Robertson County - TXGenWeb

These electronic pages may not be reproduced in any format by other organizations or individuals. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material must obtain the written consent of Mrs. Carson's descendants or contact Jane Keppler, Robertson County TXGenWeb coordinator.

Volunteer Jo Ella Snider-Parker (SPJPVine@aol.com) purchased a copy of this thesis from Texas A&M's Cushing Library & beautifully re-typed this work. Mrs. Carson's niece, Janis Hunt, has been contacted to obtain the needed copyright permission.

CHAPTER II: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Spanish Mexican & Anglo-American Creation & Organization Boundaries County Seats & Courthouses

Spanish

As the Spanish explorers, soldiers, and missionaries passed through the region between the Navasota and Brazos rivers in 1776, on their way to establish the missions and presidios in East Texas,[18] they came in contact with tribes of Tonkawas and Tawakonis. These friendly, semi-nomadic Indians attached themselves to the Spanish expedition after it had crossed the Brazos, and before it reached the Tejas country to the east. After the expedition crossed the Brazos the travelers turned to the north in order to avoid a network of streams. Thus, they found a course which led them over high ground to the Navasota.[19] The route they followed became the most important path of travel and was called El Camino Real [20] (The King’s Highway), which has been in use for almost a century and a half. This route of travel has changed gradually to the north and to the south, beginning in the 1820’s when Stephen F. Austin brought his first colonists in Texas from the coast.[21]

This portion of their trail now marks the southeast boundary of Robertson County, and is proudly referred to as the Old San Antonio Road.

Mexican and Anglo-American

Robertson County was approximately midway between Nacogdoches and the important town of San Antonio de Bexar. Yet, the Spanish Government, seemingly, made little or no effort to develop this region.

Immediately after Mexico won her independence from Spain in 1821, a flood of Anglo-American colonists poured into this new Texas. American colonization met with the approval of the Mexican authorities, but soon ended in a revolt which threw off the Mexican sovereignty.[22]

On April 15, 1825, Robert Leftwich, agent of a Tennessee company, granted permission to settle 800 families.[23] His settlement was to be located, by contract in Saltillo, in the Brazos River basin and west of the Bexar-Nacogdoches road.[24] The territory now included in Robertson County fell within his grant.[25]

After months of bitter wrangling, adjustments within the company were made and Sterling C. Robertson became the impresario of the Texas grant.[26] When Robertson made his first visit to the region in 1826, he found a squatter named Early. Little is known of Early except that he stubbornly resisted all efforts which affected his removal.[27] Various conditions delayed the colonization and created hard feelings, which were caused by those various differences over the ownership of the grant. The contract was handed back and forth between Austin and Robertson, by the Mexican Government, until the very eve of the Texas Revolution.[28] While the ownership of the grant was being disputed many colonists had settled in the lower continuous stretch which was under debate. This portion later became Robertson County. Groups of four or five families would make the long journey together and would build their houses close together for protection against the Indians.[29] Behind the everlasting qualities of Robertson County today is the story of these same people who suffered untold hardships and bitter disappointments to build up our county.

These early Texans were dependent upon their neighbors, and necessity drew the people close together. Families of these “neighborhoods” regularly borrowed meat from each other. At that time the colonists believed that meat could not be cured in this section of the country and seldom tried it. There was a compact that only one family at a time would butcher, and everyone in the neighborhood would borrow meat from that family until all the meat was gone. Then a calf was killed by another family, and so on around the borrowing circle.[30] These same neighbors helped build the houses in which the new settlers would live, and in time of sickness or trouble the neighboring colonists were constantly at their side. It was this companionship and friendliness between the colonists that broke the monotony and made life worth living for the early Robertson County settlers.

Between the years of 1829 and 1843, a group of Irish immigrants selected a wooded section for settlement just north of the San Antonio-Nacogdoches road.

They chose the wooded land, which was very poor, in preference to the rich black prairie lands on account of the timber which could be used in building homes and fencing their land. The timber also afforded protection from the many roving tribes of unfriendly Indians in this section of the state. This settlement, first known as Staggers Point, and later as Benchley, was the first within the present limits of Robertson County.[31]

In 1830 or 1831, the military post of Tenoxtitlan was established on the Brazos River. It is believed to have been established by convict-soldiers by the Mexican Government to protect the frontier and encourage settlement.

Mary Austin Holly, an early Texas historian, locates Fort Tenoxtitlan in this way:

"Tenoxtitlan is a military post and town established on the right bank of the Brazos River, twelve miles above the upper road leading from San Antonio to Nacogdoches, fifteen miles below the mouth of the San Andres River (Little River) and one hundred miles above San Felipe de Austin."[32]

For all the necessities of life the early settler was completely dependent upon his own resources. Naturally the first concern was the building of a home.

