Family History by Robert Monroe Fleming (Sr.)
Notes on Fanily History by Iva Causey Fleming
(Part 4)
Transcribed by Robert M. Fleming Jr.
Notes of family history by Iva Causey Fleming. ( Much of the data in these pages read as though told to Iva Causey Fleming by her Mother Armedia Jane Causey).
Of the children of Uncle Culbertson and Aunt Rebecca Long, only three remain. Their sons, John Turner, now residing at Danville, Tennessee. And James Marion and Morris Leander, who reside at Morrisonville, Illinois. In a letter I append hereto.
From: Miss Caroline Compuet Alexander; I do not know how many brothers and sisters Aunt Sally,(Grandma Howard) had. Her sister Rebecca who married Robert Stevenson, lived out nearest neighbor for a good many years. Her younger children and my Mother's were raised together. But they had left that part of the Missouri long before we did. I have not heard anything of them for a long time. Uncle Ruben, as we always called him, was the only school teacher we ever had. In my school days children id not have the advantages they now enjoy for getting an education. Then, if they learned to read and write, and learned a little of arithmetic and of grammer, they were considered pretty good scholars. Uncle Ruben and Aunt Beca, as we always called her, were everybody's friends. In a letter dated December 25, 1893, and dictated by Judge William Washington McKenzie, he said. "I knew two of your Grandmother's brothers, Henry and William Steele. I knew Henry well, as he lived in this county, (ChristianCo), Kentucky several years." This Great Uncle of mine, Henry Steele, is the Grandfather of James Harvey Alexander, D.S. A minister in the Presbyterian Church and a member of the Synod of Mississippi, June 27, 1896.
Mr. Alexander writes,"According to my recollections the Father of my Grandfather, (Henry Steele), was Mortimer Steele. He must have died 1810. My Mother Margaret Amina Steele, was born in Iredale County, N Carolina, in 1803 and had a distant recollection of him. (Mortimer), her Grandfather. And spoke of him as being very old at the time of his death. I do not know wether he came from Ireland or not. I think he married a woman born in Wales. My Grandfather Henry Steele when he move back from Missouri, settled on a farm six miles North of Pulaski, in Giles Co., Tennessee. And died about 1841 in Somerville. He was about seventy five years old."
Dr. James Harvey Alexander has a son, William A Alexander, who is a Presbyterian minister. Who was a member of the Synod of Mississippi, in 1893 and was elected moderator of that body when it met in New Orleans in November of that year. He is a Doctor of Divinity and is one of the professors in the Theological Seminary at Clarksville. I met both these gentlemen in New Orleans in November 1893.
DAVID MCCORMICK - Younger son of Andrew and Catherine Adams, attained his majority in 1814. He left Missouri in the fall of 1821. Was in Hempstead Co., Arkansas during the following winter. He entered Texas among the first of the original three hundred families introduced by Col, Austin, and under his first colony contract with Mexico. David McCormick then had a wife and one or two children. But these were left in Arkansas until he could select his colony lands, 4605 acres, get his title papers there for and prepare a home for his family. He got his lands alloted to him, surveyed and the title extended, and proceeded to build his home. While thus engaged his wife and their infant child or children fell sick and died. My father was his oldest nephew. The youngest Uncle and the oldest nephew had been intimate when they were boys, so David McCormick adopted Joseph Manson McCormick.
Uncle David's league of land, 4605 acres, was located on the right or west bank of the San Bernard River, a little before the head of tide water, and navigation on that stream, and about twenty five miles from it's entrance into the Gulf of Mexico. The river is a short one. It takes it's rise from near New Ulm in the sandy prairie hills and ridges between between the Colorado and Brazos Rivers. Below or South of Cummins Creek, a tributary of the Colorado, and Mill Creek, a tributary of the Brazos. Approximately on the direct line from the old town of San Felipe, in Austin County, and Columbia in Colorado Co. Even at high water it carries very little silt, and it makes little or no deposit on it's shores in it's lower course. The shores were not sripped by the axe or torn by the plow, do not wash and cave. They are nowhere abrupt or ragged. The land rises to an elevation of about thirty feet above the level of ordinary tide. But the rise is by convex grades or here and there by one or more terraces. The terraces are above ordinary high water and being always most fertile and of considerable extent, are now cultivated, but accasionally, in seasons of high water are submerged. Large forest trees and a dense undergrowth these shores to the line of ordinary tide water. The prevailing growth nearest the river being live oaks, interspersed with wild peach with ordinary pipe stems and fish pole bamboo cane. All evergreens, each carrying a thickfoliage differing in figure and hue of leaf from the other. The densest and most luxurious growth was nearest the water line and all inclined more or less toward the open space made by the river. The live oaks sent out their limbs often twenty or more feet over the edges of the stream. The dipping outer branches of these limbs touched the waster at each daily flood tide.
