Sampson Connell died on January 10, 1915. He was 57 years old, a member-elect of the Texas Legislature, a former eight-term sheriff, and one of the most beloved men Williamson County had ever produced. His son-in-law, Tax Collector Halsey Davis, received a telegram around 9:00 that morning with the news.

The telegram came from the insane asylum in Austin, where Connell had been a patient since at least early December. The death certificate, filed the next day, lists the cause of death as “Exhaustion from General Paresis.”

If you’re not familiar with that term, neither was I. We’ll get there. First, though, I want to describe how I got here, because this is not a story I set out to write.

The story behind the story

When I started researching Sam Connell, I was writing about small-town politics. The 1906 perjury scandal was juicy, absurd, and perfectly preserved in the pages of the Williamson County Sun. A sheriff accused of padding $4.00 in mileage, a reluctant city marshal pressured into filing charges, a grand jury that barely returned an indictment, and an election that made the whole thing backfire spectacularly on the accusers. It was local drama at its best, the kind of story that practically writes itself.

When I looked for what happened next, I found something I wasn’t expecting. Sam Connell’s obituary on the front page of the January 14, 1915, Sun opened with the telegram and the asylum and then, with the careful discretion of a small-town paper that knew everyone involved, pivoted to the man’s biography.

The Austin American, reporting from the city where Connell died, ran the following headline, only saying “he had been under treatment for several weeks.”

The papers were clearly leaving something out. They were silent on his cause of death, so I went looking for the document that would tell me how and why Sam Connell died in an insane asylum at the age of 57. Death certificates are confidential in Texas for 25 years from the date of death, but after that they’re public record.

When I found it, I understood. The papers were protecting Sam and his family.

So… the political story became a family story, and the family story became a medical story, and Sampson Connell’s story ended in a way that nobody in 1915 wanted to talk about.

At home in the county jail

Connell was first elected sheriff in 1888. He moved his wife and young children from Liberty Hill into the residence attached to the new county jail in Georgetown when it was completed in 1889.

Still standing today, the jail is a substantial stone structure. A Sun reporter who toured it in January 1889 described a building that was part fortress and part home: the lower cells struck him as “dark and gloomy dungeons, with poor ventilation,” while the upper story included cells “designed for the insane, and for women.” The jailer’s residence, by contrast, was described as one of the best houses in town.

By February, the Sheriff and his family had moved in.

This was standard practice at the time. Sam’s granddaughter, Billie Connell Jordan described Sam’s wife Lillie’s role at the jail:

Lillie was a brave and gracious woman. The Sheriff's residence was in the county jail and she raised her large family there. Sheriff Connell would be gone for many days at a time and she always carried out her duties in overseeing the cooking for the prisoners and made sure they had their meals on time.

Local historian Liz Weaver did a wonderful series of posts on the jail last year on her Historic Georgetown Texas Facebook page, including videos of the interior of the residence. If you want to see the rooms where Lillie raised their family, her research is the place to start.

Sam and Lillie had married on January 3, 1883, at Liberty Hill. She was Lillie Ann Bainbridge, born in Alabama. During their courtship, Sam had been away on cattle drives, writing letters home about rain and cold and loneliness on the trail. By the time the couple moved to Georgetown, they had four young children: Effie Myrtle, born 1883; Beulah Virginia, born 1885; Ivy Evie, born 1886; and Lillie Maud, born 1888.

Connell served one term and then lost the office in 1890. What followed were eight of the hardest years of the family’s life. Sam tried everything. The newspaper trail shows a meat market partnership, a grocery business with two successive partners, a livery stable on Oak Street, and a stint reviving and running the Georgetown Hotel. He broke 300 acres of sod for J. H. Booty south of town at $3.00 an acre with four yoke of oxen. He bought land between Georgetown and Hutto, sold the family’s Liberty Hill home, moved Lillie and the children to a home on Block 17 of the Glasscock Addition, three blocks east of the courthouse, and eventually traded the two-story residence on that block for the Dever livery business. The civil docket tells the rest: he was on the city’s delinquent tax list for Block 17 in 1891, and he had at least one foreclosure judgment against him in 1895. A second foreclosure suit was eventually dismissed.

The Connell family Bible tells what was happening at home during these same years, and it’s a poignant record. The first four children, the girls born between 1883 and 1888, all survived to adulthood. But starting in November 1889, while the family was still living in the jail residence, something shifted.

An infant son arrived on November 23, 1889. The Sun reported his death on December 12; he had died the previous Sunday evening and was buried Monday in the Odd Fellows’ Cemetery. He was only two weeks old. His is the only grave I’ve found of the children that were lost by the Connells.

Their first son to survive, Sampson, was born May 5, 1891. Another son, David, was born in February 1893. David only lived for three days. An infant daughter arrived in August 1895, unnamed in the Bible. No death date was given, but she didn’t survive to be listed on the 1900 census. Of the six children born after 1888, four died in infancy. The pattern is stark in the Bible’s careful handwriting: four healthy daughters in five years, then over a decade of mostly loss.

By January 1898, papers around the county were noting that Sam Connell was being urged to run for sheriff again.

He won. He moved the family back into the jail residence, and this time he would stay for seven consecutive terms, fourteen consecutive years. Whatever that return to office meant for Sam’s public career, for Lillie it must have meant a roof that was paid for, a position that carried a salary, and an end to the years of instability.

But Lillie was suffering, too. In January 1899, the Sun reported that Mrs. Sampson Connell had been quite sick for several days. In May 1900, she was reported quite ill, and a week later, extremely ill at her home. Through all of this, she was pregnant again, or had just delivered. Ella Agreta was born May 30, 1900, in the middle of Lillie’s worst documented illness. Ella died the following day. By August, Lillie had been sent to Mineral Wells, the health resort town west of Fort Worth known for its mineral springs, where she was reported improving. She was still recovering in October.

In the 1900 census, Lillie reported eight children born and five living. A daughter named Willie arrived in November 1902, and by 1910, Lillie’s count had risen to 10 born and six living; four children lost across a span of 11 years.

Big-hearted Sam

The man the community saw was the public sheriff, and by all accounts he was exceptional at the job. J. L. Lane, who encountered Connell as a twelve-year-old boy at a First Monday trade day in Georgetown, remembered him this way decades later: a large man riding a fine sorrel horse through the crowds, smiling and waving to everyone, wearing a big Stetson hat, boots and spurs. Lane recalled that Connell was “a man all people honored and loved” and that “the rougher element of the section honored and feared him.” He noted that unlike later sheriffs who sat in their offices and dispatched deputies, Connell saddled up and said “Come on, boys.” He was a leader who rode hundreds of miles monthly, day and night, and landed horse thieves and outlaws in the very jail where his children were growing up.

He wasn’t just a lawman. Connell was also the kind of man who took in other people’s children. In 1902, Roseanna McLaughlin Carr, wife of Robert Carr of Granger, died of appendicitis, leaving behind four young children. That same year, according to a contemporary county history published in 1911, Sam and Lillie adopted the youngest, a boy named Wilmer Carr.

Connell’s 1915 obituary summed it up as: Connell “had raised several children besides his own, among them an adopted son to whom he was a real father and who was as devoted to him as any of his children.” Billie Connell Jordan’s narrative about the family confirms that Sam and Lillie also “raised” the other three Carr children, though it may be more accurate to say that they fostered them; Willie was 17, Mabel was 15, and Maud was 14 when Robert Carr died and Connell was named guardian of the older children. The Carr heirs are a story unto their own, though, so I’ll have to leave that for another day.

The quiet way

After leaving the sheriff’s office, Connell went back to farming near Liberty Hill. He wasn’t done with public life, though. In the summer of 1914, he ran for Flotorial Representative in the Texas Legislature from the 92nd District, composed of Williamson and Burnet counties.

A Leander correspondent for the Sun, writing on June 11, 1914, captured the campaign in a single line: “Ex-Sheriff Connell was with us Saturday interviewing the voters in his usual quiet way,” adding that any man who beat him would know he’d been in a real race.

He won the Democratic primary in July and the general election in November. The Thirty-Fourth Legislature was scheduled to convene on January 13, 1915. Sam Connell would not live long enough to take his seat.

October

The collapse, when it came, was fast.

A week later, on October 15, another brief item:

At some point between October and December, Connell was transferred to the Austin Hospital for the Insane, which the death certificate identified by its older name, the State Lunatic Asylum. The attending physician first saw him there on December 9, 1914. He lived just one more month.

What the death certificate said

Connell’s cause of death, written in a physician’s hand: “Exhaustion from General Paresis.”

General paresis of the insane, or GPI, was one of the most feared diagnoses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First identified in Paris in the 1820s, it was a progressive, invariably fatal disease that attacked the brain. Patients experienced tremors, unsteady gait, slurred speech, personality changes, delusions, memory loss, seizures, and eventually complete paralysis. Death typically followed within two or three years of the first symptoms. There was no treatment and no cure.

By 1913, researchers at the Rockefeller Institute had confirmed what many physicians had long suspected: GPI was caused by Treponema pallidum, the spirochete responsible for syphilis, invading the brain tissue years or even decades after the initial infection. In medical circles, the connection was settled science by the time Connell fell ill in 1914.

What the Connell family actually understood is a different question. By 1915, syphilis was widely understood by the general public to be a sexually transmitted disease, and a GPI diagnosis carried with it a certain implication about the patient’s past.

Country doctors, family physicians, and especially the families of respectable men had long preferred gentler explanations. Overwork. Nervous strain. The toll of a hard life.

When Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, died of GPI in 1895, even the Lancet described his condition as the result of “an over-full life in every direction.” If a British medical journal could find a way to avoid naming the underlying cause for an aristocrat, it is easy to imagine that a Texas family in 1914 may have received a similar kind of framing, or may have preferred not to ask too many questions.

We can’t know from the death certificate alone what Lillie and the family were told. All we can say is that the newspapers apparently knew enough to not print it.

Sam Connell had been carrying a disease that would explain both the pattern of infant deaths and Lillie’s chronic illness. We know this because of how Sam died. General paresis of the insane develops only after the bacterium has lived in the body for years, sometimes decades. By the time the neurological symptoms appeared in 1914, Sam had been infected for a long time.

Did Lillie know?

Syphilis in a marriage does not stay with the husband. It passes to the wife, and it devastates pregnancies. The medical literature of the era documented the pattern clearly: miscarriages, stillbirths, infants who survived days or weeks before dying, and eventually, in some cases, children who were born apparently healthy but carried the effects of the disease into their own lives. The sequence in the Connell family Bible, four healthy children followed by repeated infant deaths, is consistent with an infection acquired sometime in the late 1880s. Lillie’s years of illness, her trips to Mineral Wells, and the babies she buried, these weren’t separate misfortunes; they were likely part of the same disease that would kill Sam in an asylum twenty-five years later.

We can’t know what Lillie was told. Doctors of the era routinely concealed venereal diagnoses from wives, sometimes at the husband’s request. A woman would know she was ill, but she wouldn’t necessarily know why. Whether Lillie ever understood what was happening to her body and her children is an unanswered question.

What the papers said

The legislative escort at Connell’s funeral was significant. Members of the Legislature went to Acting Texas Governor Q. U. Watson and requested a committee to accompany Sam Connell’s remains to Liberty Hill. Watson appointed Representatives Bland, W. G. Blackburn, Myron Blalock, B. C. Dubbs, V. C. Dove, E. E. Dewitt, and J. R. Harrison. The funeral was held Monday afternoon at Liberty Hill followed by Masonic rites. A large number of friends and relatives were present, and the Sun noted that the crowd would have been much larger but for the bad condition of the roads.

The funeral drew county officials, judges, the entire Commissioners’ Court, and citizens from Georgetown, Taylor, Granger, and Milam County. Family came from Milam County, Lometa, and Hereford.

This wasn’t the funeral of a man whose community had abandoned him.

The thing nobody said

The newspapers handled Sampson Connell’s obituary carefully and with respect for his family. Just the bare fact of the asylum, stated once.

Georgetown in 1915 likely understood enough about general paresis to draw their own conclusions and seem to have made a collective decision that this was not the thing that defined Sam Connell. The man who rode through the crowds on a sorrel horse, who took in orphaned children, who bought twelve newspaper columns to answer his accusers and then won re-election by 570 votes, that was the man they buried.

In 1920, Lillie was living in Georgetown with her daughter Evie and son-in-law Wayne Magill, along with her youngest daughter Willie and Wilmer Carr, the adopted son to whom the sheriff had been “a real father.” By 1930, she had moved to the household of her daughter Willie and son-in-law Albert Lunsford, near Liberty Hill, back in the country where she and Sam had started. Sam’s biographical sketch, published while he was still in office, said that when the sheriff’s office was done with him, “he expects to go to his farm and make an honest living by the sweat of his brow.”

He didn’t get the chance to do that for very long, but Lillie kept the family together for another sixteen years in the place where it had all begun.

Sampson and Lillie Connell are buried at Liberty Hill Cemetery. Lillie outlived him by exactly sixteen years, dying on January 10, 1931, the anniversary of his death.

Lillie’s death certificate, filed in Travis County, lists her cause of death as lymphatic leukemia, with a duration of three years. She was 68 years old. The diagnosis was confirmed by blood count. Her son, Sampson, was the informant.

The word “leukemia” would not have meant much to most readers of the 1931 Georgetown papers. But it appears again, and again, in the records of this family.

Young Sampson, the boy who survived infancy when his brothers born on either side of him did not, died on June 27, 1958, at Seton Hospital in Austin. He was 67 years old, a retired fire inspector. His cause of death: chronic lymphatic leukemia.

Willie, the youngest, died on January 20, 1967, at Allen Hospital in Burnet. She was 64. Her cause of death: lymphatic leukemia.

Chronic infections are known to increase the risk of blood cancers by keeping the immune system in a state of sustained overactivity, and syphilis, which can persist in the body for decades, is documented to disrupt immune function and chronically stimulate the lymphatic system. In infants, congenital syphilis produces blood abnormalities so similar to leukemia that the two are routinely mistaken for each other.

A mother and two of her children, all carried off by the same diagnosis, all in their sixties. The two children who died of it were the two surviving children born during the years of documented infant loss and illness, the two who survived infancy when four of their siblings did not. The shadow of Sam Connell’s illness likely didn’t end with his death in 1915 or Lillie’s in 1931; it may have followed the family for more than fifty years.

One more thing

Most of my research for Old Town Echoes starts with a house. As the Historian for Preservation Georgetown, house histories are the threads that I pull. This story wasn’t any different; I came across Sam Connell’s 1906 perjury scandal while I was researching a property that has nothing to do with him. One thread led to another, and here we are.

But that’s how this work goes… because buried in the records of the Connell family’s hardest decade, I found something else: a house. Don’t think I didn’t notice, since the houses are usually center stage in my research. It’s the one on Block 17 of the Glasscock Addition — the two-story residence Sam traded away for a livery business when the money ran out.

I found it. I know where it stood. Is it still there? We’ll talk about that next time.

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Sources & Research Notes

Sampson Connell’s Background & Family

“Death of Sampson Connell,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 14 January 1915, p. 1; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 16 April 2026).

“Connell, Member of Legislature, Dies at Local Hospital,” The Austin American (Austin, Texas), 11 January 1915, p. 8; digital image, Newspapers.com (newspapers.com : accessed 17 April 2026).

Texas State Board of Health, standard certificate of death no. 2307, Sampson Connell, 10 January 1915, Travis County; digital image, “Texas, U.S., Death Certificates, 1903–1982,” Ancestry (ancestry.com : accessed 17 April 2026).

Connell Family Bible, births page; images, “Holt, Hutchinson, Texas, United States records,” FamilySearch (familysearch.org : accessed 20 April 2026), image 231 of 1273; Sons of the Republic of Texas application attachment.

Connell Family Bible, births page (second copy); images, “Texas, United States records,” FamilySearch (familysearch.org : accessed 20 April 2026), image 1100 of 1793.

1900 United States Federal Census, Williamson County, Texas, Georgetown, District 0123, sheet 25, dwelling 177, family 486, Sampson Connell; digital image, Ancestry (ancestry.com : accessed 17 April 2026).

1910 United States Federal Census, Williamson County, Texas, Georgetown, District 0117, sheet 4b, Sampson Connel [sic]; digital image, Ancestry (ancestry.com : accessed 17 April 2026).

1930 United States Federal Census, Williamson County, Texas, Precinct 3, District 0012, dwelling 186, family 194, Lillie Connell in household of Albert Lunsford; digital image, Ancestry (ancestry.com : accessed 20 April 2026).

Billie Connell Jordan (1924–2024), granddaughter of Sheriff Sampson Connell, 'Historical Narrative by Billie Connell Jordan,' in 'Sheriff Sampson (Sam) Connell 1888–1890 and 1898–1912,' Williamson County Texas History (https://williamsoncountytexashistory.org/sheriff-sampson-sam-connell/ : accessed 24 April 2026).

“Sampson Connell,” in History of Central and Western Texas (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., c. 1911), pp. 706–707; digital image, FamilySearch (familysearch.org : accessed 20 April 2026). Notes “six children and one foster son” and states “Wilmer Carr, an orphan boy, was adopted by Mr. Connell in 1902.”

Sam Connell’s Career & Public Life

J. L. Lane, “Memories of a Williamson County Pioneer,” published in Williamson County Texas History (williamsoncountytexashistory.org : accessed 17 April 2026).

"A Texas Sheriff: Sampson Connell," The Houston Post (Houston, Texas), 18 June 1911, [3]; digital image, Newspapers.com (newspapers.com: accessed 17 April 2026).

“Sheriff Connell is occupying the residence in connection with the new jail,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 7 February 1889, p. 4; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 17 April 2026).

The Williamson County Jail

“Our New Jail,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 17 January 1889, p. 3; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 20 April 2026).

“Jail to Get Historical Marker” and “County Jail to Get Marker,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 14 January 1965, p. 3; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 20 April 2026). Construction cost of $20,906 per county records cited in the 1965 article.

Evans Studio. [Williamson County Jail Photographs #1], photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth497012/m1/1/?q=Williamson%20County%20jail : accessed April 23, 2026), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas Historical Commission.

Liz Weaver, series of posts on the Williamson County Jail, Historic Georgetown Texas (Facebook page), 2025. Includes video of the interior of the jailer’s residence.

The Connell Infant Deaths

“The infant son of Sheriff Sampson Connell died last Sunday evening and was buried Monday in the Odd Fellows’ cemetery. It was only a few weeks old. The Sun joins a large number of friends in extending sympathy to Mr. and Mrs. Connell,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 12 December 1889, p. 3; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 23 April 2026).

Connell Family Bible, deaths page; entries for infant son (died Dec 8, 1889), David Carvell Connell (died Feb 16, 1893), and Ella Agreta Connell (died May 31, 1900).

Lillie Connell’s Illness

“Mrs. Sampson Connell is quite sick with dengue fever,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 7 October 1897, p. 5; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 23 April 2026).

“Mrs. Sampson Connell, wife of the sheriff, has been quite sick for several days, but is now improving,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 12 January 1899, p. 5; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 23 April 2026).

“Mrs. Sampson Connell is reported quite ill this week,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 24 May 1900, p. 5; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 23 April 2026).

“Mrs. Sampson Connell is extremely ill at her home in this city,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 31 May 1900, p. 5; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 23 April 2026).

“Mrs. Sampson Connell is reported improving at Mineral Wells,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 23 August 1900, p. 3; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 23 April 2026).

“Mrs. Sampson Connell and Mrs. Harry Journeay are both reported improving,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 4 October 1900, p. 5; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 23 April 2026).

The Carr Children

“Little Wilmer Carr, adopted son of Sheriff and Mrs. Connell, was reported quite ill last evening,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 10 December 1908, p. 4; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 19 April 2026).

Will of Robert Carr, dated 21 December 1910, Williamson County, Texas, probate records; digital image, accessed 19 April 2026.

“Death of Robert Carr” [identifying Wilmer Carr as adopted son of Sheriff Connell], The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 9 February 1911, p. 9; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 19 April 2026).

“Deaths at Granger” [Mrs. Rosa Carr death notice], The Waco Times-Herald (Waco, Texas), 15 June 1902, p. 6; digital image, Newspapers.com (newspapers.com : accessed 20 April 2026).

