A Revolutionary War soldier in the Walker family

Several months ago I bought a rare book called The Walker Heritage, which I found referenced on line when looking for info on the Wrights, Granny's mother's family.  John Walker was a teenager when he served in the Revolutionary War, and his family lived in Maryland.  After the war he moved to Lincoln County, Georgia, which is north of Augusta.  He was married three times, as the first two wives died.  He apparently was a successful planter and also a Baptist minister, and he is reputed to have served in the State legislature just after the turn of the 19th century.  The child of the second marriage was Elizabeth Walker (Wright), maternal grandmother of Ava Lucerne Campbell Hill ("Granny").

Anyway, John Walker moved his third (and extended) family from Lincoln Co. to Walton Co., Georgia.  He died soon thereafter, circa 1836 --- his will is very interesting reading ---but the Walker descendants evidently prospered there for generations, and our grandmother had a third cousin among them who was Governor in the 1920's.

What isn't clear yet is whether the Wright family ever lived in Walton County.  The material I'd found before implied that after his wife died, John Wright -- who also served in the Georgia statehouse -- and his children, including Granny's mother Eliza Jane who was about 13 years old, moved to Alabama directly from Lincoln County, in the late 1840's.  The will in the book gave a piece of land to the Wrights, but it doesn't say which county the parcel was in.  At any rate, I suspect Wright probably sold their Georgia holdings when they made the move to the Tuskegee area.

Haynie-Cook House

Here is a larger image of the Haynie-Cook House, compared to the thumbnail-size one I previously posted to the blog.  This is a scan of a print I purchased from the Austin History Center.

Aurora Gardens

Earlier this year, I was wondering where the name Aurora Gardens came from, for the first subdivision we lived in, in New Orleans.

It turns out there was an Aurora Plantation, established in 1742.  The house was probably among those quaint old homes we sometimes drove past on the road next to the levee, and my guess is that the very land on which the subdivision was laid out may have once been part of the plantation's cultivated fields.

Shared ancient & colonial roots of Texas & Louisiana

Although not directly related to our family's history, here are two links which show the earliest colonial connections between Louisiana and Texas.

Natchitoches, La., and Nacogdoches, Tx., were ancient native American settlements, connected by a trail which would later become part of El Camino Real (the Royal Road), part of a network of roads leading to and from Spanish colonial Mexico.

The Spanish roads later defined the part of Texas which would be settled by Anglo-Americans. Bastrop, where our grandfather was born, was located on the old San Antonio Road where it crossed the Colorado River.

Natchitoches is the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase territory, as it was founded in 1714 by the French, after the founding of Mobile and before New Orleans was established.

According to the web page, the early French colonists needed a trade link to the western Spanish colonies. Hm, I wonder what the issues were around trading with the Spanish colonists in Florida at the time; perhaps the west Fla. settlements were too isolated. (Mobile is much closer to Pensacola than it is to northwest La.!)

As I remember, Natchitoches is pronounced "NACK-i-dish" and Nacogdoches is pronounced "NACK-a-DOE-chez."

http://www.elcaminorealtx.com/

http://www.natchitochestour.com/

Relative who died at the Alamo

I discovered recently that our grandfather Hiram had a great uncle who died in the Battle of the Alamo. (See link below.) He was Sam Evans, a brother of our ancestor Hannah Maria Evans, wife of Samuel G. Haynie. The fellow was 24 years old, and subsequently his father Musgrove Evans, who had moved to Texas with his children after his wife died, joined the army and fought for the Republic of Texas. I read this in another article, all of them sent to me by the man who put the Evans genealogy on line. There was another fairly young brother who was killed on the Chisholm Trail -- by bandits, I think.

Learning about this family particularly moves me because they were based in Pennsylvania, then upstate New York, and then Michigan. Here I had been thinking they were the only bona fide "Yankees" in our family tree! As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, there were many men on the move in the U.S. in the 1800's. In other words, you can't pigeonhole them by region, at least not the ones who lived their lives during that restless century.

Sam Evans was the namesake and grandson of "General" or Major Samuel Evans of the Revolutionary War period. On our mother's side of the family we have a Lt. William Evans ancestor from the Revolutionary period; in all likelihood these families were related --- because they were originally from Wales, were concentrated in two Pa. counties, and were all Quakers back in the day.

The Tillett book refers to an 1816 letter written by William Evans which indicated that he was very bothered by the institution of slavery. Said he wanted to move to Ohio, but it was "too late" for him. (He had moved from Pa. to Va.) --- His son-in-law James Wyche went to Ohio & looked things over, but decided that the free blacks were in worse condition than the slaves...

The following URL has been updated, as of 10/10/2016:

Samuel Brown Evans in the Handbook of Texas