23 December 2008

Dr. Samuel Garner Haynie (1806-1877)

I had a couple of exciting and lucky finds in books that I ordered this year from Amazon.com's Marketplace. First, Larry Willoughby's Austin: A Historical Portrait, a hardcover book updated in 1997, has an 1860's era picture of S. G. Haynie's "office and store" there on Congress Avenue, which was still a dirt road then. It was a drug store which became a general store, I believe. Once on an old census I saw that Poppa Hi's uncle was working in their store, when the uncle was a teenager. There's also a picture from the same location, but looking up Congress Ave. toward the Texas Capitol. (See below concerning Samuel Haynie's involvement in the construction of that first capitol building.) The Austin History Center shows the latter photo as the second illustration under their "Brief History of Austin" on the website.

Then I ordered Abner Cook: Master Builder on the Texas Frontier by Kenneth Hafertepe (1992) ---- and was delighted to find that there are numerous references to Dr. Samuel G. Haynie in the book, including a full page black and white copy of his portrait and a larger version of the picture of the Haynie-Cook house, plus another, much later picture of the front porch of that house when it held something called Ye Quality Shoppe. Abner Cook was the architect for the Texas Governor's mansion, as well as for the Haynie house in the adjacent block and numerous other buildings in Austin.

Here is my favorite quotation from the book:

William C. Walsh, an early resident of Austin, remembered Haynie as "a live wire. If he was not busy buying lots from the government, he was busy building a house on his latest purchase; and, while he watched the carpenters, he was explaining to any convenient listener why Austin was the best town on earth."
This is in a section of the book describing the 1852 appointment by the legislature of Dr. Samuel G. Haynie and James G. Swisher as the two commissioners who were to procure a plan for the state capitol, let the contracts, and superintend the construction.
S. G. Haynie was the mayor of Austin in the years 1850-51 and then during the Civil War, 1863-64. He also served as an early postmaster and was a legislator in the Texas Congress when his friend Sam Houston was the President [Republic of Texas period: 1836-1845]. His father, Reverend John Haynie, served as the chaplain for the legislative body.

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