A history of Texas and Texans, Part 146

Author: Johnson, Francis White, 1799-1884; Barker, Eugene Campbell, 1874-1956, ed; Winkler, Ernest William, 1875-1960
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Chicago, American Historical Society
Number of Pages: 906

USA > Texas > A history of Texas and Texans > Part 146

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

Mr. Yates made the campaign for assessor in 1912 in a field where five candidates were competing for the office, and he led the nearest competitor six hundred votes, winning the nomination and subsequent election, and in November, 1912, being installed as the successor of Ed Legg.

As a lodge man, Mr. Yates affiliates with the Modern Woodmen of the World, the Ancient Order of United Workmen, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the Knights of Pythias, and the Yeomen. He is past chancellor of the Knights of Pythias and a member of the Grand Lodge. He holds to the religious creed in which he was reared, that of the Baptist church, and he is noted for his genial good nature, his popularity being bounded only by his acquaintance.

October 23, 1896, at Terrell, Texas, Mr. Yates and Miss Eddie Clary were united in marriage, and they are the parents of two children, Fred and Gordon. Mrs. Yates' father, John Clary, died at Corsicana, Texas, when she was a child. Her mother, Mary (Redden) Hanson, is still living. There were two children in the Clary family-Mrs. Yates and John Clary, a resident of Crandall, Texas.

HENRY SPARKS, clerk of Kaufman county and a na- tive son thereof, is one of the prominent public officials of these parts. He has been in the public service for a number of years, beginning his official career as a par- ticularly young man, and has gained a wide prominence in these parts because of his many excellent traits of character and the high order of the service he has given to the public.

Born at Ables Springs, Texas, on November 18, 1874, Henry Sparks is the son of George W. and Sophia Adams Sparks, the latter a daughter of Ezekiel Ables. The father came to Texas as a child of three years, in company with his widowed mother and several children. They were from Tennessee, and there the father was born in 1849, a son of William Sparks, who passed away in the full vigor of manhood, leaving a widow and seven young children to battle with the world without a father's care. The widowed mother guided her little family to Texas, making the journey by wagon to Cherokee county, where she made her first stop, in 1852. She remained there until 1858, when she came to Kauf- man county, and here spent her final years. She settled in the timber regions in the vicinity of Terrell and slowly accomplished the task of making a productive and self-supporting farm, which clothed and educated her children and maintained her in comparative com-

2065

TEXAS AND TEXANS

fort while she lived. She was denied an education, but she could read and write, and was a devoted student of her bible, and few of the laymen of the Free Will Bap- tists could cope with her in quoting from Holy Writ. She dwelt much in later life upon the things of the spirit, and her life was a blessing to all who came within the circle of her acquaintance. When she died in 1907 she was seventy-three years old. Those of her children who reached mature years were as follows: Martha, who became the wife of Carey A. MeCracken, and re- sides on White's Prairie, Kaufman county; George W., of Ables Springs, the father of the subject; James M., of Terrell, Texas; Lucinda, the wife of T. B. Enochs, of Sulphur Springs, and Samuel, who died unmarried.

George W. Sparks reached manhood without gaining more than the rudiments of an education, and the mother's frugal home in the sandy land of the Terrell vi- cinity was his home until he married in 1872. His wife was Mrs. Sophia Adams, the daughter of Ezekiel Ables, who came to Kaufman county from Nacogdoches county, but was originally of Mississippi origin. He was a large land owner in the vicinity of Ables Springs, and the place was named in his honor. Mrs. Sparks was born in Nacogdoches county in 1838. When her first husband died he lett her with six children, named as follows: Young, who died at the age of thirty-seven in Kaufman county; James, of Sulphur Springs, Okla- homa; John K., of Childress, Texas; Wade Hampton, of Royce, Texas; William, who died at the age of eight- een years, and Jasper, of Ables Springs. The issue of the marriage of George W. and Sophia Sparks were Henry, of this review, and Maggie, the widow of James Russell, of Kaufman county. Mrs. Sparks died in 1902.

Henry Sparks gained his early educational training in Ables Springs, and finished his studies in Hills Business College, Dallas, after which he spent a few seasons on the home farm, coming in 1902 to the office of the county clerk as his deputy, the incumbent of the office being J. E. Boykin. He served in that capacity for four years, and was then selected by the directors of the Citizens' National Bank of Kaufman as assistant cash- ier, where he passed the succeeding four years. Thence he went into the race for the office of county clerk and defeated all comers for nomination, succeeding Clerk Hindman in the office in November of that year. He was renominated without opposition in 1912, and he is widely regarded as one of the most efficient and capable men ever intrusted with the administration of the office in the county. He is familiar with the duties of other county officials through actual contact with them, and in the matter of public records his system is the embodi- ment of clerical perfection.