These homes were generally simple log cabins. They were built for the most part of logs, hand-sawed planks, or of whatever timber was available. Frequently, floor was the packed earth, while other cabins were floored with slabs of timber, or pieces of split logs with the faces roughly smoothed. The chimneys were constructed of stones and mud, with mud serving as mortar. Oak pins took the place of nails as they held firmly the timbers of colonists’ crude cabins in place.[33]

As a means of better protecting themselves from the Indians the cabins were built, quite often, in a circle or square. Around each cabin the colonists erected a barricade, or outside wall, which were from ten to twelve feet in height and with the roof slanting wholly inward.[34] Almost every settlement had a blockhouse or stockade. Strong houses were constructed by the Dunn and Wheelock families, and Fort Parker, built by the Parkers, was a combination stockade and blockhouse.

Later stockades were built at Fort Boggy and on Cobb’s Prairie.[35] Parker’s Fort was the only blockhouse to be taken, according to the records, but successful raids were made on the outlying cabins. The tragedy which befell Fort Parker was the depopulation of the region during the revolution.[36]

Robertson’s colony originated with the Texas Association in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1822. By 1827, the Mexican government had transferred the original contract, and extended the boundaries until the grant was two hundred miles long and one hundred miles wide. This area included all or part of thirty present Texas counties: Bastrop, Bell, Bosque, Brazos, Brown, Burleson, Burnet, Callahan, Comanche, Coryell, Eastland, Erath, Falls, Hamilton, Hill, Hood, Jack, Johnson, Lampasas, Lee, Limestone, McLennan, Milam, Mills, Palo Pinto, Parker, Robertson, Somervell, Stephens, and Williamson. This grant was second in size only to Stephen F. Austin’s and part of the two grants adjoining.[37]

It is not definitely known when Robertson’s colony was organized, as the Mexican municipality of Viesca, but early as 1830, there was an “ayuntamianto,” or the governing board.[38] Various meetings called by the colonists preceded the revolution and delegates from Viesca were seated. In 1832, when the San Felipe Convention met, Jared E. Groce, Joshua Hadly, and William Robinson represented Viesca.[39] At the consultation of 1835, where the relationship of Texas to Mexico was decided and Provisional Government was created, J. G. W. Pierson, J. L. Hood, Samuel T. Allen, A. G. Perry, J. W. Parker and Alexander Thompson were representatives for Viesca.[40] One of the early acts of the Provisional Government changed the name of the municipality of Viesca to Milam, in honor of Ben Milam who was killed while leading the attack on San Antonio in the latter part of 1835.[41]

On March 1, 1836, the Constitutional Convention met at Washington-on-the-Brazos, located about forty miles from San Felipe and a short distance from the present town of Navasota. Among the fifty-nine delegates who attended the sessions of the convention were, Sterling C. Robertson and George Childress, who represented Milam.[42]

Added to the many hardships connected with the Revolution in 1836, was the dire mass movement from Texas known as the “runaway Scrape.” With the sorrow and consternation which the settlers received the successive announcements of the fall of the Alamo, the retreat of General Houston, and the Goliad Massacre, came the realization that the Mexicans were almost upon them. The helpless women and children began to flee for their lives, abandoning homes with all that they contained.

From Robbin’s Ferry, in northeastern Madison County, over the Trinity River, the San Antonio Road was crowded with women and children and all the livestock they could manage, as they fled before the advance of Santa Anna’s army.[43] Many sections of the colony in which Robertson had worked unceasingly to combine the talents of soldier, colonizer, and legislator,[44] were almost unpopulated.[45] The settlements, weakened by the revolution, were often targets for successful Indian raids. The Battle of San Jacinto practically established the independence of the Lone Star Republic and confirmed the Anglo-American dominance. The families who had fled, and many of whom had despaired of seeing their homes again, and the discharge soldiers, returned to the abandoned area.[46] Although Indian depredations had abated, soon after the Battle of San Jacinto, in May, 1836, the Comanches made their historical raid on Parker’s Fort. Most of the inhabitants were massacred and Cynthia Ann Parker was carried away as a prisoner.[47]

One of the little known battles of Texas, history, The Surveyor’s Fight, occurred in 1838, near Dawson, Navarro County, which at that time was included in Robertson County. One of the leading participants of the battle was Joseph P. Jones, who was killed in the skirmish. The Jones family had made the trip from Illinois and settled in northeastern Milam County, one of the first permanent settlements in Robertson’s colony, on the prairie that bears their name. Sallie Brimberry Jones and her eight children lived to see Texas become a state. When the mother died she was buried at Jones Prairie, far from the lonely grave of her husband who fell while defending the small band of surveyors from the Indians.[48]