The 1914 Campaign & Collapse

“Ex-Sheriff Connell was with us Saturday interviewing the voters in his usual quiet way...,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 11 June 1914, p. 8; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 17 April 2026).

“Ex-Sheriff Samson Connell, who was taken ill while on a visit to his brother near Sweetwater...,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 8 October 1914, p. 4; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 17 April 2026).

“Ex-Sheriff Samson Connell is under treatment at the East Lake Sanitarium in San Antonio for a nervous breakdown,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 15 October 1914, p. 4; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 17 April 2026).

Lillie Connell After 1915

1920 United States Federal Census, Williamson County, Texas, Georgetown, Wayne Magill household, including Lillian Connell (mother-in-law), Willie (sister-in-law), and Wilmer Carr (brother-in-law); digital image, Ancestry (ancestry.com : accessed 19 April 2026).

Death Certificates of the Connell Family

Texas State Department of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, standard certificate of death, Mrs. L. A. Connell [Lillie Ann Bainbridge Connell], 10 January 1931, Travis County; digital image, “Texas, U.S., Death Certificates, 1903–1982,” Ancestry (ancestry.com : accessed 23 April 2026). Cause of death: lymphatic leukemia, duration 3 years.

Texas State Department of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, certificate of death no. 10176, Maud Connell Southern, 1 February 1955, Washington County; digital image, “Texas, U.S., Death Certificates, 1903–1982,” Ancestry (ancestry.com : accessed 23 April 2026). Cause of death: carcinoma of uterus.

Texas State Department of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, certificate of death no. 36149, Sampson Connell [V], 27 June 1958, Travis County; digital image, “Texas, U.S., Death Certificates, 1903–1982,” Ancestry (ancestry.com : accessed 23 April 2026). Cause of death: chronic lymphatic leukemia, duration 5 years.

Texas Department of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, certificate of death no. 00710, Evie Magiel [Magill], 30 January 1963, Bexar County; digital image, “Texas, U.S., Death Certificates, 1903–1982,” Ancestry (ancestry.com : accessed 23 April 2026). Cause of death: carcinomatosis, due to carcinoma of colon.

Texas Department of Health, certificate of death no. 13223, Effie Myrtle Shaw, 12 February 1967, Williamson County; digital image, “Texas, U.S., Death Certificates, 1903–1982,” Ancestry (ancestry.com : accessed 23 April 2026). Cause of death: cancer and pneumonia, due to cancer of stomach.

Texas Department of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, certificate of death no. 00876, Willie Connell Lunsford, 20 January 1967, Burnet County; digital image, “Texas, U.S., Death Certificates, 1903–1982,” Ancestry (ancestry.com : accessed 23 April 2026). Cause of death: lymphatic leukemia, duration 8 years.

General Paresis of the Insane

Jesper Vaczy Kragh, “Neurosyphilis: Historical Perspectives on General Paresis of the Insane,” JSM Schizophrenia 2, no. 2 (2017): 1013.

“General Paralysis of the Insane – Part One,” Staffordshire’s Asylums: A Case for the Ordinary (staffordshireasylumrecords.wordpress.com : posted 7 April 2021, accessed 17 April 2026).

Juliet D. Hurn, “The History of General Paralysis of the Insane in Britain, 1830–1950” (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1998).

Research Notes

The Connell Family Bible records two copies of the births page, both listing the same ten children. The four infant deaths are consistent with Billie Connell Jordan’s count of “four died in infancy.” The deaths page of the Bible records three of the four: an infant son (died December 8, 1889), David Carvell Connell (died February 16, 1893), and Ella Agreta Connell (died May 31, 1900). The fourth death, an infant daughter born August 26, 1895, is not recorded on the deaths page but is inferred from her absence on the 1900 and 1910 censuses.

Lord Randolph Churchill’s death from GPI in 1895 and the Lancet’s framing of it are drawn from Hurn (1998) and the Lancet notice of 26 January 1895, pp. 239–240. The Noguchi et al. confirmation of T. pallidum in GPI brain tissue (1913) is from Kragh (2017).

After Sam Connell’s death, I located the death certificates for Lillie and five of their six surviving children. The three family members born during or after the period of suspected infection — Lillie, Sampson, and Willie — all died of lymphatic leukemia. Three of the children born before that period died of other cancers. Chronic infections, including syphilis, are known to disrupt immune function and chronically stimulate the lymphatic system, and the clustering of lymphatic leukemia in three members of one family is medically striking, though the historical record cannot establish a definitive causal link.

A note on living descendants: Sampson and Lillie Connell have descendants living in Central Texas today, and some may encounter this piece. The medical conclusions presented here — particularly the connection between Sam's diagnosis, Lillie's illness, the infant deaths, and the later leukemia cases — are the author's interpretation of the historical and medical record, not established family history. The death certificate is a fact. The chain of consequences drawn from it is inferential. If you are a member of this family and have documents, photographs, or family knowledge that would add to or correct this account, I would genuinely welcome hearing from you.

Old Town Echoes is independently researched using primary historical sources. AI tools assist in drafting and editing; all content is reviewed, sourced, and verified by the author.

On June 19, 1906, the city marshal of Georgetown walked into a justice of the peace’s office and filed perjury charges against the Williamson County sheriff. He didn’t want to be there. The justice didn’t want to take the complaint. The whole thing was, in the marshal’s telling, a job nobody else would do… and it was all over $4.00. To understand how a $4.00 mileage dispute turned into a perjury charge, I need to introduce Sam Connell.

The Sheriff

Sheriff Sampson Connell III had held the office, on and off, since 1888, and by all accounts was a popular figure. One Leander correspondent would later describe him as “big-hearted, big-bodied Sam Connell.” By the summer of 1906 he was seeking his fifth consecutive term since returning to office in 1898.

He was also, in a very real sense, a son of the Republic. His grandfather, Sampson Connell Sr., was a War of 1812 veteran who, family tradition holds, served with the Texas Army as a wagonmaster during the Battle of San Jacinto, later receiving a Republic of Texas land grant for his service. His father, Sampson Connell II, came of age during the Republic years and was recognized as a Citizen of the Republic of Texas for the period 1836–1846; a bronze DRT plaque marks his headstone at the Connell Cemetery at Bear Creek, near Liberty Hill. The sheriff’s family name was one of the closest living links Williamson County voters had to the founding of the state.

According to a group of Georgetown citizens who called themselves “the committee,” he was also a grafter (a word commonly used at the time to describe a corrupt person, swindler, or someone who made money through dishonest means, particularly through the abuse of political or official influence).

Specifically, they accused him of padding his mileage. When his deputies served subpoenas out in the county, Connell submitted accounts to the county charging for miles that, the committee alleged, nobody had actually traveled. The sums involved were not exactly Watergate-level scandalous. One of the two perjury complaints centered on $4.00 in mileage. But the principle, they insisted, was the thing.

So, they did what any reasonable group of concerned citizens would do in 1906: they started publishing articles about it in the newspaper.

Meet the papers

Georgetown had at least two papers at the time: the Williamson County Sun was the establishment paper, and the Georgetown Commercial was... another one. The committee’s articles ran in the Commercial under the heading “Public Issues,” signed by various citizens, laying out the case against Connell.

For what it’s worth, the Commercial does not appear to have enjoyed a sterling reputation for fairness outside Williamson County. In July 1906, right in the middle of the Connell fight, the Houston Chronicle ran a piece titled “Fairness in the Campaign” accusing the Commercial of doctoring its coverage of a political speech. The Chronicle noted, with some amusement, that the Commercial was in the habit of boasting that it was “the fairest journal in the whole state of Texas.”

Maybe this tells us something about the paper the committee chose as its venue.

Here’s where it gets spicy. When the committee tried to place the same articles in the Sun, the Sun said sure… but you’ll have to pay for them as advertising.

The Sun’s editor explained his position, the 1906 equivalent of “we don’t do sponsored content”:

Translation: We see what you’re doing, and we’re not doing it for free.

The committee declined to pay the Sun, so the attacks ran in the Commercial, and the Sun maintained what it called “non-interference.”

“Fair Play” writes in

On June 14, the Sun published a letter from Leander titled “The War on Connell.” It was signed “Fair Play” and it made an argument that will sound familiar to anyone who has ever watched a political scandal break in an election year:

Fair Play had a point; it’s the same point every politician in history has made when opposition research drops in October.

The reluctant city marshal

A week later, the committee made their move. On Tuesday, June 19, City Marshal R.Y. Secrest of Georgetown walked into Justice of the Peace W.T. Starnes’s office and filed two perjury complaints against Sheriff Connell.

The two complaints covered separate subpoena accounts Connell had submitted to the county back in August 1905, both for witnesses in the R.W. Thompson murder case. The first alleged he’d falsely sworn to $4.00 in mileage for 80 miles Deputy Bauchman supposedly traveled to serve three witnesses. The second alleged he’d falsely sworn to $7.50 in mileage for 150 miles Deputy F. T. Turner supposedly traveled to serve five more. Combined, the committee was alleging about $11.50 in padded mileage, though only the first complaint — the $4.00 Bauchman account — would eventually carry the indictment into court.

Justice Starnes, apparently unable to contain himself, immediately told the Sun reporter that Secrest “acted very reluctantly, and that he would not have appeared as complainant had anyone else been found willing to do so.” Starnes also revealed that the committee had told him directly: if you refuse to receive these complaints, we’ll go to some other peace officer, and then we’ll tell the public you failed to do your duty.

So. The city marshal didn’t want to file. The justice of the peace didn’t want to receive them. The committee was essentially going door-to-door in the county courthouse trying to find someone, anyone, willing to pull the trigger.

Connell showed up the same afternoon, waived examination, posted $500 bond on each complaint, and went back to work.

Connell answers his accusers

The following week, on June 28, 1906, the Sun ran Sheriff Connell’s response. And when I say “ran his response,” I mean it in the most literal possible sense: Connell’s letter took up the entire front page of the paper. All six columns. Every inch. Then it continued onto page 8 and took up that entire page too — six more columns, top to bottom. Twelve full newspaper columns across two full pages, devoted to one man’s defense of himself.

This is more than a tweet thread or even a blog post. This is small-town equivalent of taking out a two-page spread in the New York Times.

The detail that makes the whole thing sing? It ran as a paid advertisement. Remember the Sun’s editorial from two weeks earlier, the one where the editor declared that any campaign material from either side would have to be paid for at regular advertising rates? Connell paid. The committee had refused to pay to run their "Public Issues" articles in the Sun and had taken them to the Commercial instead. Connell bought twelve columns. Whatever the merits of his defense, the man was willing to put his money where his mouth was in a way his accusers evidently were not.

As for the content of those twelve columns: Connell’s argument was, essentially, my deputies did the actual traveling, I signed the accounts based on what they told me, if there are errors they’re honest ones, and they’re the deputies’ fault anyway because I’m not “morally or legally responsible” for their mistakes. He also spent a considerable amount of ink on the theory that the whole thing was a political hit job — noting, pointedly, that the committee had sat on their complaints for months and only acted once the campaign was underway.

And he didn’t write the letter alone. At the top of page 8, the defense continues with an included statement from Connell’s Office Deputy — the man who kept the books, compiled the accounts, and handled the paperwork the committee was attacking. His name was C. H. Gee.

The reluctant grand jury

District Court opened its summer term on Monday, July 2, with Judge V.L. Brooks on the bench and a grand jury of twelve men impaneled.

Almost immediately, the sheriff’s lawyers challenged one of the grand jurors, W.Y. Penn, on the grounds that he was prejudiced. Connell handed the judge a written challenge alleging Penn had signed some of the Commercial articles.

Penn, under questioning, was reported to have admitted it. The judge asked if he’d signed them for “a political purpose.” Penn said yes. The judge excused him.

Penn would write in the next week to correct the record.

With Penn gone, the grand jury went to work. Remember the neutral paper, the one that wouldn’t take sides? When the indictment came down on Saturday, July 14, the Sun reported not just the indictment but the street talk about how it had been obtained:

In other words: the grand jury nearly didn’t do it. They barely got to nine. And the paper that wasn’t taking sides felt compelled to report that.

The indictment falls apart

The indictment charged perjury — specifically, that Connell had sworn falsely to an account for serving subpoenas in the Thompson murder case, to the tune of $5.50, of which $4.00 was mileage.

It lasted about ten days.

District Attorney Moore looked at the document, which had been drafted not by him but by County Attorney Jim Neal, working with “a member of the committee,” and immediately spotted problems. He asked Judge Brooks to reconvene the grand jury to fix it. The grand jury reconvened. A new indictment was returned on July 14.

That one didn’t survive either. On July 23, Connell’s attorneys moved to quash. The motion laid out all the ways the indictment was defective. The indictment didn’t actually say Connell was sheriff when the alleged perjury happened, didn’t say the account was false, and didn’t say the mileage was actually excessive — three fairly important things to leave out of a perjury indictment.

District Attorney Moore agreed with three of the defense’s four points. Judge Brooks quashed the indictment. The crowd that had gathered to watch “slowly dispersed.”

And then the Sun, which was definitely neutral, dropped the following in its coverage of the quashed indictment:

That last phrase is Latin for “a word to the wise is sufficient.” The Sun is saying, on the record: We want it known that we know a lot more than we’re telling you but we’re choosing not to say it.

The paper also used the occasion to clear up a small matter: the committee had apparently been denying that one of their own helped draft the indictment. The Sun named names. It wasn’t County Attorney Jim Neal who’d done the drafting alone, Dan Chessher, former County Attorney and a member of “the committee,” drafted two-thirds of the indictment. Chessher, to my knowledge, never responded in print.

The voters decide

The voters rendered their own verdict on Saturday, August 4, 1906, in the Democratic primary — which in Texas at the time was the real election. The official count ran in the Sun on August 9:

• Sampson Connell: 2,156 votes

• C.J. Brady: 1,586 votes

• Connell’s majority: 570

The Leander correspondent, writing the following week, summed it up:

This is the part where I’d love to tell you there was a dramatic trial, a stirring verdict, a resolution of some kind. There wasn’t. After the July 23 quash, the perjury case seems to have evaporated. I can find no evidence it was ever refiled. The committee appears to have given up, or run out of willing complainants, or both. The scandal didn’t sink Sheriff Connell. It may have helped him.

It’s worth remembering, too, what the committee was actually asking voters to do. They were asking them to throw out a man who had been the voters’ personal choice for sheriff in four prior elections, whose father and grandfather had helped build the Republic of Texas, over $4.00 in disputed mileage charges. Four dollars in 1906 was about two days’ wages — real money, but not sheriff-unseating money. Whatever the merits of the mileage accounting, that was a hard sell, and the vote totals suggest the voters weren’t buying.

The lesson, if there is one

If you swap out the newspapers for Twitter and “the committee” for a group chat, this story is completely contemporary. Everything that makes modern political scandals feel exhausting and familiar was already fully operational in 1906:

• The opposition research drop timed to the campaign. Fair Play was right: the committee had been sitting on this for months.

• The friendly newspaper and the hostile newspaper, each pretending to be the objective one. The Sun genuinely believed it was being neutral while running Connell’s defense on page 1 and dropping Latin subtweets about the grand jury.

• The reluctant witness pressured into going on the record. R.Y. Secrest did not want to file those complaints. The committee pressured him.

• The corrections and clarifications from people who felt misquoted. W.Y. Penn’s “the reporter was seated too far away” is every politician who has ever said “the clip was taken out of context.”

• The pseudonymous letter to the editor defending the embattled official. Every single comment section on every local news site. “Fair Play” would have a blue checkmark today.

• The indictment that falls apart on technicalities and gets quietly dropped. Sounds familiar.

• The base rallying around the accused in defiance of the charges. Connell ran up his biggest margin ever after being indicted. The committee’s campaign against him was, in the end, the best thing that ever happened to his vote totals.

And the best part? The whole thing played out not on smart phones or in feeds but in weekly newspapers read by people who knew each other in person, passed on the street, traded at the general store, and argued with each other after church on Sunday.

The medium changes over time, but small-town drama doesn’t change.

A footnote on the paper

One last thing, because I couldn’t resist. The Georgetown Commercial — the paper the committee chose as its venue, the paper the Houston Chronicle caught doctoring political speeches in July 1906, the paper that existed specifically to be the Sun‘s scrappy alternative — did not outlast Sheriff Connell’s political career for too long.

On November 30, 1918, the Taylor Daily Press ran a short item under the heading “Newspaper Changes”:

Two weeks later, on December 13, 1918, the Williamson County Sun came out with a new line on its masthead: “CONSOLIDATED WITH THE GEORGETOWN COMMERCIAL.” The Commercial, established 1897, had been bought by the paper it had spent its early years competing against.

Newspaper consolidations happen for all sorts of reasons — economics, changing readership, an aging owner wanting out. But I do think it’s worth noting which paper was still standing in 1918, and which one got folded into the other.

Sam Connell, for his part, served another term. And another after that. The courthouse where the perjury indictment fell apart was torn down in 1910 and replaced by the one that still stands in the middle of the Square today; if you walk past it now, you’re standing on the same ground where, 120 summers ago, a crowd gathered to watch a case against their sheriff collapse and then dispersed to go home and gossip about it over dinner.

What came next

Sam Connell’s 1906 victory was not his last. He served several more terms as sheriff and in 1914 was elected to represent Williamson and Burnet counties in the Texas Legislature.

But the story doesn’t quite end there, not in a small town.

Remember C. H. Gee, Connell’s Office Deputy, the man who co-signed the paid defense on June 28, 1906? He would later go on to become Williamson County District Clerk. He was also the father of Hays Gee, whose story I told in The Many Lives of Hays Gee. And Sampson Connell’s granddaughter, Halsey Virginia Davis — daughter of Connell’s daughter Beulah Virginia and Tax Collector Halsey Davis — would grow up to marry Charlie Gee, Hays Gee’s son. Which means that the sheriff and his office deputy would, two generations later, share great-grandchildren.

The small world of historic Georgetown keeps getting smaller.

As with most of our historic neighbors, I found that there’s more to Sampson Connell’s story than the 1906 smear campaign, including what happened in the strange, quiet months between his legislative election and his death, and what the newspapers chose not to print about either. We’ll dive into that next week.

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Sources & Research Notes

Sampson Connell’s Background

Clara Stearns Scarbrough, Land of Good Water: A Williamson County, Texas, History (Georgetown: Williamson County Sun Publishers, 1973), p. 80.

Find a Grave, memorial for Sampson Connell II (1822–1873), Connell Cemetery at Bear Creek, Liberty Hill, Williamson County, Texas, memorial ID 34009655; database with images, Find a Grave (findagrave.com : accessed 16 April 2026), photograph by Smilydino; notes the bronze DRT plaque reading “Citizen of the Republic of Texas, 1836–1846.”

“Sampson Connell” (Family Story), contributed by Ancestry user cheryl77581, 21 June 2008; Ancestry (ancestry.com : accessed 16 April 2026). The contributor’s account attributes the San Jacinto wagonmaster service and subsequent Republic of Texas payments to Sampson Connell Sr. (the sheriff’s great-grandfather), citing Audited Military Claims and General Land Office records at the Texas State Archives, and the War of 1812 muster rolls at the Tennessee State Archives.

“Sheriffs of Williamson County, Texas,” in Williamson County Historical Commission Scrapbook, Volume 3 (Georgetown: Williamson County Historical Commission, 1975); digital PDF, Williamson Museum (https://williamsonmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/WCHC-Scrapbook-Vol-3-1975-reduced-Size.pdf : accessed 16 April 2026). Lists Sampson Connell as sheriff from 1888–1890 and again from 1898–1912.

“Death of Sampson Connell,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 14 January 1915, p. 1; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 16 April 2026).

The Papers Themselves

“Fairness in the Campaign: Houston Chronicle Report Was Distorted by Georgetown Paper,” The Houston Chronicle (Houston, Texas), 17 July 1906, p. 8; digital image, Newspapers.com (newspapers.com : accessed 13 April 2026).

“Newspaper Changes” [Georgetown Commercial sold to Georgetown Sun Publishing Company], Taylor Daily Press (Taylor, Texas), 30 November 1918, p. 4; digital image, Newspapers.com (newspapers.com : accessed 13 April 2026).

The Williamson County Sun masthead, 13 December 1918, reading “Consolidated with the Georgetown Commercial”; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 13 April 2026).

The “Public Issues” Controversy & Perjury Case

“The War on Connell,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 14 June 1906, p. 1; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 12 April 2026).