On May 13, 1897, at Ables Springs, Mr. Sparks was married to Miss Bessie Lord, the daughter of Samuel J. Lord and his wife, Emily (Hunt) Lord. They came from Florida to Texas, and Mrs. Sparks is one of the five children of the family, the others being William H., Ella, who married Robert Samples and died in Kaufman county, and Miss Mamie Lord. The children of Mr. and Mrs. Sparks are William J. Bryan, Herman and Lucile, all of whom are exceptionally brilliant and give splendid promise for future achievement.

Mr. Sparks is a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and was secretary of the local lodge and of the Odd Fellows Association for several years. He per- formed a like duty for the Pretorians upon becoming identified fraternally with that order, and it may be further stated that he is a charter member of the Oak- wood Camp of the Woodmen of the World, and was once clerk of that camp. He is a man who enjoys a deal of popularity with his fellows in and about the county, and is one of the genial, wholesouled men who ever find friends and continue to retain them through the years.

HENRY CLIFTON HICKS, president of the Hicks- Kellam Company, a dry goods and ladies' ready-to-wear establishment of Kautman, Texas, ranks with the lead- ing merchants of the city.

Mr. Hieks has been a resident of Kaufman since 1983, at which time a valise full of good clothes, a mercan- tile experience, and a little pocket change-less than a hundred dollars-constituted his capital stock, and he was only twenty years of age. Mr. Railey, at this writ- ing president of the First National Bank of Terrell, stood sponsor for the young man and induced the firm of Muckleroy and Sons of Kaufman to give him a clerk- ship in their store.

A residence of three years here gave Mr. Hicks a wide acquaintance, won him a confidence in the commu- nity that he could coin into money under certain circum- stances, and also won him a companion for life's path- way. Then he married and soon afterward faced the world as a merchant instead of a clerk.

In his early boyhood Mr. Hicks had become dissatis- fied at home and fell a victim to the "eall of the wild, " as it were. So he ran away, or left without the permission of his parents, aud started an independent career. In the community of Downsville, Louisiana, he found a hame with Maj. E. S. Pipes, a farmer and merchant, with whom he spent a year on the farm. The many good qualities of the boy, especially his alertness and his genial manner, marked him as possessing the requisites for a mercantile career, and his employer took him out of the field and placed him behind the counter. During the next five years he gained an experience at Downsville that proved the opening wedge to a business career of his own when the moment for real action ar- rived. When he married, Mr. Hicks had eight years' business experience to his credit, and he had a personal credit of which he was ignoraut. His old employer at Downsville proposed a business partnership and furnished five thousand dollars with which to open the business at Kaufman. For eleven months Major Pipes gave the enterprise his presence, and during that time convinced himself that he had made no mistake in placing his money "on the boy," and he proposed to sell the busi- ness to his ambitious young partner "on time." This was done, and some of the personal notes given by the young merchant as the sole security of his benefactor still lie among the former's personal papers and are prized as a reminder of his first important successful transaction.

Mr. Hicks continued in business alone until Septem- ber, 1912, when he incorporated as the Hicks-Kellman Company, with a capital of twenty thousand dollars. He is president of the company; J. S. Kellam, vice president ; O. T. Kellam, secretary; and Joseph Kellam, treasurer.

During his long period of merchandising at Kauf- man, business conditions have fluctuated with the rise and fall of the commercial barometer of the country and once or twice a grasping or miserly creditor could have plunged his enterprise into ruin but for the re- sponse of some loyal heart who knew his worth, his spirit and his pluck and carried him through the deep waters of obligation to where he could wade again and preserve his name untarnished. He never told his trou- bles to anyone but his creditors. He always faced per- sons he owed and sold his goods with a smile and a firm clasp and created more confidence and more credit. The fighting spirit of his father was mixed in generous proportion in his own makeup, and his motto was "Never Quit." If his task seemed hopeless, he stuck the closer to it, and he appreciated a victory more after it was won against the expressed judgment of men of busi- ness. When in a pinch for a large sum of cash for im- mediate use, he went to the source of money and pleaded his own cause successfully and made his financier proud of the transaction by paying the loan before it was due.

