Today is Texas Independence Day--and lest any of my non-Texan friends think I'm celebrating secession, let me remind you that Texas is the only state in the union that was its own nation before joining the United States in 1845. But nine years earlier, on March 2nd, 1836, delegates meeting at Washington-on-the-Brazos declared The Republic of Texas to be free and independent from Mexico and the oppressions of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana.
Twenty-six years ago, as a student of Texas History at White Deer Junior High, I participated in what I'm sure was a state wide project to climb our family trees and find out how and when and where my people came to Texas. That project started me on my lifelong genealogical quest, and now a quarter of a century later, I'm still knocking nuts out of the family tree, headstone hunting in old cemeteries, and opening closets looking for the skeletons. And I finally do know how and when and where my family got here.
About the year 1850, Joseph B. Pruitt, a Baptist preacher, and Phoebe E. Reid, natives of South Carolina and George respectively, but most recently of Benton County Alabama, moved their young family to Leon County, Texas. By 1853, they were in Van Zandt County, Texas, where my ggg grandmother Frances Jane Pruitt was born 30 October 1857. She was not the first of my ancestors born here, but she was the furthest back from me.
On 01 February 1852, Godfrey Eschberger arrived in Galveston aboard the ship Magnet from Bremen, Germany. He was 40 years old, a weaver, and hailed from Worlitz. The following December, his wife Elizabeth and six children--including my gggg grandmother Augusta--arrived aboard the ship Neptune. It is said that Elizabeth's mother accompanied them but died en route and was buried at sea. Had she made it to Texas, she would have been the only one of my ninth generation ancestors to make it to Texas. The Eschbergers settled on 320 acres located on the Bastrop-Burleson County line.
About the year 1855, Simon Draper of Shaftsbury, Bennington County, Vermont, lately a follower of Mormon leader James Strang in Michigan, chased a fleeing wife to Texas. After recovering his children, he settled in Bastrop County, where he married the aforementioned Augusta Eschberger in 1857. My ggg grandmother Aurilla Christina Draper was born to them 25 December 1858 in Bastrop County, but the family later moved to Grayson County, Texas, where Simon's parents Dr. Orrin and Aurilla Robinson Draper joined them from Ohio. The elder Drapers and the Eschbergers were the only four of my eighth-generation ancestors to come to Texas.
In the early 1850s, William McCreary and Eliza Ellen Dunham Bigham moved their family to Ellis County from Johnson County, Missouri. My gg grandfather Edwin Timothy Bigham was born there 22 August 1857, my first ancestor born in Texas.
Following the Civil War, Jacob and Manerva Adaline Wilks Rhodes moved from Panola County, Mississippi, to Van Zandt County, Texas, in 1868. Their married son Jesse N. Rhodes and wife Margaret Nicholass settled first in Davis County, but soon moved to Van Zandt, County, Texas. Her father John Nicholass came with them and was the first person buried in the Union Chapel Cemetery in Van, Texas. My gg grandfather Henry Allen Rhodes was six months old when his parents Jesse and Margaret made the trip from Mississippi.
About 1872, I.C "Kit" and Irene Josephine Davis Irvin brought their family to Wise County, Texas from Giles County, Tennessee. A later move to Montague County is how their daughter Anna Beatrice Irvin met and married Edwin Timothy Bigham in 1885, whose family had moved to neighboring Jack County. My great-grandfather Thomas Watson Bigham was born to them in Jack County in 1894. In 1908, they moved to Waurika, Jefferson County, Oklahoma.
In 1873, a young Milburn Norman Hogue came to Grayson County, Texas, where he met and married Aurilla Christina Draper. Their daughter Myrta Augusta Hogue was born there in 1881.
By 1874, William M. and Winifred May Short Wariner had brought their family to Wise County, Texas, from Calloway County, Kentucky, by way of Bollinger County, Missouri. Their son James Alexander Wariner married Frances Jane Pruitt in Cooke County, Texas, in 1874, and their son Newton Lonzo Wariner married Myrta Augusta Hogue in Grayson County in 1899. My great-grandmother Francis Aurilla Wariner was born to them in Whitesboro, Grayson County, Texas, in 1902. In the 1920s, they moved to Waurika, Oklahoma, where the last of their eleven children was born. In 1924, Aurilla Wariner married Thomas Watson Bigham. My grandmother Naomi Joy Bigham was born to them in 1929, and they raised their family in Waurika before moving to Pampa, Texas, in 1940.