“As to the Sheriff’s Race,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 14 June 1906, p. 4; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 12 April 2026).

“Complaints Filed Against Sheriff Connell,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 21 June 1906, p. 7; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 12 April 2026).

“Connell Answers Accusers,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 28 June 1906, pp. 1, 8; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 4 April 2026).

“Indictment of Sheriff Connell,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 28 June 1906, p. 11; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 12 April 2026).

“The District Court” [including “Challenging a Juror” and “The Judge’s Charge”], The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 5 July 1906, p. 1; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 12 April 2026).

“Mr Penn’s Correction,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 19 July 1906, p. 2; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 12 April 2026).

“Connell Indictment Quashed,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 26 July 1906, p. 1; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 12 April 2026).

The Election

“Leander Locals,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 2 August 1906, p. 1; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 13 April 2026).

“Primary Election Returns” [official count, 4 August 1906], The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 9 August 1906, p. 8; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 13 April 2026).

Connell–Gee Family Connections

“Kilgore Bride,” The Shreveport Journal (Shreveport, Louisiana), 15 August 1936, p. 11; digital image, Newspapers.com (newspapers.com : accessed 16 April 2026).

Images

“Williamson County’s 4th Courthouse, 1878–1910,” photograph, Williamson County Historical Commission, Georgetown, Texas.

Photograph of Sheriff Sampson Connell, Williamson Museum, Georgetown, Texas.

Research Note

The Georgetown Commercial‘s “Public Issues” series, which carried the committee’s original allegations against Sheriff Connell, does not appear to survive in any digital collection. The available run of the Commercial begins in 1907, and no physical holdings have been located for the relevant 1906 issues. Consequently, the committee’s specific charges are known only through Connell’s rebuttal in the 28 June 1906 issue of the Sun and through the Sun‘s own summary coverage.

Old Town Echoes is independently researched using primary historical sources. AI tools assist in drafting and editing; all content is reviewed, sourced, and verified by the author.

You’ll see lots of familiar buildings and landmarks, but so much has changed, too! It’s a reminder that local history can also be read in landscapes, not just in newspapers and documents.

This is my favorite one in the collection, probably because I walk these particular streets almost every day. Can you identify the streets and cross streets? What do you see that’s still here today? Which building is still here but in a different location?

I’m not going to caption this one so that you can discover it on your own, but if you scroll through the entire collection the title will give it away.

I came across these photos in Southwestern’s Distinctive Collections. The University is a great partner in preserving Georgetown’s local history!

Source

Unknown. Georgetown Aerial Collection. approx. 1930s. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/site/southwestern/georgetown-aerial-collection. Accessed 11 Apr. 2026.

Old Town Echoes is independently researched using primary historical sources.

AI tools assist in drafting and editing; all content is reviewed, sourced, and verified by the author.

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Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

If you walked through the house at 1810 South Main Street on last year’s Home Tour, you already know it was built around 1915 by Marcus Lafayette Langford and his brother-in-law Claud Byron Lunsford, a builder and a carpenter, who put up homes and public buildings across Central Texas. Today’s story isn’t about the house on Main, though, it’s about the woman who raised one of the men who built it, Mark’s mother, Claud’s mother-in-law, and one of the most remarkable people I’ve come across while researching this remarkable town.

Much of what we know about her comes from A Goodly Heritage, a family history compiled in 1967 by her grandson Ernest Langford.

When Ernest went searching for the right way to describe Christina Catherina Johnson Munson Langford, the word that kept surfacing wasn’t resilient or tough. It was cheerful. Jovial. Back in the old country, they had called her Kristina Klang — a Swedish joke about her talkativeness, since klang means something like “clang” or “clamor.” Christina never met a stranger, never stopped talking, and never stopped moving forward, not when the ocean nearly killed her, not when bandits killed her first husband, and not when her second marriage turned into something to survive rather than celebrate.

Her story starts, as so many Georgetown stories do, somewhere very far away.

From Småland to Boston

Christina Johnson was born in March 1834 in the parish of Barkeryd, in Småland province, south of Stockholm. On July 16, 1852, at 18 years old, she boarded a sailing ship in Göteborg bound for Boston, Massachusetts. She traveled in a large company of Swedish emigrants, many of whom would become the earliest Swedish settlers in Central Texas. Among them were Andrew Munson, the man she would one day marry, and her brother Gustaf Johnson.

They were three months at sea. The crossing was brutal. Nineteen passengers died during the voyage. When the ship finally reached Boston, 20 more were carried to the hospital at Deer Island, Christina among them. All of the hospitalized passengers from the ship died except her.

The healthier passengers, Andrew Munson included, had continued on to Texas. Christina stayed behind in Boston for four years, working and saving. In April 1856, she finally made her way south.

She arrived in Austin and married Andrew Munson on the very same day: April 21, 1856. The couple rented a small farm south of Austin. In Central Texas at that time, there were probably no more than ten Swedish families in the entire region, but Christina, always happy and courageous, dove into pioneer life.

A Widow on the Frontier

Then the Civil War broke out. Andrew Munson served as a freighter, driving wagon trains between the southern states and Mexico, hauling goods along routes that stretched as far as the coast and back. He was away from home most of the time. Christina was left to manage the farm and their growing family alone — by the mid-1860s, they had six children, the eldest only about ten.

After the war, Munson and some other Swedes took up freighting between Round Rock and Huntsville in East Texas, hauling limestone from one place and building materials from the other. Munson had rigged a special hollow in the axle of his wagon where he hid his money, mostly in the form of gold.

It was on one of these trips, around July 1866, that Andrew Munson died near a place called Red Top, in the vicinity of present-day Benchley in Brazos County. Two brothers-in-law, John Nelson and Gustaf Johnson, were traveling with him. Gustaf Johnson rushed to bring Christina the news. She hurried by horseback to her husband’s side, but by the time she arrived, he was already dead and buried.

Christina’s son-in-law, Ernest C. Ischy, recalled decades later that the family understood that Munson had been “waylaid and killed by bandits.” South Texas officers eventually found his body but no trace of his wagons or teams. Christina herself would say that her husband left home on a Friday and was killed on a Friday, and because of that she was superstitious about Fridays for the rest of her life. She would never let anyone leave on a trip on a Friday.

At 32, Christina was a widow with six small children in a land she’d come to only a decade earlier. By November 1868, she had bought 34½ acres of land from J.G. Caldwell about five miles from Georgetown. Her brother Gustaf Johnson was nearby. Neighboring Swedes helped her raise a log house. She would farm that property for nearly 40 years.

A Second Marriage, A Harder Chapter

In August 1869, Christina married again. William Ainsworth Langford was a Civil War veteran that had come to Texas from Tennessee shortly after the war, though exactly when and why he arrived in Williamson County, nobody seemed to know. Together they had five more children: Marcus Lafayette (born 1870), Josephus Forrest (1872), Tennessee (1874), Georgia Ann (1875), and Maud Hannah (1879). All were born near Georgetown.

The family memoir written decades later by Christina’s grandson Ernest Langford paints William as a colorful frontier character: a man of few words, a great marksman who carried his Winchester everywhere (even strapped to his cultivator when he plowed), a lawman who ran down bandits. He never sat with his back to a door, drew the shades at night, and kept his gun within reach while he slept. The first joint of his left thumb was missing, shot off while cleaning his gun. He considered that more humiliating than actually getting shot, so when anyone asked about it, he always claimed he’d worn it down dealing cards.

Some of that is surely true. However, the Williamson County court records tell a far more complicated story, one the younger generation of the family either didn’t know about or chose not to pass down.

Within a year of the marriage, William was already in financial trouble, with a $267 default judgment for an unpaid debt. By 1871, he had enough local standing to be appointed bailiff to the grand jury. That trust didn’t last. In 1872, the grand jury indicted him three times — cow theft and unlawfully removing livestock. He was convicted on two charges, fined, and sentenced to an hour in the county jail. Remarkably, while the cow theft case was still pending, he was again sworn in as bailiff.

It got worse. In 1874, with three Langford babies at home and six Munson stepchildren besides, William was indicted for aggravated assault and then for robbery. He couldn’t make bail. He sat in the Williamson County jail while Christina managed the farm and nine children on her own. He was convicted on the assault, and there are strong indications he was convicted on the robbery as well. He appealed, but the Texas Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction in May 1878.

Meanwhile, Christina was protecting what she had. In August 1878, she voluntarily waived her rights as natural guardian of her five Munson minor children and asked the court to appoint her eldest son, John E. Munson, as their legal guardian.

Christina had bought the homestead herself after Andrew’s death, but the Munson children held cattle and a fractional interest in the land. By placing those assets under John’s guardianship, Christina walled them off from her second husband’s creditors and habits. An 1881 inventory confirmed the arrangement: the homestead was held in common, half to Christina and half split among the Munson children. The legal architecture was airtight; William Langford had no interest in the Munson property.

A Revealing Divorce Filing

In 1883, divorce was still vanishingly rare in America; the national rate was less than one per one thousand. But on August 15, Christina walked into the Williamson County District Court and filed for one. Her petition laid out the private reality behind the public facts: William had come home drunk and struck her while she was sick in bed, he had drawn a large knife on her and threatened to kill the children and their “god damned mother,” and he had threatened to kill “all the Munsons” and tried to take her wagon and horse. She told the court she had raised a small crop of cotton and corn, bought three horses with her own labor, and owned four cows and nine hogs. William, she alleged, was “a dissipated and indolent man, spending most of his time, and wasting his substance in and around the bar rooms in the City of Georgetown,” who had not provided for the children in years.

The court granted an injunction restraining William from the property and placed all five Langford children in Christina’s custody. But then, at the very term of court set for trial, Christina dismissed the suit.

Why? We can only speculate. She still had five children under 14. A divorced woman with no income beyond what she could grow would have been in a precarious position, even with the homestead. The injunction had already given her the practical relief she needed. The social cost of actually completing the divorce, in a time when so few women dared to try, could have been a real concern. By dismissing the suit, Christina preserved her legal status as William’s wife and, eventually, her eligibility for his Civil War pension.

The marriage continued for 11 more years. By the late 1880s, William seems to have reinvented himself as a deputy county sheriff, doing real law enforcement work. This was frontier Texas, where the line between outlaw and lawman could be surprisingly thin, and where a man could cross it more than once in a lifetime.

By 1888 he had branched out further: an October 1888 ad in the Sun announced that W. A. Langford was serving Berwick Bay and Select Plant Oysters on the square at low rates. He was deputy sheriff one year, oyster man the next.

William Langford died on March 26, 1895, at Georgetown. He was 53. Christina filed for and received his widow’s Civil War pension. She had earned it.

The House on Timber Street

After William’s death, Christina was a widow for the second time — but she was far from helpless. By the 1900 census, she was head of household, living with her daughter Nellie.

In 1907, Christina orchestrated a remarkable family transaction. Her Munson children, scattered across the US from Oklahoma to Montana, signed over their inherited interest in the old homestead to their mother, each for a dollar “and the further consideration of the love and affection that I have for my mother.” With clear title in hand, Christina and Nellie sold the homestead for $900. Weeks later, she spent that $900 on a house in town: Block No. 68, in the Lost Addition to the City of Georgetown, bounded by Cedar Street and Timber Street (present-day Martin Luther King Jr St). She was 73 years old, and she was done with farm life.

The 1910 census places her on Timber Street, owning her home free and clear. Living with her were Nellie, who had never married or lived independently, and her daughter Georgia Johnson with two grandsons. Her youngest daughter Maud and son-in-law Claud Byron Lunsford were nearby on the same block.

Just next to Christina’s house, facing south on 12th St at 415 12th, stood the home of her closest neighbor, C.H. Gee, a name that will be familiar to my local readers as longtime Williamson County District Clerk and father to Hays Gee. Georgetown was a small world back then, and it keeps getting smaller the more you get to know the cast of characters! For instance, Christina’s daughter Tennessee married Ernest Charles Ischy, a first cousin of P.J. Ischy, who was the husband who drove his car off the bridge in The Widow of 1604.

The Timber Street property was Christina’s last home, and the one where she would live out her final decade. She was a fixture of Georgetown life in the early 1900s. She kept an old horse everybody called “Old Charley,” as gentle a horse as ever pulled a buggy, who was seemingly as old as Christina herself. The grandchildren loved riding him around her back yard. In 1917, at about 83 years old, Christina was still placing ads in the Williamson County Sun: “FOR SALE My gentle buggy horse, gentle for children to drive, works anywhere and scares at nothing whatever. Apply to Mrs. C. C. Langford.”

Grandmother Langford

Christina spoke her native Swedish all her life, read Swedish newspapers, and sang Swedish nursery rhymes to grandchildren who didn’t understand a word. She loved nothing more than sharing stories of her youth, the long journey across the Atlantic, and her early years in Texas. A report in the Sun on the third annual meeting of the Old Settlers Association in 1907 describes Christina as a speaker alongside other prominent names such as Senator Glasscock.

She was a weaver; a photograph from the book Svenskarne I Texas shows her sitting at her loom. A similar photograph, credited to Georgetown photographer N.M. Wilcox, was published nationally in Wilson's Photographic Magazine in July 1894 under the title 'Weaving Rag Carpet.'

Ernest Langford recalled that she must have woven enough carpeting to cover a good part of Williamson County.

A Last Will and a Legacy

On March 7, 1917, Christina signed her last will. The third clause reveals where Christina’s heart was heaviest; it provides specifically for “my afflicted daughter Nellie Alice Munson,” placing her entire estate, valued at about $1,500, in trust with her son Mark Langford for Nellie’s care. Only after Nellie’s death would the estate be divided among Christina’s five Langford children. Everything she owned was to serve, first and above all, the child who could not care for herself.

Notably absent are the surviving Munson children. They had signed over their homestead interests a decade earlier to help their mother move to town. The Timber Street house was bought with those proceeds. Yet the estate built from that transaction went to the Langford children, not the Munsons who had made it possible. The documents don’t explain why, but it’s a silence worth noting.

Christina died on September 15, 1918, at her home in Georgetown, at 84 years old. Her obituary in the Williamson County Sun described her as “a familiar and beloved figure.” The pallbearers were all Munsons, nephews of the deceased. She was buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery.

Nellie

There is one person in this story who never gets to speak for herself, yet whose presence shapes nearly every legal document Christina left behind.

Nellie Alice Munson was born around October 1863, the fifth of Christina’s six children with Andrew Munson. She appears in the 1878 guardianship petition alongside her older siblings, about 14, nothing in the document suggesting anything unusual. But by the time John filed his final guardianship settlement in 1884, the other Munson children had married or come of age. Nellie, at 21, was simply “living in this County with her Mother.” Whatever was different about Nellie’s life was beginning to be visible in what the records didn’t say.

In 1907, when the homestead was sold, Nellie was a party to the deed; she made her mark, and Texas law would have required her to understand the transaction. At 43, she seems to have been considered legally competent. Christina’s 1917 will, just ten years later, called her “afflicted.” By 1919, Mark Langford described her as “wholly incapable to take charge of and care for the estate devised.”

One account offers a possible explanation: when Nellie was a young girl, William Langford came home drunk and found her in bed with a raging fever. Thinking he could break it, he threw a bucket of cold water on her. The shock, combined with the illness, possibly scarlet fever, left her permanently impaired. I haven’t been able to verify this account, but it is consistent with what the court records tell us about William. If true, it would give Christina’s lifelong protectiveness of Nellie an even deeper motivation.

The family honored Christina’s wishes after her death, to a point. Around 1925, Nellie was admitted to Austin State Hospital, formerly the Texas State Lunatic Asylum. She lived there for nearly 13 years. When she died in January 1938, the informant on her death certificate was not a family member but “Austin State Hospital Records.” Her four-sentence obituary named only one survivor: “a brother-in-law, C. B. Lunsford of Georgetown.” Her full sister Emma Cannon was still alive, as were her brothers John and Sven Alfred, yet the hospital apparently knew of no one else. She was buried at Oakview Cemetery in Austin, not beside her mother in Georgetown.

What the documents suggest, taken together, is someone who had become profoundly isolated by the end of her life. Whether the family visited, whether they stayed in touch with the hospital, whether the distance and the years simply wore the connections away, we don’t know. But the paper trail at the end of Nellie’s life is strikingly bare for a woman whose mother had built her estate around the promise of her daughter’s care.

Christina had done everything she could. She kept Nellie at home for as long as she was alive to do it. She made the house itself a vehicle for Nellie’s care. When she couldn’t do it anymore, her children carried the obligation forward, however imperfectly.

The House on Timber Street

When Christina died, the Timber Street property was encumbered by the obligation to care for Nellie. In the weeks after the will was probated in 1919, the Langford children conveyed their remainder interests to Maud, Christina’s youngest, for ten dollars and the promise to provide Nellie “a home and the necessaries of life for the remainder of her life.” Even Tennessee’s children, who had inherited their mother’s share after Tennessee’s death in 1918, signed separate deeds over the next several years, each one carrying the same Nellie care clause.

With Nellie’s death in 1938, the obligation was finally released. In 1941, Maud and Claud Lunsford sold the Timber Street property to L.L. Huie for $1,600, nearly double what Christina had paid for it in 1907, but a modest sum for a house that had sheltered a family’s beloved matriarch.

The Langford Legacy on South Main

Mark Langford grew up to build the house at 1810 South Main; he later reinvented himself as a Texas Ranger on the Mexican border. His grandson Ernest Langford became a professor at Texas A&M and the compiler of A Goodly Heritage, the book that preserves the gentler version of Christina’s story. He ended that volume with a Swedish blessing: Vile hon i frid! — May she rest in peace.

The court records tell the harder version, but both versions ring true. Christina was the cheerful grandmother who sang Swedish nursery rhymes and wove carpeting on her loom, and she was the woman who filed for divorce alleging her husband had drawn a knife on her and threatened to kill the children. She was the beloved figure in the obituary and the plaintiff who told the court she’d bought her own horses with money earned doing washing. She held it all together — the farm, the children, the property, the promise to care for Nellie — across 66 years of Texas life.

The house on Timber Street, just like the C.H. Gee house next door, is gone now. Also like the Gee house, the Timber Street house was sold to the Catholic Church. The church purchased it in 1978, and aerial photographs show the house was gone by 1981.

The house at 1810 South Main still stands, though. It and many others were built by Christina’s family, people who had grown up learning from her resilience, and that’s a piece of the legacy inside those walls.

A note on names: Christina’s name appears in many variations across the historical record: Christina, Christiana, Christine, Kristina. Her maiden name is rendered as Johnson and Johanson. Her first husband’s surname appears as both Monson and Munson. I’ve generally used the spellings that appear most consistently in the primary sources, but readers may encounter other versions in their own research.

Sources

Christina’s Life and Family Memoir

A Goodly Heritage: The Family of William Ainsworth Langford and Christina C. Langford and Their Descendants, compiled by Ernest Langford (1967).

Ernest Severin et al., Svenskarne I Texas I Ord Och Bild, 1838–1918, Volume 1 (Austin, 1919), pp. 179, 492; digital images, The Portal to Texas History (texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1433684/); crediting McCulloch County Historical Commission.

Marriage Records

Texas marriage record, Andrew Monson and Christina Johnson, April 21, 1856, Travis County, Texas.

Texas marriage record, William A. Langford and Christina Munson, August 29, 1869, Williamson County, Texas.

Census Records

U.S. Federal Census, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910; Williamson County, Texas.

William Langford — Court Records

Brown Lee Collier v. W.A. Langford, Case No. 931 (1870), District Court, Williamson County, Texas.

State of Texas v. W.A. Langford, multiple cases (1872–1877), District Court, Williamson County, Texas.

W.A. Langford v. The State of Texas, No. 449, Texas Court of Appeals, Austin Term, affirmed May 4, 1878.

Divorce Proceedings

Christina C. Langford v. W.A. Langford, Case No. 2080 (filed August 15, 1883; dismissed January 19, 1884), District Court, Williamson County, Texas.

Deputy Sheriff

“Called Back,” Daily American (Nashville, Tennessee), January 22, 1887.

“W. A. Langford" [advertisement], Williamson County Sun , October 25, 1888.

Civil War Pension

U.S. Civil War Pension Index; Veterans Administration pension payment cards; William A. Langford, pension no. 640604.