Henry Clifton Hicks was born at Downsville, Louisi-

2066

TEXAS AND TEXANS

ana, January 27, 1861. All the schooling he received was before his fifteenth year. His parental home was that of a doctor and preacher, for his father both prac- ticed medicine and expounded the gospel as a Mis- sionary Baptist during a long and effective career. Henry C. was the seventh of eight children of the fam- ily of which Dr. Dulaney L. Hicks was the paternal head.

Dr. Hicks was born in Alabama in 1824 and came into Louisiana in early life. He received his medical degree from Tulane University, New Orleans, and prac- ticed his profession in Union parish, at Farmersville and Downsville, for more than sixty years. At the outbreak of the war between the states, he was commis- sioned Captain of one of the first companies that left northern Louisiana for the front in defense of the Con- federate cause. In his church work he was active all his life, he proved himself an able and effective min- ister, and he actually "died in the harness"' at Miles, Texas, in 1908. At one time he was State Evangelist of Louisiana for his church. He dealt always in truth and fairness; and he was peaceful and peace loving, but one had only to dispute his word to be knocked down for bis trouble. His mental processes were of the high- est order; his literary education came rather from obser- vation and experience than from training in school. He made no history in politics, but he knew Masonie work and was given a Masonic burial. Before he reached his majority, Doctor Hicks married a school girl of his Alabama locality and moved to Louisiana, where they hegan their wedded life. She was Miss Elizabeth Fore- hand and was one of a family of nine children.

Henry C. Hicks has given of his time to affairs in Kaufman, as a member of the city council, in which he served for a period of eight years and during the time when important matters of urban life were being matured. When Kaufman's public school building was erected he was chairman of the finance committee. As a citizen he stands for temperance and sobriety and opposed to the saloon. He has lived in Kaufman with the saloon and without it, and the principle of prohibi- tion has been demonstrated to his satisfaction as the proper one for his community. Legalizing a traffic in human lives through the liquor route merits, as he be- lieves, the condemnation of every family man.

December 9, 1884, Mr. Hicks was married to Miss Cornelia (Neely) Nash, a daughter of Charles Cornelius Nash, whose career as a citizen of Kaufman county reached its zenith the first dozen years after the war and ended prematurely in his death. Misses Robin and Patti Hicks are the children of this marriage. The former was educated in Hollins, Virginia, and the latter at Christian College, Columbia, Missouri.

PHILIP GORDON BACON has been engaged in the lum- ber business at Kaufman since 1897, and since early in the 70's has been a resident of Kaufman county. For several years he was engaged in making a farm west of the county seat and in exploiting the common prod- ucts peculiar to Texas. Thus he belongs to the class of rural home-builders close upon the heels of the pastoral era on the prairies of Texas.

Mr. Bacon is a contribution of the north to the amalgamating civilization of the south. He was born at Ypsilanti, Michigan, October 10, 1850, son of Henry Hiram Bacon, who migrated to that section of the coun- try from Schenectady, New York, where he and his wife were born about the year 1820, and from whence they accompanied their parents to Michigan in 1833. The father of Henry H. Bacon was a farmer and his son clung to that line of work and also became inter- ested in merchandising. He was a merchant of Ypsi- lanti at the time of his death in 1850. He married Eleanor Vought, a daughter of Philip Grandon Vought, of Pennsylvania-German family. Henry H. Bacon left an only son, and his widow became the wife of Milton

Pettibone, who followed the westward course of empire in the latter 50's, and settled on a claim in Douglas county, Kansas, in 1858. He lived there through the period of promiscuous settlement, through the events of the Quantrell Raid, and through the era of railroad building which gave Kansas such an impetus and put her lands upon the market as securities and filled up her prairies with a cosmopolitan citizenship unlike that of any of the older states.

While the Civil war was going on, Milton Pettibone was in the Union army and was commissioned captain of the company he raised in the community of Black Jack where he lived. He remained in the army while the war lasted and with the resumption of peace re- turned to his family and the prairie farm. He con- tinned his agrarian vocation until the weight of years pressed upon him, when he moved to Lawrence, Kansas, and there passed away at a ripe old age. His own chil- dren were Elmyra, now Mrs. Charles Mendenhall, of Colorado; Nellie, wife of Henry Wilkins, of Spokane, Washington, and Charles Pettibone, of Lawrence, Kansas.