Creation and Organization

On December 14, 1837, the Second Continental Congress of the Republic of Texas created Robertson County out of Bexar, Milam and Nacogdoches Counties. Only a part of Robertson’s colony, and much land that had been included in his colonial grant was included in the new county named for Sterling C. Robertson. Congress chose the chief justice and directed him to give ten days’ public notice of an election for a county seat. The county was also attached to the Milam Senatorial District by the same act of creation and set forth that it was entitled to one representative in Congress. A schedule of court terms was established after the county was placed in the third judicial district. County court was to be held on the third Mondays of February, May, August, and November; district court would convene next succeeding fourth Monday in April and October.[49]

There is no record of the first election, but county officials began to file their bonds in March, 1838. Alanson Hardy and Robert Henry were chosen by popular elections as justices of the peace, and Harrison Owen was chosen as county clerk and recorder. The “high sheriff” was John B. Smith, and William C. Watson was named district clerk. Earlier, Congress had chosen the following officers: Francis Slaughter, Chief Justice; A. W. Cooke, County Surveyor; Thomas Dillard, President of the Board of Land Commissioners; A. L. McCoy, Clerk of the Board of Land Commissioners and Register of the Land Office; and Alanson Hardy, Postmaster at Navasota. This was the first post office in Robertson County. In November, 1838, John R. Hardy was appointed by the county court to assess the county for the years of 1838 and 1839.[50]

A frontier company of minute men was organized in 1839. It was the duty of this organization to guard the settlements lying north of the San Antonio-Nacogdoches Road, and between the Brazos and the Navasota rivers. The company has its headquarters in Franklin and was commanded by Eli Chandler. Other units of militia were organized along the frontier at approximately the same time and some new blockhouses were erected, among them Fort Boggy, in present Leon County. [51]

The embryonic character of the county administrative bearing and its thorough relation to the community in the spring of 1840, is illustrated by first county clerk, Harrison Owen, when he was unable to issue a license to a couple who wanted to elope, until the cows came home. Owen could not gain access to the courthouse because the key to that building had been used as a clapper in a calf’s bell.[52]

Boundaries

The first officers of Robertson County had jurisdiction over the vast territory from which all or parts of seventeen other present-day counties have been created. The original boundaries were set forth by Congress: the line beginning on the Brazos River, at the county line of the County of Washington, and running on that line easterly to the Trinity River; thence due west to the Brazos River; thence down that river to the beginning point.[53]

On January 30, 1841, the first change in the Robertson County boundary came with the creation of the present Brazos County, which was first called Navasota. The creation took away from Robertson County a small portion of land above the San Antonio Road and just east of the Brazos River and fixed the present southern line of Robertson County at that point.[54]

Leon County was created March 17, 1846, and a large section of Robertson County’s original territory was removed from the southern part.[55] Three days later Dallas County was created and this took away a large tract from the northeast corner.[56]

Limestone County[57] and Navarro County[58] were created from Robertson County on April 11, 1846, and the present boundaries on that day were fixed as follow: Beginning on the northeast corner of Brazos County on the Brazos River; thence up said river twenty-five hundred varas, above the northwest corner of a survey made for Jacob Welch, as represented on the county map made for Robertson County; thence down said river to the line of Brazos; and thence with said line to the point of beginning on the Brazos.[59]

County Seats and Courthouses

Franklin, a site about one and one-half miles southwest of the present town of Franklin and now referred to as Old Franklin, was the choice of the voters in the first election for a county seat.[60] William Love provided the house for a temporary courthouse.[61] Leander Harl was awarded a contract, on June 8, 1838, to build a courthouse;[62] however, in February of the next year the county court ordered that suit be brought against him for failure to carry out the terms of his agreement.[63] The building was completed by George W. Cox because Harl had died,[64] and the county accepted it on August 17, 1839. This two-room structure “of good strong timber,” twenty feet wide, twenty-eight feet long, and about eighteen feet high was Robertson County’s first courthouse.[65]

On October 5, 1850, by a two-thirds vote of the people the county seat was moved from Franklin to Wheelock. All the county offices were ordered to move into the new county seat as quickly as possible and Wheelock was the setting for the November term of court.[66] In the summer of 1851, bids for the construction of a courthouse were ordered,[67] and in November the specifications for a two-story, wooden building, with an outside stairway, were approved by the commissioners.[68]

The building plans submitted by A. L. Brigance were not approved until May 1852.[69] Another year rolled along before the courthouse was accepted, on August 15, 1853, almost three years after the county government had been moved to Wheelock. The new building did not meet with the approval of the commissioners so they deducted sixty-five dollars from the contract price, “for failing to place the ballastrade around Said Roof,” required the contractor to continue painting the roof and stipulated that should it leak, he was to produce a “good and Substantial” new one.[70] In February 1854, Brigance was ordered to improve the roof. The reason was not given but he had to raise it “in proportion to the size of said Court House.”