Guardianship of Munson Minors

Guardianship of Mary A. Munson et al., Case No. 161 (1878–1885), County Court, Williamson County, Texas; in “Williamson, Texas, United States records,” images, FamilySearch (familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L9X3-YHPN).

Property Records

Deed, J.G. Caldwell to Christine Munson, November 30, 1868, recorded December 21, 1868; Williamson County, Texas.

Deed, Langford to Caldwell (1874); Dalrymple to Langford (1889); Munson children to Langford (1907); Langford/Munson to Johnson (1907); Thompson to Langford (1907); Williamson County, Texas.

Langford children to Maud Lunsford (1919); Ischy heirs to Lunsford (1920, 1923, 1925); Lunsford to Huie (1941); Williamson County, Texas.

Affidavit of Christina Langford, proof of heirship for Andrew Munson (1911), Williamson County, Texas.

Affidavit of Sillure and Harris (1941), Williamson County, Texas.

Probate — Christina Langford

Estate of C.C. Langford, Case Nos. 2202–2203 (1919), County Court, Williamson County, Texas.

Obituaries and Death Records

“Death of Mrs. Langford,” Williamson County Sun, September 20, 1918.

“Munson” [obituary], Austin American-Statesman, January 26, 1938.

Texas death certificate, Nellie Alice Munson, 25 January 1938, Travis County, Texas.

Georgetown Life

“The Old Settlers Reunion,” Williamson County Sun, 5 September 1907.

“FOR SALE My gentle buggy horse…,” classified advertisement, Williamson County Sun, 1917.

Nellie Munson — Family Account

FamilySearch, Nellie Munson (LVNR-S8L), “Brief Life History” contributed by user.

Maps and Visual Sources

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, Georgetown, Texas, 1916.

1810 S Main, Texas Historical Commission, Historic Resources Survey, 2016.

Find A Grave memorial #8492948, Christina Catherina Johnson Langford.

"Weaving Rag Carpet" [photograph by N.W. Wilcox, Georgetown, Texas], Wilson's Photographic Magazine, vol. 31, no. 7 (July 1894), p. 295.

Old Town Echoes is independently researched using primary historical sources.
AI tools assist in drafting and editing; all content is reviewed, sourced, and verified by the author.

Thanks for reading Old Town Echoes!

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If you attended the Home Tour last December, you saw 1408 Olive Street, the Amos-Godbey House—the one with the massive gambrel roof that looks like nothing else in town. The tour book told the story of the house and its owners, and it mentioned that the man who built it, Professor Martin C. Amos, took his own life in the summer of 1911. What the tour book didn’t tell you, because a home tour isn’t the place for it, is the full story of how he got there.

This is that story.

The Professor

Martin C. Amos was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1879. He came to the United States as a young man and proved to be an exceptional student, graduating with honors from Butler College in Indianapolis before earning a graduate degree and fellowship at the University of Chicago, where he studied German language and literature. In 1905, Southwestern University elected him Chair of Germanic Languages. He was 26 years old.

He married Mary Lewen Rutledge, whose family lived in Palestine, Anderson County, Texas. Their daughter Ruth was born in December of 1906. By the end of 1908, Amos had saved enough to purchase a lot on Olive Street and commission the C. S. Belford Lumber Company to build a home. The house that went up in 1909 was a two-story Shingle Style dwelling with a sweeping gambrel roof, stone chimneys, and a broad front porch. It appeared in the Georgetown Citizens Club book that same year, captioned simply “Residence of Prof. M. C. Amos.” He was 30 years old, with a prestigious academic post, a young family, and a brand-new home. Everything seemed to be falling into place.

The Fight for Southwestern

What happened next had nothing to do with Martin Amos and everything to do with him.

Southwestern University was Georgetown’s crown jewel, the oldest institution of higher learning in Texas, sponsored by the Methodist Episcopal Church South, and the economic and cultural engine of a small town. The university’s president, Dr. Robert S. Hyer, was a physicist of genuine distinction who had built one of the first X-ray machines in Texas and experimented with wireless telegraphy from campus. He had overseen major construction and enrollment growth during his tenure.

But by 1910, powerful voices within the Methodist church were questioning whether Georgetown was the right home for a major university. The push began with a letter from Hiram A. Boaz, president of Polytechnic College in Fort Worth, to Regent Hyer on March 7, 1910, proposing that Southwestern be relocated to Fort Worth. The idea soon shifted toward Dallas, where boosters dangled serious money. Dallas had reportedly been assured of $400,000 in cash and a forty-acre campus site if the university would come to them.

Georgetown fought back hard. Clara Scarbrough, in her history of the county, described it as a controversy that became a statewide affair. A committee of Georgetown citizens — including Lee J. Rountree, Mayor R. E. Ward, Dave Wilcox, Colonel W. K. Makemson, and C. S. Belford, the very lumberman who had built Amos’s house — traveled to Dallas to protest what they called the stealing of Southwestern University.

The Board of Trustees met in a long session in mid-June 1910, voting 21 to 13 to keep the school in Georgetown. But the vote didn’t end the argument. The controversy simmered and occasionally erupted for a year or more afterwards. Newspapers across Texas carried the debate. Methodist officials weighed in from all directions. The situation didn’t ease until 1911, when the Methodist church reaffirmed its commitment to Georgetown. Hyer resigned and moved to Dallas, where he became the first president of a brand-new institution: Southern Methodist University.

The university stayed. But by the time that was settled, it was too late for Martin Amos.

The Last Days

For a professor who had staked his family’s future on a new home he hadn’t finished paying for, the relocation crisis seemed existential. If Southwestern left Georgetown, his position would likely evaporate and his house, the biggest investment of his life, would be worth a fraction of what he owed on it. This was, in fact, one of the things they had warned about in the removal pamphlet authored by Booty, Lockett, and Gillett.

By the summer of 1911, Amos was unraveling. He grew despondent over the situation at Southwestern. On Monday, June 19, he confided in his summer school class that his worries had kept him from sleeping regularly. He told them he had slept only three hours in six days.

That night, he cashed a check for $50 from J. W. Long, telling Long that his child was sick and he was going to visit her at his wife’s family home in Palestine. It wasn’t true. Long subsequently learned that no such message had been received and that Amos’s child had not been reported ill.

Amos drove by car to Round Rock, where he caught the train to Palestine. He arrived at the home of his father-in-law, Ed Rutledge, on the morning of Tuesday, June 20, 1911.

There, in the presence of his wife, Martin C. Amos ingested poison. The initial news dispatch reaching Georgetown reported strychnine, but later private information indicated cyanide of potassium was the substance used. The coroner’s inquest, conducted that same day by J. B. Phillips, Justice of the Peace for Anderson County, recorded that Phillips was called to the Rutledge home at about eleven o’clock that morning. He viewed the body and took statements from Mrs. Rutledge and the attending physician. The finding: Amos had taken the poison deliberately, gone into convulsions, and died at approximately 10:45 a.m. He was described as about six feet tall, dark complexion, weighing about 140 pounds. The justice ruled the death a suicide.

He was 32 years old.

The News Reaches Georgetown

Georgetown learned what had happened through a telegram. Mary Amos wired her friend Mrs. Weisser. The message was blunt: “Martin has killed himself. Come at once.”

Mrs. Weisser left on the first train for Palestine. Dr. C. C. Cody followed her that night.

The Williamson County Sun ran the story on June 22, 1911, under the headline “Suicide of Prof. Amos.” The Houston Post ran it the same day:

The San Antonio Express reported it under a starker headline: “Poison Kills a Professor.” The Palestine paper noted that Amos had formerly taught in the public schools there and had many friends in the city, and that his death had caused a profound sensation.

The Sun reported that while J. W. Long said he noticed nothing wrong and that Amos had been in ordinary good spirits, friends disagreed. They said he was subject to fits of despondency and had acted queerly for several days. The obituary attributed his death to the unsettled state of affairs at the university and his fear of losing both his job and his home, adding that these things and the great heat were believed to have unsettled his mind.

Amos’s funeral and burial were held in Palestine, at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Ed Rutledge, though he was a resident of Williamson County at the time of his death. The Palestine paper noted that his death would cause sorrow not only locally but across the state, given the wide acquaintance he had made as a professor of languages at Southwestern.

After

Martin Amos died without a will. Mary filed papers regarding his estate on January 23, 1912, in the Williamson County Court. The probate application, filed by the attorneys Wilcox & Graves, described the community estate between Mary and Martin and asked the court to appoint appraisers. The court granted community administration that same day.

Six days later, Mary sold the family home to S. E. Wilcox.

No death certificate for Martin Amos has ever been located. The coroner’s inquest above is the closest thing to an official record of his death.

The Amos Women

The 1988 Recorded Texas Historic Landmark application research noted that efforts had been made to discover what happened to Mrs. Amos and her daughter Ruth but that the records were not conclusive. However, the trail didn't stay cold forever. Time, and a few online databases, have filled in the gaps.

After selling the house, Mary took Ruth back to Palestine. In 1919, she filed for guardianship of Ruth’s estate in the Anderson County Court; Ruth, then 13, had inherited property near Palestine and a share of her grandfather’s estate in Indiana, together valued at $2,500. A month later, Mary married Charles A. Hoffman, and they had one daughter, Katherine, in 1920. Mary died in Houston in 1931. She was 49. She was buried in Palestine.

Ruth boarded at a school in Palestine, likely St. Mary’s Academy, and married Charles Cowper Clarke Jr. in Harris County in 1924. The Houston Post wedding notice identified her as the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. C. A. Hoffman. The couple settled in the San Marcos area, where their son, Charles Rutledge Clarke, was born in 1926. His birth certificate listed his mother’s birthplace as Georgetown.

Charles Cowper Clarke died in 1938, from injuries sustained in an accident in San Antonio on June 20, the same date Ruth’s father had died twenty-seven years earlier.

Ruth married again, this time to a Dewey Bruton, and had two daughters. She died in San Antonio in 1960 at the age of 53. She was buried at Roselawn Memorial Park. Her death certificate listed her father’s name as “Unknown.”

What Stayed

The house on Olive stayed. That’s the thing about houses… They outlast the people who build them, and they outlast the crises that sometimes undo those people. The gambrel roof that Martin Amos commissioned from C. S. Belford in 1909 is still the most distinctive roofline on Olive Street. The stone chimneys still stand at the gable ends. The porch columns still frame the front door.

After Amos, the house passed through a quick succession of owners — the Wilcoxes, the McDonalds, W. W. Jenkins — before finding its long-term steward in Dr. John C. Godbey, who bought it in 1925 and lived there for 43 years. The Stegers followed, restoring and protecting it for another 36 years and securing the Recorded Texas Historic Landmark designation in 1988.

The university stayed, too, of course. The fight that lead to the death of Martin Amos ended with the school exactly where it had always been. Hyer left for Dallas and built SMU. Georgetown kept Southwestern. The thing Amos seemed to have feared most, the loss of everything, never came to pass. By the time resolution arrived, though, he was already buried in Palestine.

Sources

Martin C. Amos — Biographical

“M. C. Amos, Ph. B.,” Southwestern University faculty listing, Southwestern University Yearbook (Georgetown, Texas), 1909.

“Residence of Prof. M. C. Amos,” Georgetown Citizens Club Book (Georgetown, Texas), 1911.

The Relocation Controversy

Clara Stearns Scarbrough, Land of Good Water: A Williamson County, Texas, History (Georgetown, Texas: Williamson County Sun Publishers, 1973), 249–250, 389.

Booty, A. A.; Lockett, M. B. & Gillett, E. G. Southwestern University at Georgetown, Texas: Some Reasons why it Should not be Removed., pamphlet, ca. 1909; Georgetown, TX (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth802477/ : accessed March 21, 2026); University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History; crediting Southwestern University.

Death of Martin Amos

“Suicide of Prof. Amos,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 22 June 1911, p. 17; digital image, NewspaperArchive.

“M. C. Amos Ended Life: No Cause Assigned for Rash Act of Georgetown Professor,” Houston Post (Houston, Texas), 20 June 1911, Newspapers.com.

“Poison Kills a Professor: M. C. Amos of Southwestern University Dies at Palestine,” San Antonio Express-News (San Antonio, Texas), 21 June 1911, p. 9; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“Palestine News Budget” [funeral notice for Prof. M. C. Amos], Houston Post (Houston, Texas), 22 June 1911, Newspapers.com.

Inquest on the body of M. C. Amos, 20 June 1911, J. B. Phillips, Justice of the Peace, Anderson County, Texas; in “Anderson, Texas, United States records,” images, FamilySearch (familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C3SX-895N-5), image 79 of 1085.

Probate — Williamson County

Application of Mary Amos, surviving wife of Martin C. Amos, deceased, for community administration; and Order granting community administration, No. 1737, 23 January 1912; County Court, Williamson County, Texas; in “Williamson, Texas, United States records,” images, FamilySearch (familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L9XQ-XDJR), image 115 of 657.

Mary and Ruth Amos — After 1911

Application of Mary L. Amos for guardianship of Ruth Amos, minor, No. 2500; Appointment of guardian; Bond; Inventory and appraisement; and List of claims, October Term A.D. 1919; County Court, Anderson County, Texas; in “Anderson, Texas, United States records,” images, FamilySearch (familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L9QS-KWC9), images 260–262 of 1668.

Mary Amos–Charles A. Hoffman marriage, 23 November 1919, Anderson County, Texas; in “Texas, U.S., Select County Marriage Records, 1837–1965,” Ancestry, document no. 8625.

Death certificate, Mrs. Mary Hoffman, 29 May 1931, Harris County, Texas; Texas State Department of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Ancestry.

“Wedding” [Ruth Amos–C. Clark Jr.], Houston Post (Houston, Texas), 8 June 1924, p. 31, Newspapers.com.

Marriage license, Chas. Clark Jr. and Miss Ruth Amos, 4 June 1924, Harris County, Texas, Ancestry.

Birth certificate, Charles Rutledge Clarke, 23 July 1926, Hays County, Texas; Texas State Board of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, file no. 787, Ancestry.

Death certificate, Charles Cowper Clarke, 25 June 1938, Frio County, Texas; Texas Department of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, registrar’s no. 27724, Ancestry.

Death certificate, Ruth Bruton, 1 February 1960, Bexar County, Texas; Texas Department of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, state file no. 6934, Ancestry.

U.S. Federal Census, 1920, Anderson County, Texas, Palestine, ED 6, sheet 11A, line 31, Ruth Amos; digital image, Ancestry.

RTHL Application Research

“The Amos-Godbey House,” Recorded Texas Historic Landmark application research, Charles and Jodie Steger, ca. 1988; typescript pages consulted in project files.

Old Town Echoes is independently researched using primary historical sources.
AI tools assist in drafting and editing; all content is reviewed, sourced, and verified by the author.

Thanks for reading Old Town Echoes!

Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The social columns of early twentieth-century Georgetown recorded women’s lives in a particular way. They told you what Mrs. Hays Gee served at her luncheon. They told you she was in the bridge club that met at Mrs. R.L. Logan’s home and that she hosted bridal showers with cream chicken and mint ice.

They didn’t tell you that she owned 1,148 acres in Jackson County before she ever met Hays Gee. They didn’t tell you she ran a farm alone at the age of twenty-one or that she managed two estates through probate courts. The newspapers always called her Mrs. Hays Gee. Even her obituary led with “widow of Hays Gee.”

The newspapers provide some clues to who she was, but the records that give her back her name aren’t the newspapers, they’re the deeds and the court minutes. Her name was Annie Lee Brown.

This is a companion piece to “The Many Lives of Hays Gee,” which followed Annie’s husband through a murder trial in Oklahoma Territory, a military desertion under a false name, and a long career chasing Texas oil. That post closed with a promise to tell Annie’s side of the story.

The Horse at Navidad

Annie Lee Brown was born on August 1, 1878, in Austin, Texas, the youngest daughter of Oscar S. Brown and Mary J. Lloyd. Annie grew up in DeWitt County, in the South Texas lowlands between the Guadalupe River and the Gulf. Her family was large. The Brown family tree shows at least nine siblings with Annie as the baby of the family.

In 1896, at the age of 18, Annie married John W. “Buck” McCrabb in DeWitt County. They settled in Jackson County, where their first son, Joseph Oscar McCrabb, was born in 1897. A second son, Tyson, followed in 1899.

Then, in October 1899, Buck McCrabb died at their home in Navidad, Jackson County. A horse fell on him while he was running a hog. He lingered, unconscious, until the following night. His body was taken to Cuero on the afternoon Southern Pacific train for burial in the family graveyard.

Annie was twenty-one years old. Her sons were two and nine months.

A Feme Sole

The 1900 census finds her in Jackson County, Precinct 5. Head of household. Occupation: Farmer. She was running the farm with two babies and an aging father in the house. Her father would die two years later.

That same year, the Brown family partitioned the estate of Annie’s father, Oscar S. Brown, through a deed recorded in DeWitt County. Annie received her share of the Brown family land in her own right. This matters because everything Annie inherited from her father was her separate property under Texas law, not community property with any future husband.

On October 20, 1906, she signed a deed in DeWitt County conveying land to her brother. The notary’s acknowledgment identifies her as “Annie L. McCrabb, a feme sole.”

For most of American history, a married woman had no independent legal existence. Under the common law doctrine of coverture, her property, her contracts, her capacity to sue or be sued, all were absorbed into her husband’s identity. Texas was better than most states on this front; its community property system, inherited from Spanish law, gave married women stronger property protections than the common law provided, but even in Texas a married woman couldn’t sell her own separate property without her husband joining the deed, and she had limited standing in court without his participation. Those restrictions weren’t fully removed until 1967, when Texas amended its constitution to let a married woman convey her separate property on her own authority.

A feme sole stood outside that structure. The term designated an unmarried woman who could own property outright, enter contracts, and appear in court on her own authority. For Annie, widowhood had conferred something the law otherwise reserved for men and single women: full legal personhood. For the next five years, every document she signed carried that designation. She was not Mrs. anybody. She was Annie L. McCrabb, a feme sole, managing properties, paying taxes, repairing fences, and traveling to Edna to see about the land and collect rent.

The Guardian’s Report

The most revealing document of Annie’s widowhood is a guardianship exhibit she filed in DeWitt County Court in 1912, looking back over the entire period since she had taken charge of her sons’ affairs. It reads like an accounting of a life lived on almost nothing.

The children’s estate included 1,148 acres of land in Jackson County (the John McCrabb survey, appraised at roughly six dollars an acre), $945 in cash from the inventory, and two horses valued at $54. There was also a claim for money owed by J.F. McCrabb, the previous guardian of the estate who was now deceased.

Annie’s disbursements for the first two years tell the story of daily survival. Board at $10 per month for each child. Drugs and doctor bills: $25. School books and supplies: $25. Clothing for two wards for two years: $150. Total: $650.

After August 1909, the expenses changed. The boys began boarding in Georgetown at $12.50 each per month. The exhibit lists clothing at $230, school books and supplies at $30, washing at 50 cents per week. There is a line for “drugs and doctor bills to be charged to Tyson, who was accidentally shot,” at $65. Two bicycles: $30. And a line for the guardian’s own expenses: traveling to Edna to see about the property and collect rent, $30.

Oh, and the shooting incident that appears between entries for school books and bicycle purchases as if it were just another cost of raising two boys in early twentieth-century Texas? The Houston Post reported in November 1910 that a man named Dever had waived examination in Georgetown justice court and was placed under a $500 bond on a charge of assault. “The defendant claims the shooting of Young Tyson McCrab, in the left ankle, was accidental.”

The Georgetown Connection

Why Georgetown? The probate records don’t explain the choice, but the family tree does.

Annie’s older sister Bettie Minnie Brown had married a man named J.C. Cameron. Bettie died young, in 1887, but her son, J.C. Cameron Jr., eventually married Beatrice Gee, the daughter of C.H. Gee of Georgetown and the sister of Hays. Annie was the aunt of Hays Gee’s brother-in-law. The Brown and Gee families were already entangled before Annie and Hays ever met.

And there was an even older connection: the 1870 census shows Annie’s father Oscar Brown farming in Georgetown. That combination of family history and family connection almost certainly explains why the McCrabb boys were boarding in Georgetown by 1909 and why Annie herself eventually followed. In 1910, the census shows her still in DeWitt County, but a November 1911 legal document identified her as a resident of Williamson County. She had moved to Georgetown. She was thirty-three years old.

Name Changes

Sometime in the next few months, Annie married Hays Charles Gee.

