents of eleven children.
A. C. Grimland died in 1959. Theresa Grimland died in 1955. Both are buried in the Rock Church Cemetery. from the 1985,
Bosque County: Land and People
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