The construction of a courthouse did not give permanence to the county seat. On the very day that the commissioners entered their order accepting the new courthouse they announced the results of an election held a few days earlier, at which the voters had named the center of the county as their choice for a seat of government.[71]

Four commissioners were appointed by the court to investigate the suitability of the people’s choice for a town site. In case it did not meet with the approval of the commissioners, they were to choose one or two other places within five miles of the center and to do what they could toward procuring donations from the landowners. County archives and offices must remain at Wheelock until quarters right for the occasion could be provided elsewhere.[72] The calm attitude of the county fathers evidenced in this last order seems to have been particularly well-advised, for three years passed before the will of the people in the matter of this county seat change was gratified.

The appointed commissioners submitted their report and stated that they had chosen a site on the Francis Slaughter headright, and about one and one-half miles southeast of the center of the county, “on the head of Cedar Creek.” On November 22, 1853, the county court accepted the report and at the same time declared the site the new county seat, “so soon as the legislature passes an act confirming the same.” The same commissioners also recommended that the people petition the legislature for such confirmation.[73]

The legislature passed an act on February 13, 1854, “to Locate the Seat of Justice in the County of Robertson.” The chief justice was directed to order an election, to declare any place within five miles of the center of the county chosen by the majority of the voters to be the county seat. The new seat must be called Owensville, and as soon as the necessary buildings were erected the county offices and courts must be moved from Wheelock, but not before.[74] In November 1854, the county court directed the chief justice to obtain from the district surveyor of the Robertson Land District a certificate showing the “precise center” of the county. The county court was still meeting at Wheelock but wished to locate the county seat, soon, “permanently.” Three commissioners were appointed to select two or more sites within five miles of the center and procure “the best donations they can and report the Same to the Chief Justice Instanter.”[75] This report has not been found, but on April 7, 1855, an election was held, and David H. Love donated a site for the county seat “on the Waters of Walnut Creek.”[76]

The commissioners drew up a contract with A. L. Brigance, in November 1855, with the specifications calling for a two-story wooden building with outside stairway. This time the building was to be forty feet square, and “to be set on good sound oak blocks.” The doors were to be fitted with “locks and fastenings,” and must be “well painted roof and all.” The contract called for the completion of the courthouse by August 1, 1856, and Brigance was to receive as compensation one town lot in Owensville and $2,750.61. Brigance met the deadline; the building was accepted on August 5, and orders were given for the county offices to move into their new buildings.[77] The county court held its final meeting at Wheelock on August 19, 1856[78] but held a special term in the new courthouse on August 28.

Owensville remained the county seat until July 12, 1870, when an act of legislature moved the seat to Calvert,[79] and on August 1, of that year, the county court held its first session in the new county seat. For almost ten years the county seat remained at Calvert, but no courthouse was ever built there. For a time offices were rented, and at one time a building was leased by the year for seventy-five dollars per month. Finally a two-story house fronting on Main Street was obtained by the county and came to be known as the Court House Building. The voters, in 1874, considered the possibility of removing the county seat the Englewood, but apparently voted to remain at Calvert, for on June 1, 1875, a contest of the election was dismissed by the county court. The court continued to meet at Calvert until the final meeting, on February 25, 1880,[80] which ended sessions in that county seat.

On December 16, 1879, Calvert lost the county seat to Morgan, through an election. Morgan was a development of the Texas Land Company, on the International and Great Northern Railroad.[81] On February 9, 1880, the court ordered that the plans of the city of Morgan, as presented by the Texas Land Company, be authorized to name the streets. The commissioners appointed Overall, as captain and H. Holdeman as an assistant, on December 29, to make the arrangements for a courthouse at Morgan. This same committee was to receive all donations made to the county; to see that the town was properly laid off; and “report the best means of removing the records of the court to Morgan.”[82] In the meanwhile it was discovered that there was already a post office named Morgan in Texas, so the commissioners renamed the new county seat Franklin.[83] The records were moved early in March 1880, to a “frame building 25 x 100 feet” in Franklin. On March 8, 1880, the commissioners court held its first meeting at the new site. About one year later the plans of F. E. Ruffini, Austin architect, for a $30,000.00 courthouse were accepted and J. B. Smith was awarded the contract. On January 7, 1882, the building was accepted and still serves the county, although it has been extensively remodeled.[84]