I have not found the marriage record. I’ve searched DeWitt County, Williamson County, and neighboring counties without success.

This is the point early on where the research on Annie nearly hit a brick wall; I don’t have a marriage record linking Hays Gee to Annie. There’s no document that connects her maiden name to her second husband. If it weren’t for her sons, her identity before Georgetown might have remained a mystery. Joe and Tyson McCrabb appear in census records alongside Hays and Annie, and they show up in newspaper columns about the Gee household. Their surname didn’t match their stepfather’s, and that mismatch is what made Annie’s earlier life recoverable. The McCrabb surname led to a marriage record for Annie L. Brown and J.W. McCrabb in the 1896 DeWitt County marriage index, which opened the door to the Brown family, the guardianship, the partition deed, and the rest of Annie’s past.

While the marriage record is missing, the probate records help to pinpoint the timeframe for the marriage.

On November 24, 1911: Annie L. McCrabb, a feme sole.

On April 11, 1912: the Williamson County Sun reported “Mr. and Mrs. Hays Gee are here,” the first newspaper reference to the couple.

Then, on January 21, 1913, the court record reads: “Mrs. Annie McCrabb Gee, guardian of the estate of Joseph Austin McCrabb and Tyson Frederick McCrabb, minors.”

There it is, the name change, entered into the minutes of the DeWitt County Court. From that point forward, every probate document identifies her as Annie McCrabb Gee. She didn’t drop her first husband’s name. She added to it. In the legal record, she carried both marriages with her.

She was four years older than Hays. She had two sons, a farm, and over a decade of self-sufficiency. He was 28 or 29 with a past that my Hays Gee piece has already described. She almost certainly knew all about his past through the Cameron-Gee family connection. Given that, as well as her autonomy as a widow, it’s interesting that she decided to enter into a marriage with Hays.

There’s another interesting piece to Annie’s story around the time she married Hays. As guardian of her sons’ estates, Annie had petitioned the court for permission to sell 574 acres of the McCrabb land in Jackson County. The land was unimproved pasture, and she argued that the personal property had been exhausted and the sale was necessary to fund the boys’ support and education.

The buyer was C.H. Gee, Hays’s father, at $18 per acre. The total price was $9832, but the first sale fell through. The January 1913 court entry records that the purchaser refused to consummate the transaction. Annie filed a new report of sale in April 1913, and this time C.H. Gee completed the purchase at a lower price of $10 per acre.

So, the picture is this: Annie married into the Gee family, and within months, her father-in-law purchased her children’s land through the probate court where Annie was the guardian executing the sale. The transaction was legal and court-supervised, but the intertwining of the two families’ finances had begun, and it would continue for decades.

Her Separate Estate

In August 1915, Annie purchased Block 31 of the Glasscock Addition in Georgetown for $4,000. The deed specifies that the cash portion, $2,800, came “out of her separate funds,” and that the property was to become part of her separate estate. This was not a joint purchase. This was Annie, acting in her own legal capacity, investing money she controlled.

She held the lot for five months. On January 29, 1916, she and Hays sold it to A. Clowlin for $4,000. The day before, Clowlin and his wife had signed a deed selling the Gees a 120-acre farm south of Georgetown for $9,000, with $4,000 in cash and the balance in promissory notes. Both deeds were filed on the same day. The transactions were coordinated: Annie’s town lot became the down payment on the farm.

But there was an important difference between the two purchases. The Glasscock Addition property had been Annie’s separate property. The farm deed named both H.C. Gee and wife Annie McCrabb Gee as grantees, making it community property. Annie’s separate money had funded a joint asset. Under Texas law, that changed who controlled it and who could lose it.

Six months later, on a June morning, the farm house was destroyed by fire. The San Antonio Express reported that Mrs. Gee lost jewelry and diamonds amounting to about $750.

When Annie filed her guardianship report the following January, she told the DeWitt County Court that “there is no way in which she can give an itemized account of the expenditures, for the reason that her dwelling with all contents was burned, and that all account books and receipts of monies paid out for said minors were destroyed.” All she could report was the balance on hand: $1,155.

In June 1922, they bought another lot in the Glasscock Addition and contracted with Griffith Lumber Company to build the house at 602 South College Street. As you know from last week, they had to give up that house three years later because they were unable to pay down the principal. C.H. stepped in to buy the debt and pass the house to a new owner.

Mrs. Hays Gee

After the sale of the College St house, Annie rebuilt a social life, if not a financial foundation. This is the period where the Williamson County Sun knew Annie best, and knew her least. Mrs. Hays Gee hosted a 42 luncheon. Mrs. Hays Gee was in the bridge club. Mrs. Hays Gee threw a bridal shower. In March 1924, she and Hays hosted a birthday dinner. Meanwhile, Hays chased oil leases across Central Texas. They visited Joe and his family in San Antonio. Tyson and his wife came from Seattle. The social columns recorded all of it under the name Mrs. Hays Gee.

Her Boys

By 1940, Hays and Annie had left Williamson County entirely. The census finds them in San Antonio, in the household of Annie’s firstborn son, Joe McCrabb, now 42 years old. Joe had built a respectable life there as a builder with a family of his own. The circle that began when Annie was a young widow farming alone in Jackson County had come around: she lived in her son’s house now.

Annie’s youngest, C.H. Gee Jr., had done well too. He graduated from Southwestern University with a chemistry degree, took a position with LaGloria Corporation in Corpus Christi, and was commissioned as a Naval Reserve ensign during the war. By 1944, Annie and Hays were living at his address on Glendale Drive. Two of the three boys Annie raised had landed on solid ground.

The third had not. Tyson McCrabb’s life after Georgetown is difficult to summarize and harder to imagine living through as his mother. In 1922, at twenty-three, he was convicted under the Mann Act in Seattle and sent to the federal penitentiary at McNeil Island. His intake record listed his crime as “white slavery” and his mother in Georgetown as his contact. After his release, he drifted through Northern California, accumulating arrests for battery, hotel burglaries, and petty theft across San Francisco, Oakland, Palo Alto, Redwood City, and Stockton. In May of 1926, he struck a taxicab head-on in San Francisco, killing the driver; he was charged with manslaughter. By 1932, he was at Folsom. The 1940 census found him at the Louisiana State Penal Farm. He used at least three aliases. California prison records trace a path through McNeil Island, Folsom, Baton Rouge, and San Quentin over a span of more than twenty years.

In 1937, Tyson turned up in Cuero, Annie’s home county, where he sustained a 24 inch abdominal wound in a knife fight. In 1947, he married again in San Antonio. He died on January 7, 1950, in San Francisco, at the age of fifty. His obituary listed his occupation as the travel bureau business. Survivors included his mother, Mrs. Annie Lee McCrabb Gee.

The guardianship exhibit that Annie filed in 1912, with its careful accounting of school books and boarding fees and the $65 for Tyson’s gunshot wound, reads differently in light of what followed. She spent a decade scraping together the money to raise and educate those boys. One of them became a builder. One of them became an ensign. And one of them spent most of his adult life in and out of prison.

Who Was Annie Lee Brown?

Annie died in 1963, at Gowen Geriatorium in Shreveport, after a long illness. She was 84. The Shreveport Journal said: “Mrs. Annie L. Gee, 84, of 3861 Victory Dr., widow of Hays Gee.” A native of Cuero, Texas. Survivors: two sons, C.H. Gee of Shreveport and Joe McCrabb of San Antonio. Five grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, two great-great-grandchildren. Burial in Forest Park Cemetery.

The Williamson County Sun published hundreds of column inches about the Gee family between 1889 and 1938. In all those years, Annie was identified only as Mrs. Hays Gee. Before that, she was Mrs. Annie McCrabb. While her first husband’s obituary did name her as “Miss Annie Brown of Clinton,” her own obituary identified her as “widow of Hays Gee.”

Who was Annie as a woman, a wife, a mother? The records and newspaper articles don’t tell us that—but we do know her name. Anna L. Brown. Annie L. McCrabb. Annie McCrabb Gee. Annie Lee Gee.

The probate court in DeWitt County is where she exists most fully as a person: a woman managing land, settling claims, boarding her children, paying for their school books, collecting rent on the property she maintained. A feme sole. A guardian. A woman who owned things and did her best to hold on to them.

She was born Anna Lee Brown, but she always went by Annie. She married twice, buried one husband and outlived the other, raised three sons, farmed alone, managed estates, hosted luncheons, lost a house to fire and another to debt, and moved six times across Texas and into Louisiana.

The newspapers called her Mrs. Hays Gee. Her name was Annie Lee Brown.

This post is published during Women’s History Month. It is dedicated to the women in the historical record who were identified only by their husbands’ names and also acknowledges the clerks, notaries, and court reporters who, in the course of ordinary legal business, recorded women’s names for posterity.

Sources & Research Notes

Coverture, Community Property, and Feme Sole

Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). General treatment of coverture doctrine and married women’s legal status under English common law, including the feme sole designation.

Kathleen Elizabeth Lazarou, Concealed Under Petticoats: Married Women’s Property and the Law of Texas, 1840–1913(New York: Garland Publishing, 1986). Development of Texas married women’s property rights within the community property framework inherited from Spanish civil law.

Joseph W. McKnight, “Texas Community Property Law: Its Course of Development and Reform,” California Western Law Review 8, no. 1 (Fall 1971): 117–158. Traces the evolution of Texas community property law, including restrictions on married women’s capacity to convey separate property without spousal joinder.

Tex. Const. art. XVI, § 15, amended 1967. Removed the requirement that a married woman obtain her husband’s joinder to convey her separate property, granting her independent authority over her separate estate.

Annie L. Brown McCrabb Gee

“Annie L Brown,” Texas, U.S., Select County Marriage Index, 1837–1965; marriage to John W Mc Crabb, 23 December 1896, DeWitt County, Texas; image, Ancestry.

“J.W. (Buck) McCrabb,” obituary, Cuero Daily Record (Cuero, Texas), 23 October 1899; digital image, The Portal to Texas History (texashistory.unt.edu).

1900 U.S. census, Jackson County, Texas, population schedule, Precinct 5, ED 60, Annie McCrabb [listed as McNabb], head of household, widowed, farmer; digital image, Ancestry; citing NARA microfilm publication T623.

1910 U.S. census, DeWitt County, Texas, population schedule, Annie McCrabb household; digital image, Ancestry; citing NARA microfilm publication T624.

“Anna L Brown,” Ancestry profile, tree “Families of Historic Georgetown, Texas”; birth 1 August 1878, Austin, Texas; death about 1963; parents Oscar S. Brown and Mary Lloyd. This profile is maintained by the author and represents the current state of the research.

The Brown Family

1870 U.S. census, Williamson County, Texas, population schedule, not stated, dwelling 135, Brown, Oscar, household; farmer, real estate $600, personal estate $250; born Virginia; post office Georgetown; digital image, Ancestry. Oscar Brown, age 43, with wife Mary (32, Missouri) and children Wirt, Bettie, Charley, Lillie, and William. Annie not yet born.

DeWitt County, Texas, Deed Records, Vol. 48, pp. 220–228; partition deed, O.S. Brown et al.; dated 26 July 1899, recorded in DeWitt County; FamilySearch digital image (familysearch.org), Image Group Number 005861541.

McCrabb Guardianship (DeWitt County Case No. 1024)

Annie L. McCrabb to W.A. Brown, deed, DeWitt County, Texas; dated 20 October 1906, recorded 22 October 1906; Vol. 58, p. 31, Deed Records of DeWitt County. Annie identified as “a feme sole.”

Application for temporary guardianship, Mrs. Annie McCrabb; County Court, DeWitt County, Texas; 16 October 1909; Probate Minutes, p. 515.

Bond and oath, Annie McCrabb, temporary guardian; approved 25 October 1909; Probate Minutes, p. 526. Sureties include W.A. Brown.

Order appointing Annie McCrabb permanent guardian; January Term, 1910; Probate Minutes, p. 553.

Bond and oath, Annie McCrabb, permanent guardian; approved 25 January 1910; Probate Minutes, p. 577.

Inventory and appraisement, Estate of McCrabb Minors; filed 1 March 1910; Probate Minutes, p. 582. Lists 1,150 acres in Jackson County (John McCrabb survey) appraised at $6,900; two horses at $54; cash on hand $945.

Application for sale of cattle; 3 December 1909; Probate Minutes, p. 531.

Annie L. McCrabb to release, vendor’s lien; dated 24 November 1911, acknowledged 8 December 1911 before C.R. Faubion, Notary Public, Williamson County; recorded 9 January 1912, DeWitt County Deed Records, p. 434. Annie identified as “a feme sole, formerly of the County of DeWitt... but now of the County of Williamson.”

Order for sale of real estate, Estate of McCrabb Minors; 15 October 1912; Probate Minutes, p. 546. Annie still identified as “Mrs. Annie McCrabb.”

Guardianship exhibit, Mrs. Annie McCrabb, Guardian; October Term 1912; Probate Minutes, p. 547. Detailed financial accounting of receipts and disbursements, 1908–1912.

Report of sale, Mrs. Annie McCrabb; 19 October 1912; acknowledged before L.A. Strickland, Notary Public, Williamson County; Probate Minutes, p. 561. C.H. Gee purchased 574 acres at $18/acre ($9,832). Sale confirmed October 26, 1912.

Order rescinding sale confirmation; 21 January 1913; Probate Minutes, p. 602. First appearance of “Mrs. Annie McCrabb Gee” in the court record.

Report of sale, Mrs. Annie McCrabb Gee, Guardian; April Term 1913; Probate Minutes, p. 10. C.H. Gee purchased 574 acres at $10/acre ($5,740 cash). Sale confirmed April 19, 1913.

Citation to file account, Estate of McCrabb Minors; October Term 1916; Probate Minutes, p. 607. Annie identified as “Mrs. Annie McCrabb Gee.”

Report and account, Mrs. Annie McCrabb Gee, Guardian; January Term 1917; Probate Minutes, p. 50. Reports dwelling and all account books destroyed by fire; balance on hand $1,155.

The Tyson McCrabb Shooting

[Assault charge, Tos Dever, shooting of Tyson McCrabb], The Houston Post (Houston, Texas), 18 November 1910, p. 5; digital image, Newspapers.com. Dever placed under $500 bond; claimed shooting of Tyson McCrabb in the left ankle was accidental.

Census Records: Gee Family

1920 U.S. census, Williamson County, Texas, population schedule, ED 149, sheet 8B, Gee, Hays, household; digital image, Ancestry; citing NARA microfilm publication T625.

1930 U.S. census, Williamson County, Texas, population schedule, Georgetown, Gee, Chas. H. household including Hays Gee and family; digital image, Ancestry; citing NARA microfilm publication T626.

1940 U.S. census, Bexar County, Texas, population schedule, San Antonio, McCrabb, Josephus household, including Gee, Hays; digital image, Ancestry; citing NARA microfilm publication T627.

1950 U.S. census, Nueces County, Texas, population schedule, Corpus Christi, ED 258-129, Gee, Hays C. household; digital image, Ancestry.

Marriage and Family

[Local notice: Mr. and Mrs. Hays Gee are here], The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 11 April 1912, p. 26; digital image, Newspaper Archive. First newspaper reference to the couple.

[Local notice: move to Jackson County], The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 26 June 1913, p. 5; digital image, Newspaper Archive.

[Georgetown correspondence: Gee farm near Cuero], The Houston Chronicle (Houston, Texas), 13 July 1913, p. 17; digital image, Newspapers.com.

[Birth notice: son born in Inez], The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 11 December 1913, p. 5; digital image, Newspaper Archive.

[Local notice: Mr. and Mrs. Hays Gee and children to Pittsburg], The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 11 February 1915, p. 5; digital image, Newspaper Archive.

The Separate Estate and Farm

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records, Vol. 171, p. 532; W.L. Price and Ernest Johnson to Annie McCrabb Gee; Block 31, Glasscock’s Addition, Georgetown; $4,000 ($2,800 cash “out of her separate funds,” assumption of $1,200 note); dated 16 August 1915, filed 18 August 1915; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas. Property designated as Annie’s separate estate.

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records, Vol. 172, p. 297; H.C. Gee and wife Annie McCrabb Gee to A. Clowlin; Block 31, Glasscock’s Addition, Georgetown; $4,000 ($2,500 cash, assumption of $1,200 note plus interest); dated 29 January 1916, filed 29 January 1916; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records, Vol. 172, p. 298; A. Clowlin and wife L.V. Clowlin to H.C. Gee and wife Annie McCrabb Gee; two tracts in Williamson County (120 acres, Batres survey); $9,000 ($4,000 cash, three promissory notes for $1,800 and two at $2,000); dated 28 January 1916, filed 29 January 1916; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas. The farm south of Georgetown destroyed by fire June 1916.

The House Fire

“Hays Gee’s Home Burned,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 22 June 1916, p. 6; digital image, Newspaper Archive.

“Big Loss in Georgetown Fire,” San Antonio Express (San Antonio, Texas), 24 June 1916; digital image, Newspapers.com(newspapers.com). Reports loss above insurance at $1,500 and jewelry/diamonds at $750.

The College Street House

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records, Vol. 205, p. 417; Mrs. M.J. Suttles to H.C. Gee, part of Lots 1 and 2, Block 35, Glasscock Addition, Georgetown; $500 cash; dated 19 June 1922; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

Williamson County, Texas, Mechanics Lien Records, Vol. 6, p. 344; H.C. Gee and wife, Annie Gee, to Griffith Lumber Company; $3,300 in two promissory notes; dated 6 July 1922; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

“Much Building Activity Is Noted at Georgetown,” The Houston Post (Houston, Texas), 17 July 1922, p. 16; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“Home Contract Let,” San Antonio Light (San Antonio, Texas), 1 September 1922, p. 2; digital image, Newspapers.com.

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records, Vol. 224, p. 344; H.C. Gee and wife, Annie Gee, to C.H. Gee; Block 35, Glasscock Addition; $4,000; dated 9 September 1925; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records, Vol. 222, p. 559; C.H. Gee to Hedges Agnew; Block 35, Glasscock Addition; $4,000; dated 1 October 1925; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

Social Life

[Surprise birthday party for Mrs. C.H. Gee, hosted by Mrs. Hays Gee], The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 16 March 1919; digital image, Newspaper Archive. Guest list includes Mrs. S.K. Brown, likely a relative of Annie Gee (née Brown).

[Birthday dinner for Mrs. Suttles and Mrs. C.H. Gee], The Houston Post (Houston, Texas), 16 March 1924, p. 35; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“Pretty Shower for Bride,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 28 November 1924, p. 8; digital image, Newspaper Archive.

“42 Luncheon,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 29 June 1928, p. 6; digital image, Newspaper Archive.

“Bridge Club,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 8 November 1929, p. 13; digital image, Newspaper Archive.

[Local notice: Mrs. Annie McCrabb of Cuero visited her sister], San Antonio Express (San Antonio, Texas), 27 August 1911; digital image, Newspapers.com.

The Separate Estate

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records, Vol. 288, p. 94; deed, H.C. Gee to Annie Lee Gee; dated 25 September 1937; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas. Recorded one week after C.H. Gee Sr.’s death.

Tyson McCrabb

Washington, U.S., U.S. Penitentiary McNeil Island, Photos and Records of Prisoners Received, 1887–1939; Records of Prisoners, 1922; prisoner no. 4295, Howard Tyson McCrabb; crime: White Slavery; received 25 November 1922; discharged 1 October 1923; digital image, Ancestry.

“Wooer Betrayed Her, Girl Asserts,” San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, California), 18 October 1922, p. 7; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“Rescued Girl Bares Vice Trap,” San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California), 18 October 1922, p. 9; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“Two Missing Girl Witnesses Found in Yreka,” Tacoma Daily Ledger (Tacoma, Washington), 21 October 1922, p. 2; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“Didn’t Like Their Manners, Kayos 2,” San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, California), 1 May 1926, p. 5; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“Tyson McCrabb Gets Crabby But Police ‘Crab’ Act,” San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California), 1 May 1926, p. 5; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“1 Dead, 2 Hurt in Gay Party Auto Crash,” San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California), 17 May 1926; digital image, Newspapers.com (newspapers.com). Tyson McCrabb charged with manslaughter in death of taxicab driver Thomas Moore. See also: “1 Killed, 4 Hurt in S.F.,” Oakland Post Enquirer (Oakland, California), 17 May 1926, p. 7; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“Divorces Asked,” Seattle Union Record (Seattle, Washington), 28 September 1926, p. 17; digital image, Newspapers.com. Gladys from Tyson McCrabb, desertion.

