texas – Page 48 – Texas History Notebook

Adobe Walls

It is now a ghost town in Hutchinson County, far north in the Panhandle, but in the 1800s it was a community that briefly came together during what would be the latter days of buffalo hunting in north Texas. It is also the site of two battles between the mostly Anglo inhabitants and the native tribes that came together to try and eliminate them.

Eliza Allen Houston Douglass

Elizabeth Ann Allen was the first wife of Sam Houston. Quite a bit younger than Houston, she was born in 1809 to John and Laetitia Saunders Allen in Tennessee. The Allens were a wealthy family of the Gallatin area. Houston was born in 1793, so he was some 16 years older than Eliza when they married in 1829. Some accounts will give her age to be sixteen but according to genealogical sources, she was about twenty. Although they were only married about eleven weeks, the reason for their separation and eventual divorce has been the subject of speculation ever since.

Fort Bend

The area around Brazoria and Fort Bend counties first had Anglo-American settlers in the early 1820s, associated with the colonists of Moses and Stephen F. Austin. According to a newspaper article from 1946 in the Freeport Facts, Freeport, Texas, they included the family of Capt. Randall Jones who landed at the mouth of the Brazos on December 23, 1821 in a schooner named “Lively” and brought their possessions upstream near a promising bend in the river near the current town of Richmond. The settlement was called Fort Settlement or Fort Bend. Jones was joined by about fifty other families in that immediate area. If there was an actual structure that gave its name to the Fort Bend area, it was most likely a simple shanty or cabin, rather than a more traditional military style-fort. The historic location of such a building does not appear to be precisely known.

Tex Schramm

Texas Earnest Schramm, Jr. was born in 1920 in San Gabriel, California. His father was named Texas Ernst Schramm and his mother was Elsa J. Steinwender Schramm. Tex’s father later adopted the spelling Earnest for his middle name, but at birth his father had shared the middle name Ernst with four of his siblings. Tex’s grandfather, Edgar Ernst Schramm had come to the United States from Germany and his grandmother, the former “Tony” Benner, was born in New Braunfels. The Benners had been long time Texas residents, as Tex’s grandmother Benner’s family had had arrived in the 1800s. His Schramm grandparents had resided in San Antonio for many years. Tex’s father had moved the family to California where Tex spent his early years, attending high school there. Tex attended University of Texas in Austin, graduating in 1947 with a degree in journalism, after serving in the United States Army Air Corps in World War II.

Caro Crawford Brown

Thirteen women were inducted into the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame on September 18, 1986. They included astronaut Sally Ride, women’s basketball coach Jody Conradt, business executive Mary Kay Ash, former ambassador Anne Armstrong, rancher Mary Lavinia Griffith, educator and civic leader Ada Simond, educator Wilhelmina Delco, pathologist May Owen, attorney Hermine Dalkowitz Tobolowsky, publishing editor Margaret Cousins, civic volunteers Alicia R. Chacon and Frances E. Goff and journalist Caro Crawford Brown.