The water was limid, of an average depth in mid channel of twenty feet. (It is not so deep now). And of the average width of three hundred feet, it's a meander a line of beauty, clear, smooth, motionless, or gently moving up or down, according to the stage of tide. Which on this coast has an ordinary daily rise and fall of about two feet, flowing in and receding with a maximum current of two miles an hour in that part of the river on which the McCormick league fronts.
Placed between the Brazos and the Colorado, both long rivers, where head streams drain lands similar to those which tinge the waters of the Red River, and whose caving shores torn with frequent and severe floods are bluff and bare, or shaggy with the debris of uprooted cottonwood trees; the San Bernard River presented a picture to [illegible word] the eye, with a [illegible word] which the axe and plow have some what marred, but cannot wholly destroy. The uper and lower lines of the McCormick league are paralled, and run from the river S. 45 W. to their connection with the back line run at right angle to their course. The middle thread of the channel of the river in front completes and closes the survey. The course and meanders of the stream, from the upper to the lower line, are such that this league has fully five miles of river front. Near the lower corner on the river of this league, there is a large creek or bayue, up and down which the tide then daily flowed and ebbed for a distance of one mile. Which enters the river from the Southwest on a line parallel with and a few hundred yards above the lower line of the survey. The upper line connects with the river at a point about one mile above the mouth of Bell's Creek, which enter the river on the opposite side.
Three fourths of the tract was solid woodland. But it embraced the lower or Southeast half of Chance's Prairie, which extends to with in a little more than half a mile of the point on the river where Uncle David built his home. At the mouth of Bell's Creek the fading edge of the great prairie between the Brazos and Colorado comes to the brow of the top bank of the Bernard. The point where the home was located was about eight miles from Bell's Landing,(now Columbia), on the Brazos, and about the same distance from Brazoria, on the same river, then the County seat. Situated eight miles below Bell's Landing.
in 1832 Uncle David had made only a small clearing and had not more than forty acres of land in cultivation. His dwelling house was a single room log cabin placed on the brow of the top bank of the river. In that cabin I was born. There were other inferior cabins on the place for lodging the help and for storing corn and curing and keeping meat. Two much traveled roads crossed the river and each other at that point. He was the licensed keeper of a public ferry there, then known as and named the McCormick Ferry on the San Bernard River. He did not personally work the ground or tend the ferry or do the chores. He occupied his time chiefly at in looking after his stock of hogs and cattle. Of which he had large numbers under good control. He had one of the best of saddle horses, and a small pack of well kept and well trained dogs. These and his trusty rifle were his constant companions. He owned no slaves at this time. He had owned at least one man slave, whom he had trained to the trade of house carpenter. And had him employed in building the town of San ?. [The question mark is in the manuscript] He kept always one or more unmarried white men as hired help, generally new comers who wished to make trial of the country and climate before deciding on a permanent location. He also had a hired slave woman to do the cooking and other house work. And tend the ferry when only horse-back travelers were to pass over. The heavy wagons and teams of movers or freighters required the use of a larger boat and a stronger ferryman. Cultivation of the land was easy. It had not become seeded with grass and weeds to any great extent. When properly tilled it yielded in Indian corn fifty bushels to the acre, or more. And 500 bushels of yams or sweet potatoes to the acre was not an unusual crop. The minimum yield in cottom was a bale of 50 pounds of ginned cotton to the acre. The second year after my parents became members of his family Uncle David built a new house all the the finer about which he did or directed personally.
The lumber in this house was gotten out of the woods by hand. The walls and upper and the lower joists were hewed logs; the floors, window and door frames, facings and shutters and the rafters were whipped-sawed hard ash lumber. The roof was of red cypress all heart split shingles. The sills were live oak hewed to twelve inches square. The plates of Spanish oak hewed to ten inches square. The other logs were 22 feet long, twelve to fifteen inches in diameter, hewed down on two side opposite so as to form a slab six inches thick. Each end was so worked that in raising the walls the ends of the logs or slabs would would dove tail together, forming a perfect joint and true perpendicular corner and reduce the space between the logs in the body of each wall to a uniform size. Then spaces were chinked with short, thin split pieces of wood, worked in so as to set at an angle of fourty five degrees from the perpendicular. These chink pieces were from six to eight inches long, three to four inches wide and about one half an inch thick, and were so set in and driven that the lower edge of the lower end would jam hard against the log below it.And the upper edge of the upper end would jame hard against the log above. The several pieces at the same time touching each other lightly. As a single row of ordinary chimney bricks backed up on end and obliqued to angle of fourty five degrees. These line of chinked-in spaces were then plastered inside and out with good mortor made of oyster-shell lime and sharp sand.
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©2009 Robert M. Fleming Jr.
This page was last revised on 29 August 2009.