Emory B. Raines (1800 – 1878) was the son of James (or John) Rains and Mary Ann Duncan Rains and was one of at least a dozen children born to the couple. Emory was born May 4, 1800 in Caney Branch, Warren County, Tennessee. In 1817, when he was a teenager, the family moved to Texas, first settling in the Nacogdoches area. When he was in his 20s, he married the former Marana Anderson. Rains was 29 years old before he learned to read. As was the norm at that time, Rains did not attend a law school, but independently studied the law and was admitted to the Texas Bar. He later became a Texas legislator, serving in Shelby and Wood counties.
He is noted for having sponsored the Homestead Law in 1839. Just before 1836 and the end of the Texas Revolution, colonists were to be potentially aided by the so-called Chambers Jury Law passed by the Coahilla-Texas legislature. Thomas J. Chambers was to have become a Superior Judge. Though the act was never fully implemented, it would have benefited debtors by exempting certain articles of personal property from claims of creditors. The Homestead Law, authored and sponsored by Rains, is said to have been inspired by the earlier law and his own boyhood experience back in Tennessee. There, his mother and father were turned out of their home due to unpaid debt. Everything they owned was taken from them except the clothes they were wearing. Rains’ concept was intended to prevent creditor abuse, placing some credit responsibility on the creditor rather than all of it on the debtor. It was one of the first such laws passed in the country.
Rains served in the Texas Legislature before the Civil War. He was a member of the Convention of 1845 in which the Texas Constitution was drafted. It was approved by Texas voters in the fall of that year, leading to Texas becoming the 28th State in the Union, also signifying the end of the Republic of Texas. Rains was about sixty years old at the outbreak of the Civil War and did not join the Confederate Army.
After the end of the war, he was instrumental in the formation of a new county out of what was formerly portions of Hunt, Hopkins, Van Zandt and Wood counties with Wood contributing the greatest amount of land. The new county was named Rains County in his honor in 1870. The county seat was first named Springville, but was later renamed Emory.
Marana and Emory Rains had at least a dozen children between 1825 and 1845. Upon his death in 1878, he was interred at Emory City Cemetery. Marana survived him by about seven years and is also buried there along with several other family members.
Rains County was created by the 12th Texas Legislature on June 9, 1870 during the administration of Reconstruction Governor Edmund Davis. Much of its southern border is the Sabine River. Its reservoirs include Lake Fork and Lake Tawakoni. Its first courthouse was a two room wooden building from around 1872. It served the area for several years until it was destroyed by fire in 1879. Two more courthouses served the county until a suspected arson fire in 1908 after which the current courthouse was completed in 1909, clad in brick made in the county. The county seat of Emory was formerly known as Springville, likely so named because of the many natural springs in the area.
Notable people who are associated with the county include Charles Henderson Yoakum (an early attorney and Texas Legislator), Carroll Dawson (college basketball player, college and professional basketball coach, professional basketball administrator), singers Ryan Beaver and Ben Keller. Though born in Floydada, Texas, the late country artist Don Williams is a descendant of Emory and Marana Rains.
Also born in Emory was William Lafayette Mills, released from prison in July 25, 1938. Mills stated that he saw Clyde Barrow kill his first victim, now known to be “Big Ed” Crowder. Mills is generally not part of the narrative of the Barrow Gang, since he was never a member of the group and only was acquainted with Barrow in prison. The Wise County Messenger, Decatur, Texas, published a letter to the editor on January 4, 1940 that included these comments:
Emory, Texas, Jan. 1, 1940. Dear Sir: Please publish in your paper that I will give a free lecture in Decatur Saturday, January 6th, at 2:30 p. m. on “Crime Does Not Pay.” I was sentenced to 78 years and served 25 years. I saw Clyde Barrow kill his first man, was with him and Raymond Hamilton and knew Bonnie Parker and many other noted criminals.
Mills went on to list his law enforcement endorsements and to add that he had already spoken to over 200,000 people in the past year at “high schools, colleges, CCC camps, radio and churches.”
The next week’s issue of the newspaper recounted Mills’ Decatur speaking engagement. Mills had said that he had little education and did not learn to read or write until 1922. He chose a life of crime at the age of 17, that it had begun with gambling at marbles as a youth. The article quoted Mills as noting that 37 percent of criminals could not read or write and that 15 percent would not recognize their own written name. When referring to his own criminal record, he said that he had been sentenced to his term of 78 years on 32 different charges arising from crimes committed in Oklahoma and Texas.
Referring to Barrow, Mills said he was serving time at the Eastham state prison farm when on October 29, 1931 Clyde beat the other prisoner to death for having abused him. Barrow had been incarcerated at Eastham for about 20 months from 1930 to 1932 before he was paroled. Mills does not expressly say in his booklet that he witnessed Barrow kill the other prisoner.
In his lectures, Mills typically spoke while wearing a striped suit provided him by the Texas prison system and would display an actual electric chair. Mills was often quoted as saying that he had known of one to two dozen men that he knew who had been executed in the electric chair around the years of his incarceration. Another of his articles displayed was a whip like device that had been used to punish prisoners. Mills was the author of a booklet called “Twenty-five Years Behind Prison Bars” which detailed his experiences in Oklahoma and Texas prisons.
Copies of Mills’ booklet can still be found though it is long out of print. He was first incarcerated in 1910. In it, he recounts his long history in and out of state jails and one federal prison. He had a pattern of serving time, being released and getting arrested, convicted and incarcerated again. He said that repeat offenders were sent to the hardest prison farms in the system. He was sent to Eastham Farm on July 13, 1931 and was in jail at Eastham when Barrow, Parker and others engineered the January 1934 prison break in which Ray Hamilton and Joe Palmer escaped. The guard named Major Joseph Crowson was shot in that incident and later died.
Mills became a Christian while still in prison. In his booklet he describes the day that it happened. One Sunday night he was playing poker when the prison chaplain stopped by. He says that the chaplain asked him to quit gambling long enough “to preach” (presumably, to hear the chaplain’s sermon). Mills was moved at the service and said that night he said he “surrendered my heart to God.” Two years later, he was married. Thereafter, he dedicated his life to lecturing on the ill effects of crime. His goal was to deter juvenile delinquency. His speeches were characterized as being “very religious but not denominational.” Mills died in 1968 at the age of 75 in Terrell, Texas and is interred in an unmarked grave at a church cemetery in Emory.
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