Philip G. Bacon spent his boyhood among the pioneers of eastern Kansas and assisted his stepfather with the preliminary work of their new home. He acquired a fair education notwithstanding he was out of the fringe of settlement, hut Kansas always provided for the edu- cation of her youth first, and he was a Kansas youth. He saw the railroad come through his locality, estab- lish the station of Wellsville near his own home and got his first important employment away from the farm in the actual building of that branch of the Santa Fe road. He left the friends of his boyhood iu 1879 and took a team to a railroad construction camp and went to work on the grade. He worked on the M. K. and T. railroad grade then being constructed from Sedalia to Fort Scott, on a part of the Missouri Pacific system from Holden, Missouri, to Paola, Kansas. Following this experience he traded for a claim in Elk county, Kansas, where he communed with primitive nature for a year and sighed as he missed the flow of the "yellow" which accompanied the force of railroad builders. So at the end of the year he exchanged his claim for an outfit and set out for a railroad camp, which he found at Newton, Kansas, where the Santa Fe had concen- trated its material and started its line westward. He accompanied the slowly creeping artery of commerce across the plains to Hole-in-the-Rock, Colorado, where the work stopped. As a consequence many men were thrown out of a job. As a means of tiding himself over this crisis, Mr. Bacon made his first trip to Texas, journeying hy wagon from Coffeyville, Kansas, and bringing with him three teams of mules. In Kaufman county he took a contract for breaking prairie not far from the county seat for Doctor Dashiell. Here he sur- prised the native population by dragging a plow with mules instead of the proverbial Texas "Longhorn, " as had been done heretofore. When the financial sky cleared up so that railroad work was resumed he re- turned to that and abandoned, for a few years, the life of a farmer, but he looked forward to the date when he should become an actual settler on the prairie land he first helped to plow up. He then took a contract for the construction of a section of the extension of the "Waco Tap" between Hillsboro and Waco and had to take third mortgage bonds for his pay for the work. This left him in an embarrassing position, as he had no funds with which to pay his men. Next he took a contract on the narrow gauge road then being built from Jefferson west and built a segment of the line in Morris county, where he met his obligations to his help and then secured another contract, this time out of Denison on the Denison and Southeastern, from Green- ville to Dallas. He then returned to Hole-in-the- Rock and continued with the Santa Fe line past Albuquerque, New Mexico, to the Arizona line, where

Lewis Meriwether M.K.

2067

TEXAS AND TEXANS

he left the Atlantic & Pacific, as it was then called. Whether in the exact order of their happening or not, these routings account for his time chiefly while he was a railroad contractor and when he finally abandoned it he came back to the black land whose sod he had turned over some years before. He then purchased a tract of land one mile north of Gastonia, and settled down to farming in earnest, and here for fifteen years he was engaged in agricultural pursuits until 1897, when he bought his present lumber business.

May 2, 1878. in Kaufman county, Mr. Bacon was mar- ried to Miss Amanda Elizabeth Sheltman, a daughter of Samuel and Mary (Still) Sheltman. Mr. Sheltman came to Texas from Pennsylvania previous to the Civil war and he and his wife were married at San Augustine, the Still family being among the pioneers of Texas, Mrs. Bacon was born in Kaufman county in 1857. Their children are: Perl, wife of James DeLacy, of Kaufman; Milton, of Crandall, Texas; Mary, Alice, Grandon and Ruth. Mr. Bacon's mother died at Lawrence, Kansas, in January, 1913, at the age of ninety-three years. Fra- ternally Mr. Bacon is an Odd Fellow.

LEWIS MERIWETHER, M. D. A native of the Lone Star state and a scion of one of its distinguished pioneer families, Dr. Meriwether is here an able and successful representative of the exacting profession that was sig- nally dignified and honored by the character and services of his father, who was one of the pioneer physicians and surgeons of Houston county, this state. In the active work of his profession he whose name initiates this review has well upheld the prestige of the family name, as has be also as a loyal and progressive citizen of Houston county, his residence and professional head- quarters being maintained in the thriving and attractive city of Crockett, the metropolis and judicial center of the county. A succinct delineation of the personal appear- ance of this representative physician of eastern Texas has been given in the following words: "Well above the average height, straight as a pine, with his kindly fea- tures bronzed by years of exposure to sun and wind and rain, there is no more familiar figure upon the streets of the city of Crockett than that of Dr. Meriwether, and no citizen has more impregnable vantage place in popular confidence and esteem."

