Bug Tussle, Okla., and Bug
Tussle, Texas, are a bunch of miles apart and on opposite sides of the Red
River.
Both bear odd names, but
names not all that uncommon. There is a Bug Tussle, Ala., and a Bug Tussle,
Wisc. There must have been a whole lot of bugs tussling back in the 19th
century.
Wikipedia doesn’t have much
to say about Bug Tussle, Texas, other than it is an unincorporated area in
Fannin County and that the community was named “from an incident in the 1890s
when a swarm of insects spoiled an ice cream social."
Had Wikipedia’s writers
done a little more checking, they might have come across Bug Tussle as the
birth place of former U.S. Rep. Dale Milford. After attending Bug Tussle schools,
Milford went into the Army, where he attained the rank of captain and flew artillery
spotter aircraft during the Korean War. Milford was an early TV weatherman in
the Dallas-Fort Worth area before serving three terms in Congress.
Milford also built his own airplane,
the Milford Buckaroo, pictured here:
The Oklahoma Bug Tussle is
not the birth place of a U.S. congressman, but does sit near Eufala Lake. The
name comes from Alabama, where the Eufala were part of the Creek Tribe. The
town of Eufala, Ala., has several blocks of the finest Southern homes you will
ever see.
Without reference, a Wikipedia
writer states: “Bugtussle was also the name of the town where the fictitious Beverly Hillbillies, of TV series fame, lived before moving to California
(according to some episodes; other episodes alluded to other possible places of
origin).”
It would have been difficult for Jed and Elly
May Clampett, Granny Moses and Jethro Bodine to have lived in Bug Tussle,
Okla., since their cabin and subsequent oil wells were in the Ozarks, not far
from Silver Dollar City.
But, never let inaccuracy stop a little PR for
your town.
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