“Hotel Burglar Suspect Taken,” Redwood City Tribune (Redwood City, California), 26 February 1927, p. 5; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“Alleged Hotel Thief Out on Bail of $2,500,” Redwood City Tribune (Redwood City, California), 3 March 1927, p. 1; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“Burglar Suspect Alleged to Have Lengthy Record,” Redwood City Tribune (Redwood City, California), 5 March 1927, p. 1; digital image, Newspapers.com. California Bureau of Criminal Identification report; aliases Howard Tyson McCrabb, Harold Tyson, and “Highpockets Duke.” See also: “Local Burlingame Suspect Has Lengthy Record Police,” Redwood City Standard (Redwood City, California), 10 March 1927, p. 8; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“Hotel Burglars Face Trial Here,” Woodland Daily Democrat (Woodland, California), 18 December 1929, p. 1; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“Dixon Burglars Identified,” Independent-Leader, 27 December 1929, p. 5; digital image, Newspapers.com.

[Solano County conviction notice], Red Bluff Tehama County Daily News (Red Bluff, California), 9 January 1930, p. 3; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“Given Six Months in Jail,” Solano County Courier (Suisun, California), 30 January 1930, p. 1; digital image, Newspapers.com. Percy Wormer and Tyson McCrabb, petit larceny.

“Rubano un paio di pantaloni,” La Voce Del Popolo (San Francisco, California), 15 August 1930, p. 5; digital image, Newspapers.com. Joseph Dunn and Tyson McCrabb arrested for theft at 157 Powell Street.

“Burglary Case Continued to September 11,” Peninsula Times Tribune (Palo Alto, California), 4 September 1930, p. 1; digital image, Newspapers.com. Stanford Court Hotel burglary.

“Trio Arrested as Robber Suspects,” San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, California), 30 November 1930, p. 81; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“Confessed Robber Denied Probation,” Oakland Tribune (Oakland, California), 26 March 1931, p. 23; digital image, Newspapers.com. Tyson McCrabb serving sixty days in city jail for receiving stolen property.

“Jail Sentence Imposed,” The Fresno Bee (Fresno, California), 2 April 1932, p. 2; digital image, Newspapers.com. Tyson McCrabb, alias May; vagrancy; thirty days.

“Alleged Burglar Identified, Jailed,” The Record (Stockton, California), 9 June 1932, p. 17; digital image, Newspapers.com. Santa Fe Hotel burglary; attempted burglary charge leading to Folsom.

“Two San Antonians Make Assault Bond,” San Antonio Express-News (San Antonio, Texas), 19 May 1937, p. 9; digital image, Newspapers.com. Tyson McCrabb dangerously wounded in Cuero; knife wound 24 inches across abdomen.

“Man Who Robbed Hotel Here Sent to Pen for Theft,” The Shreveport Journal (Shreveport, Louisiana), 6 May 1938, p. 21; digital image, Newspapers.com (newspapers.com). See also: “10-Year Sentence,” The Town Talk (Alexandria, Louisiana), 6 May 1938, p. 1; digital image, Newspapers.com. Ten years, Louisiana penitentiary; also wanted in San Antonio, Corn City, and by Folsom authorities.

1940 U.S. census, West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, population schedule, State Penal Farm, ED 63-9, sheet 28B, McCrabb, Tyson; digital image, Ancestry; citing NARA microfilm publication T627.

California, U.S., Prison and Correctional Records, 1851–1950; San Quentin State Prison, Prison Registers, 1945–1947; prisoner no. 18034, Tyson McCrabb; received 10 July 1945; crime: attempted burglary, first prior; term: 0–20 years, San Joaquin County; digital image, Ancestry.

“$600 Jewel Theft Charged,” San Antonio Light (San Antonio, Texas), 15 August 1946, p. 24; digital image, Newspapers.com (newspapers.com). Tyson McCrabb charged with theft of auto from Mrs. Odie Martindale of Schertz.

“Marriage Licenses Issued,” The News (San Antonio, Texas), 27 February 1947, p. 13; digital image, Newspapers.com(newspapers.com). See also: San Antonio Light (San Antonio, Texas), 27 February 1947, p. 26; digital image, Newspapers.com (newspapers.com). Tyson T. McCrabb and Opal B. Mitchell.

“Tyson F. McCrabb,” obituary, The News (San Francisco, California), 9 January 1950, p. 22; digital image, Newspapers.com (newspapers.com). Survivors include mother Mrs. Annie Lee McCrabb Gee; stepfather H.C. Gee of Corpus Christi; brothers Joseph O. McCrabb of San Antonio and half-brother C.H. Gee of Shreveport.

Later Years

[House for sale notice], The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 2 December 1938, p. 8; digital image, Newspaper Archive.

“Ens. C.H. Gee,” Corpus Christi Times (Corpus Christi, Texas), 6 August 1944, p. 31; digital image, Newspapers.com(newspapers.com). Notes parents Mr. and Mrs. Hays C. Gee living at 112 Glendale Drive.

Obituaries

“Hays C. Gee Dies Here at Age 78,” The Shreveport Journal (Shreveport, Louisiana), 11 April 1962, p. 8; digital image, Newspapers.com.

“Mrs. Annie L. Gee Succumbs at 84,” The Shreveport Journal (Shreveport, Louisiana), 24 July 1963, p. 8; digital image, Newspapers.com.

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I found Hays Gee the way I find most people in Georgetown’s past: through a house. I was researching a historic plaque order for a home on College Street, working through the chain of title, when the name Hays C. Gee surfaced in the deed records. He and his wife Annie bought the lot in 1922 and built a house on it. They were a young couple putting down roots in Georgetown, and it looked like a straightforward house history.

Then I started researching Hays in the Williamson County Sun, and straightforward went out the window.

Hays Gee was arrested for murder just before his twentieth birthday. At twenty-one, he was acquitted. The same year, he enlisted in the U.S. Army under a false name and then deserted. None of this history was relevant to the house on College Street, but it was fascinating nonetheless.

The Gee Family

Hays’s father, C.H. Gee, a courthouse man, was a highly-regarded clerk and official in Caldwell before moving his family to Georgetown in 1889. The Sun once noted that “Charley Gee is a ‘born clerk.’ There isn’t a better one in Texas.” He served in various deputy roles for decades before being elected District Clerk in 1918, a position he held until his death.

C.H. married Mary Ella Rowland of Lexington in 1876. They had three children: two sons, Xenocles and Hays, and a daughter, Beatrice.

Hays Charles Gee was born on January 2, 1883, in Caldwell. He appeared on the Georgetown public school honor roll in 1891, where he was listed among the second graders.

By the fall of 1902, the family had left Georgetown. C.H. had purchased a hotel in Stroud, a small town in Oklahoma Territory. The Stroud Star announced the sale in September.

What happened next would follow the family for years.

The Hotel St. Louis

On December 1, 1902, a cattleman named S.R. Evans of Wagoner, Indian Territory, was shot and killed in the office of the Hotel St. Louis. Both C.H. and Hays were arrested and taken to the jail at Chandler, the county seat.

The Stroud Tribune printed two very different versions of what happened that night. The first described Evans arriving late, very much intoxicated, refusing to go to bed, cursing and threatening to kill the Gees, kicking at the door of the room where C.H. and his family were sleeping. At the foot of the stairway, Evans allegedly threatened to kill Hays, and the 19-year-old shot him.

The second version told a different story. It maintained Evans was not drunk at all. According to this account, the elder Gee and Evans were disputing over room arrangements when C.H. reached under the counter, drew out a hickory club about two feet long, and raised it as if to strike. Evans jerked the club away. At that moment, Hays appeared and fired the fatal shot without a word. The account noted that an hour passed before anyone outside the hotel learned what had happened, and that the night watchman eventually found Evans lying in a pool of blood that had already begun to clot, with a portion of an unchewed fig between his teeth.

In the Cage

The case moved slowly. While waiting for trial, Hays was involved in a jailbreak attempt that nearly got him killed.

On the night of August 22, 1903, the prisoners in the cage pulled up iron bars from the floor and were preparing to pry up the boards. There were twenty prisoners confined in the jail at the time, nine of them in the cage. Hays discovered the plot and gave the signal to a nearby jailer who had noticed suspicious behavior among the prisoners for a day or two. When the other prisoners realized what Hays was doing, they tried to prevent him from reaching the door and threatened to “brain him” with the iron bar. He shoved them aside and pushed a note through the grate, beyond their reach. The jailer summoned deputies, who entered the cage well armed and put down the escape, “none too soon,” the Chandler Daily Publicist reported, “for young Gee was being very roughly handled.” The paper credited both the officers and “young Gee for his bravery in heading off the break.”

The Stroud Star reported in October 1903 that Hays had been released on bond, noting that during his confinement he had “shown such exemplary behavior and has also won the good will of the officers by preventing a jail break that he was admitted to bail.” The paper called it unusual: Judge Burford had previously refused to permit persons charged with a similar offense to give bond for their appearance.

On April 16, 1904, a telegram from Charlie Cameron to Chester Olive in Georgetown brought the news: Hays Gee had been acquitted. The Fort Worth Record-Register published a brief account. Only the son had been tried. The town received the news as “gratifying.”

The Gees returned to Georgetown by 1905. C.H. resumed his courthouse career. Hays seemed to drift: visiting friends, fishing trips, small notices in the Sun’s columns. By 1907, the family relocated briefly to San Antonio, but they were back in Georgetown by the end of 1908.

Finding Roy Collins

What happened next didn’t make the Georgetown papers until it was nearly over. The Sun reported in 1909 that through the efforts of a Congressman Burleson, young Hays Gee’s “time” had been reduced.

That was enough to send me looking for more of the story. I contacted the National Archives to request the court-martial file for Hays Gee, but NARA had no record of a Hays Gee court-martial.

I kept digging. In an Adjutant General’s Office correspondence index, I found a cross-reference card filed under “Gee, C.H.”

Hays had enlisted under an alias, Roy Collins, which meant there would be a file after all.

I sent the alias back to NARA. This time, they found it: RG 153, Entry 15AA, Court-Martial Case Files 1894–1917, File 60867, Collins, Roy.

Private Roy Collins

In August of 1904, Hays Gee traveled to Dallas and enlisted in the United States Army using the alias Roy Collins. He was assigned to Company I, 19th Infantry, and sent to Vancouver Barracks, Washington, for garrison duty.

Six weeks later, in September of 1904, Private Roy Collins deserted.

He returned to Texas. He avoided detection for more than four years. Then, in Dallas, a former comrade recognized him and turned him in. Hays was apprehended in January of 1909 and taken to Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

The trial was convened on February 5, 1909. Private Roy Collins, Company I, 19th Infantry, was arraigned on a single charge: desertion, in violation of the 47th Article of War. To the specification: “Guilty.” To the charge: “Guilty.” The accused had no testimony to offer and no statement to make. The trial lasted a single afternoon. The court sentenced Private Roy Collins to be dishonorably discharged, to forfeit all pay and allowances, and to be confined at hard labor for two years and six months at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

Dear Mama

Among the most remarkable documents in the court-martial file is a handwritten letter from Hays at Fort Sill on June 10, 1909, addressed to “Dear Mama.”

He wrote that his health was very poor, that he had asthma all the time. The doctor had examined him and said his condition was “very good with the exceptions of Asthma.” Then this: “Mama of course I done wrong in desertering but I was younger then I am now and I did not relieze what it was, and I would not say a word if my health was all right.”

A week later, his mother sat down in Georgetown and wrote to U.S. Congressman A.S. Burleson in Washington, D.C. “I know you have been our best and dearest friend,” she wrote. “I have no one but you in this world.” She reported that Hays suffered from asthma and asked whether a petition signed by the Governor might do any good. “Now please try once more for his old mother.” She was 54 years old; perhaps the ongoing adventures of her second son were making her feel older.

Burleson forwarded the letters to the Judge Advocate General. “The appeal of this distressed mother is so pitiful that I feel I cannot ignore it,” he wrote.

The sentence was reduced. Hays would remain at Fort Sill rather than being sent to Fort Leavenworth. The Williamson County Sun reported on Hays’s homecoming.

Coming Home

What followed was, on the surface, the life that Hays’s parents probably wanted for him all along. He married a woman named Annie Brown McCrabb, a widow from Cuero with two young sons from her first marriage. By 1913, they had a third son together, Charles H. Gee Jr., born at Inez in Victoria County. That summer, the Houston Chronicle reported that Mr. and Mrs. Hays Gee and family had “gone to their farm near Cuero for the summer.” The farm was Annie’s, land she had held since her first marriage. When Hays married Annie, he didn’t just gain a wife; he gained a family and a foothold.

They bought land and farmed near Georgetown, lost everything in a house fire in 1916 when a gasoline range exploded, and started over. By 1919 they were hosting parties at the C.H. Gee home on University Avenue. By 1921, Hays was named a director of the newly organized Federal Loan Bank Association in Georgetown. The boy who stood trial for murder in Oklahoma and then was court-martialed for desertion by the US Army was now sitting on a bank board.

The House on College Street

In June 1922, Hays and Annie bought a lot in the Glasscock Addition for $500 cash. The Houston Post reported in July that “Hays Gee this week began the erection of a new residence at the corner of Seventh and College avenues.” By September, the San Antonio Light noted it was nearing completion. A mechanics lien with Griffith Lumber Company for $3,300 secured the construction. That house at 602 South College is how I found their story.

They didn’t hold on to it long. By September 1925, having paid only interest on the construction note, they sold the property to Hays’s father for $4,000. C.H. assumed the debt. Three weeks later, he turned around and sold it to Hedges Agnew for $4,000. The father had stepped in, bought his son’s debt, and passed the property to a buyer who could actually carry it. It was the kind of quiet family rescue that doesn’t make the newspaper.

After the house was sold, Hays turned his restless energy toward something new. Through the late 1920s and into the 1930s, Hays reinvented himself as an independent oil operator, spending years chasing leases across Central Texas. A test well near Fiskville drew local headlines, and he continued drilling throughout the region, but none of them seem to have made him rich.

By the mid-1930s, the Gees were dividing their time between Georgetown and Seguin, and Hays appeared on the Georgetown delinquent tax roll in 1934. Their financial footing seems to have never been solid.

A Father’s Unforeseen Legacy

C.H. Gee Sr. died in September of 1937, at the age of 83. The Houston Chronicle ran his obituary with the headline “Veteran Official of Williamson County Expires.” He had served as a public official or deputy for forty-five years.

C.H. had lived at 415 West 12th St (University Ave), on the corner of what is now University and Martin Luther King Jr St, since 1912. The Sun noted the family’s move into the new home in May of that year. It was the house where Ella Gee had died in 1924, the house where Annie had thrown surprise birthday parties, the house that anchored the Gee family through over two decades of Georgetown life.

By the early 1930s, C.H. had a new neighbor. A TxDOT right-of-way map dated August 1932 shows the Catholic Church already established on its own lot on the northwest corner of 12th and Timber, with C.H.'s property on the northeast corner directly across the street. Local accounts dates the original St. Helen's to 1931, and the 1932 map confirms the church was there by that date, on its own parcel, while C.H. was still alive and living next door.

After C.H.’s death, his sons conveyed the homestead to the Rt. Rev. C.E. Byrne, Bishop of the Catholic diocese in Galveston. The 1937 deed expanded the diocese's footprint at that intersection, adding the Gee homestead on the northeast corner to the church property already across the street. City directories confirm St. Helen's was located at 415 W. 12th, the same address that C.H. and Ella Gee had lived at for all those years.

What happened to the Gee home? Did the church keep it and use it for a rectory or other auxiliary building, or did they tear it down to make way for the sanctuary? If you know, please tell us in the comments!

The combined property gave a marginalized community a permanent and expanded place in the city’s geography. For three decades, this site functioned as a sanctuary, a school, and a cultural fortress for Georgetown’s Hispanic residents.

Both buildings, the home and the church, are gone now. The property on the northeast corner of University and MLK is an empty parking lot, and St. Helen’s Catholic Church now has a large presence just east of town.

This section has been updated with information imparted to me by Helen Cordes of Hidden HerStories and MoreStories. The original version mistakenly assumed that the Gee property became the founding site of St. Helen’s. The TxDOT map confirms the church was already established on its own adjacent lot before C.H. Gee’s death. Thanks for the information, Helen!

Austin Avenue

In his last days, C.H. had done one more thing for Hays by securing a property at Lot 5, Block 2 of the Logan Addition, now commonly known as 1611 South Austin Ave. It was likely intended as a landing spot for Hays and Annie upon their return from Seguin, because by 1938 the property was described in the Sun as the Hays Gee residence. Even near death, C.H. was still arranging things for his son.

That house, by the way, sits on the same block as my current residence on South Austin Ave, two houses down and across the street, and is currently undergoing renovations. If the Gees had stayed a few years longer, they would have welcomed their new neighbor across the street, Mrs. Mittie Pennington Ischy, formerly of the old Dimmitt homestead.

In December 1938, the Gee residence on South Austin Ave was listed for sale. The Georgetown chapter was closing.

Still in the Game

Hays kept working. When he resurfaced in the San Antonio oil columns in 1938, it was under the banner “Tarver and Gee,” a partnership with Jack Tarver that was drilling in Medina County. Their No. 1 Roos showed oil sand at 520 feet. In August, the Houston Chronicle reported they were running casing and “operators expect to make a well.”

By 1940, Hays and Annie were living in San Antonio in the household of Annie’s oldest son, Josephus McCrabb. In September, the San Antonio Light reported a new gas field in Bexar County, fifteen miles southwest of the city. A wildcat had tested at an estimated million cubic feet of gas per day. The operators under contract were Kirk, Fred Beatty, and Hays Gee of San Antonio. It was a long way from Georgetown and its small town society, but Hays was still in the game.

They followed their youngest son next. C.H. Gee Jr. graduated from Southwestern University with a chemistry degree and then went to work for LaGloria Corporation in Corpus Christi. By 1944, he was an ensign in the Naval Reserve, and his parents were listed at his Corpus Christi address. They eventually moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, likely following young C.H.

A Georgetown Son

Hays Gee died on April 11, 1962, at the age of seventy-eight. His obituary in the Shreveport Journal described him as a retired independent oil operator and a native of Williamson County, Texas. It listed him as a member of the First Baptist Church of Georgetown. He had been gone more than twenty years, but he was still a Georgetown son.

Annie died about a year later, on July 24, 1963. They’re buried together at Forest Park Cemetery in Shreveport, far from Georgetown and the pages of the Williamson County Sun.

Hays Gee had a rocky start by any measure. Marriage seemed to give him direction. Annie brought land, family, and a measure of steadiness that Hays hadn’t seemed to find on his own. Whether the ambition was his or hers or something they built together, his trajectory changed when Annie entered the picture.

He never quite landed the big strike, but Hays kept moving: Georgetown to Seguin to San Antonio to Corpus Christi to Shreveport, always chasing the next lease, the next well, the next deal. His obituary called him a retired independent oil operator, and that was true as far as it went; his story is that of a man who seems to have never stopped reaching for something just out of his grasp.

Next time on Old Town Echoes: The story of Annie Brown McCrabb Gee, who buried her first husband before she turned twenty-two, farmed alone, raised two sons, and then bet on a Georgetown man who had already seen more trouble than most people see in a lifetime.

Sources

The Stroud Hotel Shooting and Trial

“Hotel purchase,” The Stroud Star (Stroud, Oklahoma Territory), 19 September 1902.

“Both Sides: Two Stories of the Stroud Hotel Tragedy Gleaned From Different Sources,” Stroud Tribune (Stroud, Oklahoma Territory), 10 December 1902.

“Shooting report,” Lincoln County News (Chandler, Oklahoma Territory), 11 December 1902.

“Hays Gee released on bail,” The Stroud Star (Stroud, Oklahoma Territory), 2 January 1903.

“Bail refused; Hays Gee in county jail,” Stroud Messenger (Stroud, Oklahoma Territory), 1 May 1903.

“Attempted jailbreak,” Stroud Messenger (Stroud, Oklahoma Territory), 28 August 1903, p. 1; reprinting Chandler Daily Publicist (Chandler, Oklahoma Territory), 22 August 1903.