Dr. Lewis Meriwether was born near Marshall, the capital of Harrison county, Texas, on the 2nd of Octo- ber, 1850, and is a son of Dr. Francis L. and Ethalinda (Dunlap) Meriwether, the former of whom was born in Abbeville district, South Carolina, and the latter of whom was born in Greene county, Alabama. The Meri- wether family was founded in America in the early colonial days and the lineage is traced back to the stanchest of English origin. Dr. Francis L. Meri- wether was a boy at the time of his parents' immigra- tion from South Carolina to Alabama, where he was accorded excellent educational advantages, his father having been a man of substantial means and a citizen of prominence and influence in his community, both parents having continued to reside in Alabama until their death. In preparing for the work of his chosen profession, Dr. F. L. Meriwether availed himself of the advantages of the Lexington Medical College, in the city of Lexington, Kentucky, and he ably qualified himself according to the professional standards of that period. Concerning this sterling pioneer physician of Texas the following interesting record has been given and is well worthy of perpetuation in this publication: "It is significant of the character of Dr. F. L. Meriwether that while he was a man of extreme culture and refine- ment, coming of a family born to an appreciation of the best that civilization offers, yet an inborn love of nature and the primitive led the young pioneer physician to settle always just at the edge of the better known haunts of men. With his young wife he came to the state of Texas, bringing with him forty slaves, and he settled

in the more or less primitive surroundings of Harrison county, where the fishing and hunting were good and where he could drink in the ruggedness and charm of the mighty woodland. He first practiced his profession in Alabama, chiefly among the Choctaw Indians, and in later years he related how he fixed in the Indian mind the time his prescriptions should be taken, indicating in turn certain points in the sky, calling attention to the sun and then pretending to swallow." He came to Harrison county, Texas, in 1845, and in 1850 he removed to Houston county, where he purchased a large tract of land and developed a productive ranch, besides giving his attention to the work of his profession, in which he ministered throughout a wide territory and with utmost self-abnegation and faithfulness, so that his name is held in reverent memory in the community that long represented his home. He passed the closing years of his life upon his old homestead ranch, where he died in 1881, in the fullness of years and well earned honors. Too advanced in age to enter the Confederate ranks at the time of the Civil war, Dr. Meriwether did all in his power to further the cause of the Confederacy, and he showed his loyalty as well as his deep human sympathy by providing for the widows and families of soldiers killed in conflict or those in active service at the front. He attended such families in a professional way without thought of making any demand for compensation and in many other ways he was kindly and helpful to those in adversity and distress during that climaeteric period in the nation's history. He was a man of exalted char- acter and his life and labors counted for much, as such a man could not be obscure, whether in the wilderness or in the centers of metropolitan activities. His cher- ished and devoted wife was summoned to the life eternal in 1876, and both were devout members of the Christian church. Concerning their six children the following brief record is given: Huldah, who became the wife of Dr. Frank Rainey, of Dallas, Texas, is now deceased, as are also Frank and Willie Gertrude; Dr. Lewis Meri- wether, to whom this article is dedicated was the third in order of birth; Fanny is the wife of Judge Anson Rainey, presiding on the bench of the court of civil appeals in the city of Dallas; and Jessie is the wife of Thomas H. Dailey, a representative real estate broker of that city.

In a retrospective way it may be noted that two distinct branches of the Meriwether family have been prominent in the annals of American history, one branch having made original settlement in Tennessee and Ken- tucky and the other having found representation in the early settlement of Georgia, Alabama and other southern states. Meriwether county, Georgia, received its name in honor of a distinguished member of this family, and of a collateral branch of the family was Captain Meri- wether Lewis, one of the leaders of the historic Lewis & Clark expedition across the western wilds under the auspices of the Government and at the time when Thomas Jefferson was president of the United States.

Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.

A history of Texas and Texans, Part 146

Author: Johnson, Francis White, 1799-1884; Barker, Eugene Campbell, 1874-1956, ed; Winkler, Ernest William, 1875-1960 Publication date: 1914 Publisher: Chicago, American Historical Society Number of Pages: 906

Author: Johnson, Francis White, 1799-1884; Barker, Eugene Campbell, 1874-1956, ed; Winkler, Ernest William, 1875-1960
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Chicago, American Historical Society
Number of Pages: 906