Mary Elizabeth Sutherland Carpenter was born in Salado, Bell County, Texas on September 1, 1920 to Thomas Shelton and Mary Elizabeth Robertson Sutherland. Her father was a state highway inspector and her mother was a homemaker. Liz was the middle child of five children. According to traditional genealogical sources, her mother, Mary Elizabeth Robertson was the daughter of Maclin Robertson who was in turn the son of Sterling Clack and Sarah Maclin Robertson. Sterling Clack Robertson was born in 1785 in Tennessee and came to Texas as empresario of his own colony, settling in what would become Bell County near the current town of Salado. Robertson was also a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. On Liz’s father’s side, her Texas roots went back just as far. Her father was Thomas Shelton Sutherland III. His father was Thomas Shelton Sutherland II and his father was George Sutherland, born in Alabama and by profession a cowboy and rancher, who is noted as having served in the Texas Army and fought in the Battle of San Jacinto.
Category: biography
John R. Baylor
Various members of the Baylor family have figured into Texas history over the years. John Robert Baylor was a nephew of Robert Emmett Bledsoe Baylor, a judge and a preacher and also co-founder of Baylor University. John Robert was born in 1822 in Paris, Kentucky to John Walker Bledsoe and Sophie Marie Wiedner Baylor. John R. Baylor grew up in a military family, as his father was an Army doctor. John Robert was the brother of George Wythe Baylor, a Texas Ranger and Henry Weidner Baylor, also a surgeon and a Texas Ranger. Henry Weidner Baylor was the namesake of Baylor County in North Texas.
Continue reading John R. BaylorWest Texas Cowboy Revivals
The old cowboy camp meetings were started by a Presbyterian minister by the name of William Benjamin Bloys. Bloys was born in 1847 in Tennessee. Around the time of the Civil War, his Unionist family moved to Illinois. Bloys was educated there in Salem Academy, after which he graduated in 1879 from Lane Theological Seminary for the purpose of becoming a Presbyterian minister. He was married the same year to Catherine Yeck.
Continue reading West Texas Cowboy RevivalsSheriff Pat Garrett’s Life in Texas
Sheriff Pat Garrett is best known for having killed the outlaw Billy the Kid in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. He was born in Alabama in 1850 and moved with his family to Louisiana where they owned a plantation but their business was destroyed by the Civil War and his father died a few years after the war’s end. Fewer people probably know that when he was younger, he spent some time working as a cowboy in the vicinity of Dallas, Texas. He then went on to work on the LS Ranch out in the Panhandle area (now Oldham and Hartley counties).
William Orville “Lefty” Frizzell
(Image credit: Country Music Hall of Fame)
Lefty Frizzell was born in Corsicana, Texas in 1928 to Naaman Orville and Ades D. Cox Frizzell. His father was an oilfield worker who followed the drilling rigs. Lefty was the oldest of eight children and his family moved around as the oil exploration business required. There are several explanations of how he came by the nickname of Lefty. The one seeming told most often (and perhaps a legend) was that his classmates began calling him this after a schoolyard fight. He was called Sonny when he was growing up, but he was left handed, which is possibly also the source of his nickname.
Texas History Notebook 