“Bond granted after jailbreak,” The Stroud Star (Stroud, Oklahoma Territory), 9 October 1903.

“Trial set,” Chandler Daily Publicist (Chandler, Oklahoma Territory), 17 September 1903, p. 3.

“Hays Gee acquitted,” Fort Worth Record-Register (Fort Worth, Texas), 17 April 1904, p. 3.

“Telegram reporting acquittal,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 21 April 1904, p. 13.

The Court-Martial

RG 153, Entry 15AA, Court-Martial Case Files, 1894–1917, File 60867, Collins, Roy; National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

Adjutant General’s Office correspondence index, cross-reference card, “Gee, C.H.” re: Hays Gee, alias Roy Collins, in “United States records,” images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSB7-V988-T, image 21 of 2770).

“Hays Gee returns home,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 9 December 1909, p. 15.

The Gee Family

1891 Georgetown Public School honor roll, The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 2 April 1891, p. 6.

1908 San Antonio City Directory, listing for Gee, C.H. and Gee, Hays, 710 S. Presa.

[Local notice: C.H. Gee moved into new home], The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 16 May 1912, p. 15; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com).

“Gee home burned,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 22 June 1916, p. 6.

“Big Loss in Georgetown Fire,” San Antonio Express (San Antonio, Texas), 24 June 1916, p. 10.

“Veteran Official of Williamson County Expires,” The Houston Chronicle (Houston, Texas), 20 September 1937, p. 13.

“C.H. Gee obituary,” The Austin American (Austin, Texas), 23 September 1937, p. 10.

“Hays C. Gee Dies Here at Age 78,” The Shreveport Journal (Shreveport, Louisiana), 11 April 1962, p. 8.

“Mrs. Annie L. Gee Succumbs at 84,” The Shreveport Journal (Shreveport, Louisiana), 24 July 1963, p. 8.

The House on College Street

Deed, Mrs. M.J. Suttles to H.C. Gee, 19 June 1922; Part of Lots 1 and 2, Block 35, Glasscock Addition, Georgetown; Williamson County Deed Records, Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

Mechanics lien, H.C. and Annie Gee to Griffith Lumber Company, 6 July 1922; Williamson County Deed Records, Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

“Much Building Activity Is Noted at Georgetown,” The Houston Post (Houston, Texas), 17 July 1922, p. 16.

“Home Contract Let,” San Antonio Light (San Antonio, Texas), 1 September 1922, p. 2.

Deed, H.C. and Annie Gee to C.H. Gee, 10 September 1925; Williamson County Deed Records, Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

Deed, C.H. Gee to Hedges Agnew, 1 October 1925; Williamson County Deed Records, Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

Social Life

“Birthday dinner,” The Houston Post (Houston, Texas), 16 March 1924, p. 35.

“Pretty Shower for Bride,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 28 November 1924, p. 8.

“42 Luncheon,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 29 June 1928, p. 6.

“Bridge Club,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 8 November 1929, p. 13.

Federal Loan Bank

“Loan Bank at Georgetown,” San Antonio Express-News (San Antonio, Texas), 13 December 1921, p. 10.

Oil Ventures

“Oil in Water Well Starts New Test,” Austin American-Statesman (Austin, Texas), 28 June 1928, p. 1.

Oil and gas subdivision plat, Hays Gee, 16 July 1931; Williamson County Deed Records, Cabinet A, Slide 136, Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

“Georgetown Wildcat Has Good Showing,” Taylor Sunday Press (Taylor, Texas), 30 August 1931, p. 6.

“Tarver and Gee No. 1 Roos,” San Antonio Express-News (San Antonio, Texas), 25 May 1938, p. 13.

“Tarver and Gee, Medina County,” San Antonio Express-News (San Antonio, Texas), 3 June 1938, p. 15.

“Medina Test Resumes,” The Houston Chronicle (Houston, Texas), 28 August 1938, p. 25.

“Noake gas well,” San Antonio Light (San Antonio, Texas), 3 September 1940, p. 21.

Legal

“Gee v. Steck, 125th District Court,” The Austin American (Austin, Texas), 18 December 1938, p. 20.

The Next Generation

“Farm near Cuero,” The Houston Chronicle (Houston, Texas), 13 July 1913, p. 17.

“Ensign C.H. Gee Jr.,” Corpus Christi Times (Corpus Christi, Texas), 6 August 1944, p. 31.

The 1937 Estate and Property

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records, Vol. 289, p. 127; affidavit/proof of heirship, Hays C. Gee and Xenocles Gee; establishing C.H. Gee died intestate 18 September 1937, with heirs Hays C. Gee, Xenocles Gee, and Charles Cooper Cameron (grandson); dated 12 November 1937; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records, Vol. 289, p. 590; affidavit, Xenocles Gee and Hays C. Gee; establishing heirship of both Mary Ella Gee (died intestate 1925) and C.H. Gee (died intestate 18 September 1937); conveyance of University Avenue homestead to Rt. Rev. C.E. Byrne, Bishop of Galveston; dated 6 December 1937, filed 7 December 1937; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records, Vol. 288, p. 94; deed, H.C. Gee to Annie Lee Gee; Lot 5, Block 2, Logan Addition, Georgetown; dated 25 September 1937; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas. Recorded one week after C.H. Gee Sr.’s death; property commonly known as 1611 South Austin Avenue.

St. Helen Catholic Church

Helen Cordes, “Mighty Hispanic Leaders,” Hidden HerStories and MoreStories (blog), 23 September [n.d.]; (https://www.hiddenherstories.com/blog/mighty-hispanic-leaders : accessed 10 March 2026). Describes the founding of St. Helen Mexican Mission and St. Helen Catholic Church, including the ruse used to purchase the land, and dates the original church to 1931. Deed records indicate the Gee heirs conveyed the University Avenue property to the Diocese of Galveston in December 1937.

Later Years and Property

“Delinquent tax roll,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 26 January 1934, p. 6.

“House for sale notice,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 2 December 1938, p. 8.

1940 U.S. census, Bexar County, Texas, population schedule, San Antonio, enumeration district (ED) 259-213, sheet 14A, household 314, Hays Gee; digital image, Ancestry.com (ancestry.com : accessed 10 March 2026); citing National Archives microfilm publication T627, roll 3995.

Texas Historical Commission, Historic Resources Survey Form, 602 S. College St., Georgetown, Williamson County, Texas; 2016 Survey ID 125106; recorded by CMEC, 2 May 2016; digital image (https://gisstaticwebfiles.blob.core.windows.net/gis/WebMaps/HistoricPlaces/Surveys/125106.pdf : accessed 10 March 2026). Construction date listed as 1920 (WCAD); deed records indicate lot purchase June 1922 and construction lien July 1922.

Old Town Echoes is independently researched using primary historical sources. AI tools assist in drafting and editing; all content is reviewed, sourced, and verified by the author.

In my last post, I introduced you to Mittie Pennington Ischy, the woman who lost her husband on the bridge and who might just be haunting my home on Austin Ave.

Today I want to share more of the story of Mittie’s life before she arrived at this house.

In genealogy, a death always presents the possibility of a probate file, and probate files can be absolute goldmines of genealogical detail. I decided to dig up Joe Ischy’s probate files to learn more about Mittie. A deep dive into those files unearthed a surprising detail: PJ Ischy was the owner of several properties when he died, and one of them was the old Dimmitt homestead.

The Dimmitt Homestead

The Dimmitt homestead is one of Georgetown’s oldest surviving structures, built in 1866 by JJ Dimmitt on roughly 25 acres just west of town on the west bank of the South San Gabriel River. If you’ve spent time in the Historic Georgetown Texas Facebook group, you’ve probably seen it discussed. It’s a recognized landmark, and its history with the Dimmitt family has been the subject of recent community interest and research.

The Williamson County history page for the Dimmitt homestead states that after JJ Dimmitt died in 1884, his wife Margaret retained title until 1917, when she sold it to “Miff J. Ischy.” It then skips ahead to 1947, when Dr. R.W. and Jean Gamble acquired the house and surrounding land.

But here’s the thing… The buyer’s name wasn't Miff, the sale didn’t happen in 1917, and the jump from “Miff J. Ischy” to the Gambles erases over 30 years of the Ischy family’s connection to the property.

The woman who held the Dimmitt homestead for nearly thirty years after her husband died is reduced in the historical record to a misspelled name and a wrong date.

Thankfully, the probate and deed records give us her story.

Paul Joseph Ischy purchased the old Dimmitt homestead from Mrs. ML Dimmitt on May 3, 1909.

Joe didn’t pay cash. He executed a series of ten promissory notes to Margaret Dimmitt. Margaret retained a vendor’s lien on the property until every note was paid in full.

A vendor’s lien was the early twentieth-century equivalent of seller financing; the seller, not a bank, held the debt. The total purchase price was $2,500, payable in annual installments through 1919. It was a manageable plan… on paper.

It doesn’t seem to have gone according to plan.

Joe moved his family to the Dimmitt homestead after purchasing the property. The 1910 US census suggests they were already on the homestead. In 1913, Joe's first wife died. Her death notice confirms they were living on the old Dimmitt homestead based on the description of their home.

Two years after Ida’s death, three-year-old Irene Ischy died of diphtheria. By the time Joe married Mittie in June of 1916, he was a widower with three surviving children, a sizable debt on the family home, and significant financial strain.

According to deed records, he had only managed to pay off two of the ten notes, totaling $300, by 1917. The remaining eight, representing $2200 in principal plus years of accrued interest at eight percent, were still outstanding.

Something had to change.

The Ides of March?

What happened next took place in March of 1917, and the coordination of it tells its own story; it doesn’t seem to have been a series of coincidences. It must have been a plan.

On March 7, 1917, Joe and Mittie together transferred a vendor’s lien note from the Pennington family involving 78.5 acres in the John Berry league to B.W. Bullock. The vendor’s lien note represented Mittie’s share of her father’s homestead. Essentially, Mittie sold the debt to Bullock in order to turn a paper asset into a liquid asset.

On March 26, 1917, Joe signed an extension agreement with Margaret Dimmitt. In this document, he acknowledged that Notes 1 and 2 had been fully paid and discharged but that the remaining eight notes were still outstanding. Margaret agreed to extend the payment deadline to on or before January 1, 1925.

On March 27, 1917, one day later, Margaret Dimmitt transferred those same eight outstanding vendor’s lien notes to Mittie E. Ischy for the sum of $2200 cash in hand. The deed states, in language that matters enormously under Texas law, that Mittie paid this sum “out of her separate property and estate.”

On March 28, 1917, all three documents were filed for record in the Williamson County courthouse at virtually the same time: the original 1909 deed of conveyance (which had never been recorded in the eight years Joe had been living on the property), the extension agreement, and the transfer of notes to Mittie. The original deed and extension were filed at 11am. The note transfer was filed at 5pm the same day.

Here’s what the March activity accomplished… Joe’s creditor, Margaret Dimmitt, was paid off and removed from the picture. Joe received a generous extension on his debt, now owed to his own wife. Mittie, by purchasing the notes with her separate funds, ensured that the debt belonged to her personally, not to the marital community. Under Texas community property law, this distinction was critical. As Joe’s second wife with no biological children in the marriage, Mittie occupied a legally precarious position. If Joe died without a will, Texas intestacy law (that law that dictates who inherits an estate when there’s no will) would not just hand her everything. His children from his first marriage had inheritance rights, too. By holding the notes as her separate property, Mittie had secured a claim against the estate that a probate court could not set aside.

Whether this was foresight, financial prudence, or something else, the records don’t say. However, six months after this carefully orchestrated restructuring, Joe Ischy was dead.

What did Joe know?

Joe knew Mittie had cashed out her claim on her father’s lands, so he knew she had the money. Did he ask her to pay off his debt to Margaret Dimmitt and save their home? Was that his plan? If so, the last document filed that day tells a different story.

Mittie didn’t pay off Joe’s debt. She purchased it. The question of whether Joe understood that distinction, whether he knew that his wife now held a secured claim against his property rather than having simply cleared his obligation, is one the records don’t answer.

What happened that evening on the bridge?

The Williamson County Sun and the Taylor Daily Press both reported Joe’s death, and their accounts differ in interesting ways.

The Sun’s account, dated September 27, 1917, reported the accident this way:

The Taylor Daily Press account, published the following day, described it differently:

The Sun says they were watching from the porch. The Taylor paper’s account says they only heard the crash. There are also two different versions of what Mittie saw when she reached Joe. The Sun says he had fallen clear of the auto and that Mittie raised his head and tried to revive him. The Taylor account says he was crushed underneath the car.

The Sun account is the only one that says the car suddenly turned to the left before driving off the bridge.

Why were the two accounts so different?

Neither account offers a cause for the swerve. Neither mentions mechanical failure, another vehicle, an obstruction in the road, or any other explanation. The car just turned to the left, and Joe went off the bridge. Joe’s death certificate lists his cause of death as an accident — “automobile fell off bridge.”

There’s another detail worth noting from the probate. In addition to several other life insurance policies, Joe carried an additional $2000 accidental death policy with the Southwestern Surety Insurance Company. When did Joe purchase this policy? The records don’t say. The company initially refused to pay without a court-appointed administrator. The policy eventually paid, but the refusal raises its own question: was it purely procedural, or did the company have reason to look more closely at the circumstances?

Where Was the Bridge?

A 1916 Sanborn fire insurance map of Georgetown shows a bridge crossing the South San Gabriel further north than the current University Avenue bridge, roughly at the 10th Street level. This location is considerably closer to the Dimmitt homestead than the current bridge (which is about 250 yards from the old Dimmitt place), and it aligns with the 150-yard estimate in the Taylor paper.

Satellite imagery of the area between the current bridge and the Dimmitt homestead reveals remnants of a bridge across the riverbed: stone or concrete structures consistent with old bridge abutments or pilings, with traces on both the east and west banks that suggest an old road alignment running roughly east-west across the river. These features fall in a line that corresponds to the Sanborn map’s bridge location. Additionally, the street that extends north from 10th is now Bridge St. Just like Railroad Ave now exists where the old rail line was in the above image, the name of Bridge St. is also telling us a story, if we’re paying attention.

Joe was coming from the meat market in town. He was traveling westbound, crossing the bridge toward home. The Sun says his auto “turned to the left.” For a westbound driver, a left turn means south, across any oncoming traffic lane and off the opposite side of the bridge from his natural line of travel. If fatigue, distraction, or a mechanical failure caused the car to drift, the more natural direction would be to the right, off the near edge and toward his own side of the road. A leftward turn across the road is a different thing entirely.

I won’t presume to assign intent to a man who has been dead for more than a century based on the direction his car turned in its final seconds. However… The geometry of the accident is interesting. He went off the bridge away from the direction of his home, where his family was waiting and maybe even watching. Alongside the financial pressure, the accumulated losses, the accident insurance, and the coordinated legal transactions, it’s a thought-provoking set of events.

How was Joe’s estate untangled?

Joe died intestate. He left no will. Administration of his estate was opened as Cause No. 2078 in the Williamson County Court. The estate was described as being largely in debt.

Because Mittie held the vendor’s lien notes that she purchased from Margaret Dimmitt as her separate property, the estate owed her the money, not Mrs. Dimmitt. On January 2, 1920, Joe’s estate sold the 25 acre Dimmitt homestead to Mittie for $2500. She didn’t pay cash; the purchase price was offset against what the estate already owed her on the notes. She traded the debt for clear title to the homestead.

The probate accounting tells its own story. The estate’s total receipts, or assets, came to $18,398.01. Its disbursements, including debts, costs, and expenses, totaled $17,166.11, leaving a balance of only $1,231.90. Interestingly, without the $2000 accident insurance payout, the estate would have been insolvent.

Did Mittie stay at the old Dimmitt homestead?

Records indicate that Mittie raised Joe’s children on the homestead where their father had died.

By 1930, the Ischy children were grown, married, and living elsewhere. The census finds Mittie still at the Dimmitt homestead, renting to the Thomas F. Guthrie household. Why is she listed as a lodger? Under 1930 census rules, when a homeowner rented out the majority of the house, the renter was listed as head and the owner as a lodger. Mittie still owned the place. She was just sharing it.

A 1936 Texas Power and Light easement confirms that a residence occupied by Mrs. Mittie Ischy stood on the Stubblefield Survey land.

By 1940, Mittie is again listed as owner and head of household. Residents listed as renting from her are her widowed sister, Flora Rader, Flora’s daughters Eunice and Ruth, and Ruth’s husband.

Mittie was still there. Still on the same porch, still within sight of the river, still 150 yards from the place where Joe’s car went through the railing.

In 1944, at the age of 66, Mittie finally sold the Dimmitt acreage and moved into town. She bought the Victorian cottage on South Austin Ave, the first owner since the Hodges family to actually live in it.

What the Record Misses

The Williamson County history page reduces Mittie to a misspelled name and a wrong date. “Miff J. Ischy” purchased the property in “1917.”

In fact, Paul Joseph Ischy purchased the property in 1909. His widow, Mittie Elizabeth Pennington Ischy, acquired clear title through probate in 1920 and held the land until 1944. That is not a minor correction; it’s the difference between a footnote and a life.

Here’s what I’ve learned over and over as a genealogist: women are often lost in historical records. We belonged to our fathers and then to our husbands. We lost our family names, which helped to sever the paper trail leading back to our roots. We often couldn’t own property unless we were widowed, and even that wasn’t always straightforward. Against those odds, Mittie held on to her birthright from her father and used it to secure her future, and, despite lingering questions that can likely never be answered, the bones of her story are there in the records for anyone willing to look. Still, she was almost forgotten.

I felt like that needed correcting; Mittie’s husband died just beyond her front porch, and she navigated his debts, raised his children, and held their land through the Depression and the Second World War before finally selling and walking away.

I have the probate and the deeds and the maps, but I still have more questions than answers swirling around in my head regarding the events of Mittie’s surprise marriage to Joe Ischy, the March financial transactions, and the accident on the bridge. But I also have a better picture of a woman named Mittie who carried all of it into a house on Austin Avenue, the house where I live now, where she stayed until she died.

If you read the last post, you know about this house: the bangs, the doors that rattle when no one is there, the objects that don’t always stay put. I’m still not saying I’m sure the ghost of 1604 Austin Avenue is Mittie Ischy…

But I do feel like I know her a little now. And maybe that’s enough.

Update [19 March 2026]: Since publication, I discovered the existence of a Texas Department of Transportation right of way map for the Highway 29 corridor through Georgetown. The map documents the condemnation of 2.36 acres from the Dimmitt homestead property for the state highway right of way. The parcel is labeled "Mrs. Mittie Ischy" and references a condemnation proceeding recorded in Vol. 6, Page 242. The right of way runs along the South San Gabriel River, cutting through the same land where Mittie lived for nearly three decades. The road built on that condemned strip is the one you drive today when you cross the river on University Avenue. The map shows the old bridge.

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Sources & Research Notes

The Dimmitt Homestead

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records, Vol. 179, p. 619; M.L. Dimmitt to Paul Joseph Ischy, 3 May 1909, recorded 28 March 1917; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records, Vol. 67, p. 868; extension of vendor’s lien, P.J. Ischy and M.L. Dimmitt, 26 March 1917, recorded 28 March 1917; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records, Vol. 180, p. 272; M.L. Dimmitt to Mittie E. Ischy, transfer of vendor’s lien notes, 27 March 1917, recorded 28 March 1917; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records, Book 179, p. 555; P.J. Ischy and Mittie E. Ischy to B.W. Bullock, transfer of vendor’s lien note (Pennington tract, John Berry League), 7 March 1917; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

David Moore, “John J. Dimmitt House,” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Site No. 96000076, prepared for Hardy-Heck-Moore, Austin, Texas, July 1984, revised December 1995; digital image, Texas Historical Commission Atlas (https://atlas.thc.texas.gov/NR/pdfs/96000076/96000076.pdf : accessed 26 February 2026).

“John J. Dimmitt House, Williamson County, Texas,” Williamson County Texas History (https://williamsoncountytexashistory.org/john-j-dimmitt-house-williamson-county-texas/ : accessed 26 February 2026). This page states that Margaret Dimmitt sold the property to “Miff J. Ischy” in 1917. The name, the date, and the absence of any reference to Mittie Ischy or the probate transfer are the errors corrected in this article.

