Elsie Millican is a living link to San Saba's "wild west" days. Not only has she seen much of this charming town's history first-hand (she'll be 96 by the time you read this), but she knew San Saba's all-time greatest hero very well -- E.E. Risien, who through genius and perseverance made San Saba the "Pecan Capital of the World," was her grandfather, and Elsie was a married woman before he died in 1940. Today, her grandchildren carry on the family tradition with the Millican Pecan Company.

Edmund E. Risien was a young English cabinetmaker, on his way to California when he stopped at San Saba in the early 1870s to earn a little money. (one of his first jobs was to make coffins for three men who had been hanged). He stayed in San Saba, and eventually married an English girl who had been staying with her brother in Lampasas.

Interested in everything around him, Risien became fascinated by the wagonloads of pecans that were brought into town each fall. Most of the land in San Saba County was not occupied, and anyone willing to work could gather pecans from the abundance of trees along the San Saba and Colorado Rivers. To make their work a little easier, men would cut branches off the trees and pick the pecans off the branches on the ground.

Risien would inspect each wagonload, checking for flavor, color, texture and ease of shelling. He became so excited about one wagonload of pecans that he made the driver tell him where he had found them. When he arrived at the tree, it had only one branch left! Believing that he could save the tree, Risien bought land near the junction of the two rivers, and set out to develop the best pecans in the world. Among those who enjoyed the fruit of his labors were Queen Victoria, Alfred Lord Tennyson (Mrs. Millican still has a handwritten letter from the famous English poet to her grandfather) and C.W. Post, who named his "Grape Nuts" cereal after a cluster of Risien's pecans.

Pecans were not the on ...

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