In 1877, Calvin Washington and Celestine Paradicia Mullen Guynes moved their family from Copiah County, Mississippi, to Robertson County, Texas, where Calvin died later that year. His son Henry Becton Guynes, was cowboying in the Waco area in the 1880s.
In 1878, James William and Katherine Hartman Stafford brought their family to Grayson County, Texas, from Taylor County, Iowa. My gg grandfather Francis Marion Stafford had been born in the latter in 1876. A few years after that, they moved up the Red River to Wilbarger County, where James was post master in the community he named Fargo.
About 1880, William Haywood Parker came to Waco, McLennan County, Texas, and then sent for his wife and family. Priscilla Temperance "Tempy" Wildman Parker brought her six children and three others to Texas by train from Calhoun County, Alabama, stuffing one of them under the seat. Bill Parker died soon after their arrival in Texas, and Tempy began marrying her daughters off. Sarah Elizabeth Parker married Henry Becton Guynes in Waco in 1887. They had twelve children, the youngest of which was my great-grandmother Charlene Fayblane Guynes, born 1910 in Rayland, Foard County, Texas. The Guynes moved to Wheeler County shortly after Charlene's birth, where Henry died in 1912.
In 1884, John Chester and Susan Mohon Jackson moved their family from Wilson County, Tennessee, to Denton County, Texas, and three years later to Wheeler County. Their youngest child was Clare Desmond Jackson, born 1881 in Hartsville, Tennessee. She met Francis Marion Stafford, who had come to the Panhandle from Vernon, Texas, on a cattle drive in 1895, and they married in 1905. My great-grandfather Lewis Jackson Stafford was born in 1910, grew up knowing Charlene Guynes, and they married in Shamrock in 1928. My grandfather Francis Lynn Stafford was their oldest child, born in 1929.
About 1885, William T. and Ursula Stagner Cross came to Van Zandt County, Texas, from DeWitt County, Illinois, by way of Henry County, Missouri. Their daughter Cammie Caldona Cross, born in 1872, married Henry Allen Rhodes, and gave him six children before her death in 1904. Eight days later he married her younger sister Hattie Gertrude Cross, and they had nine more children. My great-grandmother Laura Gertrude Rhodes was the youngest child of the first family, born in 1903. The Rhodes family lived in Grand Saline, Van Zandt County, Texas, and in Nacogdoches, Texas, before moving to Thomas, Oklahoma. There Gertrude Rhodes met Cleon Gerold Huckins, and they married in 1927 before moving to Hutchinson County, Texas, where my grandfather Gerold Edward Huckins was born in 1929.
During the oil boom of the late 1920s, John Henry and Edith Beighle moved to Skellytown, Carson County, Texas, from Oklahoma, and my grandmother Olga June Beighle was born there in 1930. In 1939, the Staffords moved to Skellytown where Jack and Charlene were employed by Cabot Corporation at the carbon black plant. Lynn Stafford, Gerold Huckins, and June Beighle grew up in Skellytown together and were best friends. In 1945, Lynn and June sneaked off to get married; he was sixteen, she was fifteen. They moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where my father Bryan Lynn Stafford was born in 1948. A few years later, they moved back to the Texas Panhandle.
Gerold Huckins met Joy Bigham at a popular Pampa nightspot, and they eloped to Sidney, Nebraska, where he had a job waiting for him in 1950. They returned to Skellytown a few months later, and he joined the army. My mother Donna Gail Huckins was born in Pampa in 1951 and grew up in Skellytown. My Stafford grandparents and my two-year old father were among her first visitors.
The Staffords moved to Louisiana in the 1950s, but later divorced and Lynn Stafford moved back to the family farm in Shamrock. My Dad ran away from his mother and step-father in Louisiana and joined his Dad in Texas, where he remained until enlisting in the army in 1965. After a three-year stint in Germany, he returned to Texas, looked my mother up, and they married in 1969, shortly after her High School Graduation and ten days after her eighteenth birthday. I was born three years later in Groom, Carson County, Texas.
I spent the first 17 years of my life in Pampa, Skellytown, and White Deer, Texas, before we moved to Southern New Mexico, where I spent the next 17 yeas. In 2006, I moved back and now here I am, living deep in the heart of Texas, thirty miles from where Texas Independence was declared, and not much further from where my first Texas ancestors originally settled. Texas bred, born and raised, and proud to be a Texan once more.
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