Source of Mittie’s Funds

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records, Vol. 152, p. 197; Isabelle Pennington and Flora B. Rader to J.P. Pennington Jr., 11 December 1913; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

Census Records

1910 U.S. census, Williamson County, Texas, population schedule, Justice Precinct 1, ED 115, sheet 16A, line 40, Joe Ischy household; digital image, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 5 March 2026); citing NARA microfilm publication T624.

1920 U.S. census, Williamson County, Texas, population schedule, Justice Precinct 1, Georgetown, ED 150, sheet 30A, line 20, dwelling 277, family 279, Mrs. Mittie Ischy household; digital image, Ancestry.com (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 5 March 2026); citing NARA microfilm publication T625.

1930 U.S. census, Williamson County, Texas, population schedule, Precinct 1, Georgetown and Liberty Hill Road, ED 246-5, supervisor’s district 24, sheet 12A, line 2, Mittie Ischy (lodger in Thomas F. Guthrie household); digital image, Ancestry.com (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 5 March 2026); citing NARA microfilm publication T626.

1940 U.S. census, Williamson County, Texas, population schedule, ED 246-4, sheet 3B, line 46, house 41, Mittie Ischey household, North of South San Gabriel; digital image, Ancestry.com (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 5 March 2026); citing NARA microfilm publication T627.

The Ischy Family

“Death of Mrs. Joe Ischy,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 3 July 1913, p. 7; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 23 February 2026).

“Little Irene Ischy Dead,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 24 June 1915, p. 1; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 26 February 2026).

Travis County, Texas, Marriage License No. 871, Paul Joseph Ischy and Mittie Elizabeth Pennington, 1 June 1916; marriage performed 4 June 1916 by W.A. Hamlett, Austin, Texas; returned and filed for record 17 June 1916; digital image, “Texas, U.S., Select County Marriage Records, 1837-1965,” Ancestry (ancestry.com : accessed 26 February 2026).

“Ischy-Pennington,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 15 June 1916; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 26 February 2026).

Joe Ischy’s Death

“Auto Plunges from Bridge; Joe Ischy Killed Instantly,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 27 September 1917, p. 9; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 20 February 2026).

“Joe Ischy Killed in Auto Accident,” Taylor Daily Press (Taylor, Texas), 28 September 1917, p. 1; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 20 February 2026).

Texas Department of State Health Services, death certificate no. 26539 (1917), Joe Ischy; digital image, Ancestry.com (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 24 February 2026).

Accident Insurance

Williamson County, Texas, County Court, Cause No. 2078, Estate of P.J. Ischy, Deceased; application for temporary administration, filed 8 October 1917; images, “Williamson, Texas, United States records,” FamilySearch (familysearch.org : accessed 22 February 2026); Image Group Number 005788505; Texas County Court (Williamson County).

Probate of P.J. Ischy’s Estate

Williamson County, Texas, County Court, Cause No. 2078, Estate of P.J. Ischy, Deceased; administration records, 1917-1920; images, “Williamson, Texas, United States records,” FamilySearch (familysearch.org : accessed 22 February 2026); Image Group Numbers 005788504 and 005788505; Texas County Court (Williamson County).

Bridge Location

Sanborn Map Company, Georgetown, Williamson County, Texas (New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1916); digital image, accessed via the Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

Satellite imagery (Google Earth, accessed February 2026) shows features in the riverbed at this location that are consistent with remnants of old bridge abutments.

Mittie’s Later Years

Texas Power and Light Company easement, recorded 1936, Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records.

Williamson County, Texas, Deed Records; Mittie Ischy to Clark, sale of Dimmitt homestead acreage, 1944; Williamson County Clerk’s Office, Georgetown, Texas.

“Mrs. Mittie Ischy Dies Saturday; Rites Sunday,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 3 November 1966; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 20 February 2026).

Old Town Echoes is independently researched using primary historical sources. AI tools assist in drafting and editing; all content is reviewed, sourced, and verified by the author.

On the evening of September 27, 1917, Mittie Ischy was standing on the front porch of her home, just west of the South San Gabriel River. One of her stepdaughters was with her. They were waiting for her husband Joe to come home for supper; he had been at work at his meat market in town.

They saw his car on the bridge. They recognized it. He was coming at a good pace.

Then, suddenly, the auto turned to the left.

They watched the car crash through the wooden railing and plunge to the bottom of the stream, about twenty feet below. They rushed to him. Joe had fallen clear of the car and was lying perfectly still on his face. When Mittie reached him, she raised his head and found that he wasn’t breathing. She tried to revive him, blowing in his face, desperately trying to restart respiration. It was no use.

Doctors later found that Joe’s neck had been broken, along with both arms and his collar bone. He was killed instantly by the fall. He was 45 years old.

We’ll come back to the scene at the bridge and its significance. But first, the house…

If you’ve driven down Austin Avenue in Georgetown’s Old Town, you’ve probably passed by 1604 without a second glance. From the outside, it looks like a typical Victorian cottage—pretty porch, unique shingles, the quiet charm of a modest 130-year-old home minding its own business.

This house has a story, though, and at the heart of it is the woman who was standing on that porch by the river. Her name was Mittie Pennington Ischy. She might still be here.

The Old Hodges Home

The house at 1604 was built in 1894 by Samuel Allen Hodges and his wife, Anna Pearl Montgomery. Sam was the nephew of prominent Georgetown builder Charles Sanford Belford, and the home is thought to be the oldest house attributed to Belford in the Belford Historic District, though no construction records have ever been found to confirm the connection definitively. The modest L-plan Victorian cottage was home to the Hodges family for almost 20 years. Sam and Anna raised two children there: Leland, who grew up to become an architect, and Elizabeth, who was born in the front bedroom and grew up to be a well-known teacher at Georgetown High School. By 1923, the family had moved next door to a new home at 1602 Brushy Street that Leland had designed for his parents. (The city changed the name of Brushy Street to Austin Avenue in 1934.)

After the Hodges left, 1604 spent the next two decades or so occupied by renters. The house was waiting for its next real owner. She arrived in 1944.

A Pioneer’s Daughter

Mittie Elizabeth Pennington was born on May 8, 1878, right here in Georgetown, to a family whose roots ran deep. Her father, John Parker “Jack” Pennington, was the kind of man they put historical markers up for (and they did, you can find the Pennington Family Cemetery marker east of Georgetown at the intersection of Founders Oak Way and Pennington Lane). Born during the Republic of Texas period, Jack had lived as a young man in Arizona Territory, where he was among the first families to settle and where he survived several deadly encounters with the region’s Native Americans. He fought in the Civil War then moved to Texas in 1867.

Jack’s first wife and Mittie’s mother, Emily Jane McAllister, died in 1880. Mittie was just two years old. Jack remarried, had two more children, and the family continued their lives on their Georgetown farm.

By the mid-1890s, Jack Pennington had spent a decade going blind from cataracts. The man who had survived the Arizona frontier and the Civil War was losing the world, one shade at a time. Jack did undergo an eye operation in Austin, but it proved unsuccessful.

Jack appeared to make peace with it. He taught himself to navigate the Georgetown farm by memory and feel, tracing fence lines with his hands, following familiar structures, even wandering over to the neighbors, who thought him jolly and congenial as always.

But on the night of November 30, 1904, after spending a pleasant day with his family, Jack quietly took his bed sheet and groped his way to the corncrib in the barn. He climbed onto the thick rim of a wooden trough, knotted one end of the sheet around a rafter and the other around his neck. Then he jumped. His wife found him hanging there in the morning.

Mittie was 26 years old. The daughter who had lost her mother before she could remember her was now without her father, too.

For the next several years, Mittie’s life becomes quieter in the historical record, which, to a genealogist, suggests a single woman getting on with the business of supporting herself. By 1910, a directory finds her in Corsicana, Texas, working as a telephone operator. In an era when “spinster” was less a description than a verdict, Mittie seemed to be making her own way.

A Surprise Wedding and an Instant Family

Joe Ischy was a well-known Georgetown businessman who owned and operated the City Meat Market. He was Swiss-born, respected, and by all accounts a good man. He was also a man who had been dealt a brutal hand.

Joe’s first wife, Ida, died in 1913, leaving him a widower with four young children. Then in 1915, his youngest daughter, three-year-old Irene, died of diphtheria. The Williamson County Sun noted “the whole community sympathizes with him.” Joe Ischy was a man who knew loss. So, perhaps it makes sense that he and Mittie found each other.

In June of 1916, Joe surprised his friends by taking “unto himself a better-half,” as the Sun cheerfully reported. Attended by his brother Ernest and Ernest’s wife, Joe and Mittie went to Austin “overland” and were married. “Hosts of friends of both parties, including The Sun, extend hearty congratulations.”

Just like that, Mittie went from being a single woman, likely considered well past marrying age by 1916 standards, to a wife and mother of three: Alma Louise, 17; Myrtle, 13; and Phillip, 10. After years of quiet independence, she suddenly had a full house, a husband, and a whole new life.

It lasted fifteen months.

That brings us back to the bridge. We stood on the porch with Mittie in the opening of this story and watched it happen.

But what was happening in the months before that evening on the bridge? What might probate files and deed records reveal about the Ischys’ home and financial situation? Where was that bridge? These are just some of the questions I’ll dive into next week. In the meantime…

The House at 1604

In 1944, at the age of 66, Mittie left the homestead west of town where she had lived since her marriage to Joe. She purchased the home at 1604 South Austin Avenue and became the first owner since the Hodges family to actually live in it.

She made it her own, converting the Victorian cottage into a duplex. She lived in the south portion of the home and rented out the north side. The home had two kitchens, only one bathroom, and some creative plumbing to make it all work. Mittie’s kitchen occupied the room that had once been young Elizabeth Hodges’ bedroom (and is now the primary bathroom). In fact, a cabinet in the now-bathroom has shelves with pie safe doors, a remnant from when the room was Mittie’s kitchen and the cabinet her pantry.

It was a practical arrangement for a practical woman. Mittie lived at 1604 for the last 22 years of her life. Whatever she carried from that homestead by the river, she carried it through the front door of 1604 and into the rooms where she would spend the rest of her days.

A House That Keeps Changing Its Mind

One of the things I’ve been fascinated about with 1604 is how the changing floor plan tells the story of the people who lived there; the walls themselves are a kind of autobiography.

1894: The Original Hodges Home When Sam and Anna built the home, it was a straightforward L-plan Victorian cottage: a parlor and study at the front, a dining room, the Hodges’ bedroom, a kitchen at the back, and a rear porch; simple, modest, and solidly built.

A note on the following floor plans: no dated architectural drawings exist for 1604, so the layouts shown here are my own creation. I built them from undated floor plans in the property records, from physical clues still visible in the house, and from the stories of the people who lived here. They are my best interpretation of how the home changed over 130 years. Where the evidence left gaps, I filled them with educated guesses.

1919: The Belford Remodel The Hodges family contracted with Belford to add a new front gallery, a sleeping porch, and an extended kitchen.

1940s: The Ischy Duplex This is Mittie’s chapter. The house is divided, with two kitchens and a shared bathroom.

1970s: The Lewis & Rambo Remodels After Mittie’s death in 1966, the house sat empty and was used for storage until John and Patricia Lewis purchased it in 1971. The Lewises converted it back into a single-family home.

Present Day The home continues to evolve. A sunroom, a guest bedroom, and two bathrooms now occupy spaces that have served half a dozen different purposes over 130 years. But the bones are still there.

The Ghost in the Mirror

Now, I did promise you a ghost story, and I am not one to leave tea unspilled.

There’s an antique mirror on the wall in the study. The current owners say it came with the house. They told the story of a guest staying in the study, which was a guest room at the time.

One morning, the guest was found sound asleep on the sofa in the parlor. When asked why he’d moved, he reported that he couldn’t sleep because he kept dreaming of a woman standing over him, insisting that he “put it back” over and over. He finally gave up and moved to the sofa, where he slept fine.

His host put two and two together pretty quickly; she’d just moved that mirror out to the carriage house. She went and got it and put it back.

I’m a genealogist, not a ghost hunter. I deal in documents, not the paranormal. I also happen to be living at 1604 currently.

The mirror is still on the wall in the study. I haven’t moved it. I will not be moving it.

I don’t know who the woman in the dream was, but it seems that someone in this house has strong feelings about where the mirror belongs. She also seems to have other… opinions.

It started with my desk. One day, my dogs were barking at some street noise they found objectionable, which is a frequent occurrence on Austin Ave. Suddenly, my desk jolted like something had slammed into it from underneath, hard enough that my first thought was that a desk leg had broken through one of the old floorboards. I crawled around, inspected every inch, and I couldn’t find a single explanation. The dogs, for the record, were unmoved.

I was folding laundry one evening in our bedroom (which also happens to have been Mittie’s bedroom, too, by the way). Two dogs were with me and one was in the parlor. The bedroom door rattled in its frame, the familiar jiggle of a dog nudging a closed door because she wants in. I didn’t immediate respond, and it rattled again, a dog impatient to gain entry. Except I went and opened the door… to an empty hallway. The third dog was sound asleep on the sofa in the parlor.

Then there’s the music situation… When our wireless speakers are played at a high volume, the music distorts and then cuts out entirely. During one loud music episode, right as the music killed itself, there was a loud, sharp bang at what sounded like the front door, but no one was there.

Apparently, someone prefers quiet.

One night, while sleeping in the guest room with all three dogs and the door closed, our housesitter was woken around 4 a.m. by a loud thud somewhere in the house. The dogs barked, but she decided she was not investigating at 4am. The next morning, she found a large ceramic candleholder that had been sitting on a side table in the parlor knocked to the floor and shattered in a room that had ostensibly been unoccupied by humans or animals all night.

One of the most dramatic incidents happened in the primary bathroom, which was once Mittie’s kitchen. A visitor used the restroom, and a good thirty seconds after she had gotten up, flushed, and moved to the sink to wash her hands, the bathroom trash can, which had been sitting on the back of the toilet, flew off the toilet. It didn’t fall, and it didn’t tip; it launched itself with enough force to fling its contents across the toilet and into the shower stall.

My guest was... unsettled, to say the least. I couldn’t blame her.

Still Her House?

It’s noteworthy that all of these incidents happened in a house where a woman lived for 22 years, a woman who had already spent a lifetime enduring loss after loss, who divided this home in half to share it with tenants, who took care of her space and likely made sure her tenants also treated her home with respect. And maybe she’s still watching over 1604, keeping us in line.

I’m not sure that the ghost of 1604 Austin Avenue is Mittie Pennington Ischy, but if I were a ghost and I’d spent the last 22 years of my life dedicated to looking after my home and its residents, I might decide to stay in that home, too.

Maybe she just wants it known that this is still her house. After everything she went through, I'm okay with that. I like the peace and quiet, too, Mittie.

If you happen to pass by 1604 Austin Ave, give a nod to Mittie. She earned it. Just maybe keep the volume down.

More to the story

What’s the story behind the old homestead where Mittie was standing the day Joe died, where she lived until she moved to Austin Avenue in 1944? Next week, we'll follow the paper trail that Mittie and Joe left behind: probate files, deed records, and a 1916 map that reveals where that bridge actually stood. The records raise questions about what was happening in the Ischy household in the months before that September evening, questions that, more than a century later, still don't have easy answers.

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Sources & Research Notes

The Pennington Family

Virginia Culin Roberts, With Their Own Blood: A Saga of Southwestern Pioneers (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1992).

“Pennington Family Cemetery,” Texas Historical Commission historical marker (1998), intersection of Founders Oak Way and Pennington Lane, Georgetown, Williamson County, Texas.

Corsicana, Texas, City Directory, 1910; Mittie Pennington, telephone operator; image, "U.S., City Directories, 1822-1995," Ancestry (ancestry.com : accessed 20 February 2026).

Joe Ischy’s Life and Death

“Ischy–Pennington,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 15 June 1916, p. 3; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 20 February 2026).

“Little Irene Ischy Dead,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 24 June 1915, p. 3; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 20 February 2026).

“Auto Plunges from Bridge; Joe Ischy Killed Instantly,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 27 September 1917, p. 9; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 20 February 2026).

“Joe Ischy Killed in Auto Accident,” Taylor Daily Press (Taylor, Texas), 28 September 1917, p. 1; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 20 February 2026).

The two newspaper accounts of Joe’s death differ slightly in their details; I drew from both to reconstruct the events of that evening.

Mittie Pennington Ischy

"RADER-ISCHY," San Antonio (Texas) Express-News, 21 August 1920, p. 7, col. 1; digital image, Newspapers.com (newspapers.com : accessed 24 February 2026).

“Mrs. Mittie Ischy Dies Saturday; Rites Sunday,” The Williamson County Sun (Georgetown, Texas), 3 November 1966; digital image, Newspaper Archive (newspaperarchive.com : accessed 20 February 2026).

Texas Department of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, certificate of death no. 70266, Mittie Pennington Ischy, 29 October 1966; image, "Texas, U.S., Death Certificates, 1903–1982," Ancestry (ancestry.com : accessed 20 February 2026).

History of 1604 Austin Avenue

Williamson County, Texas, deed records. Sam A. Hodges from J. H. Hodges, lot in Block 78, recorded August 1894.

Belford Lumber Company ledger, 1919 entry for S. A. Hodges; notes specify work for new front gallery, sleeping porch, and extended kitchen. Held by Southwestern University Distinctive Collections, Georgetown, Texas.

“Belford Historic District,” National Register of Historic Places nomination packet (1985), continuation sheet, p. 78. Published online by the Texas Historical Commission, Austin; https://atlas.thc.texas.gov/.

Texas Historical Commission, survey form for 1604 Austin Avenue (Survey ID: 125373), recorded 2007, updated 2016.

Elizabeth Hodges Sanford, interview/research notes, 1979; transcribed in research files for the Georgetown Heritage Society.

Ghost Stories

The mirror incident was related to me by the owner of 1604 Austin Avenue. All other experiences described are my own or were reported to me firsthand by my guests.

Old Town Echoes is independently researched using primary historical sources. AI tools assist in drafting and editing; all content is reviewed, sourced, and verified by the author.

Who Am I?

I’m a professional genealogist and the owner of Kaleidoscope Genealogy. While I officially moved to Georgetown in 2023, my roots here go back to the 1950s. Two of my grandparents attended Southwestern University, where they met and fell in love. In a very literal sense, Georgetown played a big role in my existence!

Today, I live in Old Town. Every day, I walk through these streets with my three dogs (and one granddog) - Zahra, Zeus, Zelda, and Pepper - marveling at the historic architecture and dying to know their stories.

The Historian’s Torch

Local historian Liz Weaver has done a legendary job regaling our community with history on her Historic Georgetown page. When she stepped down as the Historian for Preservation Georgetown, I eagerly raised my hand to take over researching the Heritage Home Markers.

The anatomy of a house history isn’t much different from my professional genealogy work. While it includes architectural details, the real soul of a home lies with its people. Discovering those family stories is what I do best.

As I’ve been researching homes, I keep finding stories that are simply too interesting to stay buried in the past.

Why “Old Town Echoes”?

As a genealogist, I don’t just find names on deeds; I find people. I find the widow who might just be the ghost in my historic Victorian cottage, the upstanding citizen with a shady past, and the touching stories (and scandals) of the families who built this town brick by brick.

I realized that these “byproducts” of my research were actually the heartbeat of Georgetown. The stories were too compelling to end up on the cutting room floor. Old Town’s past echoes here in the present, and it’s time to start spilling the tea on our historic neighbors.

What You’ll Find Here

This Substack is designed to be the “narrative companion” to the local history we see every day. Each week, I’ll be serving up The Weekly Tea—a deep dive into:

• The Quirky: The local eccentricities that didn’t make it into the history books

• The “Crime-y”: The scandals and courtroom dramas that once rocked Georgetown

• The Human: The touching, real-life stories behind the historic plaques

• The “How-To”: Occasional behind-the-scenes looks at how I use professional genealogy to “unearth” these gems

From the Screen to the Sidewalk

While I love sharing these stories digitally, my goal is to eventually take you with me to see these sites in person. I am currently developing history walking tours in Georgetown, and my Substack subscribers will be the very first to know when the tickets go live.

So, grab a cup of tea (or something stronger), and let’s go see what the neighbors were up to a century ago.

Old Town Echoes is independently researched using primary historical sources. AI tools assist in drafting and editing; all content is reviewed, sourced, and verified by the author.