Notes for: William MCFADDIN
William grew up at a time when life on the coastal prairies was hard and often grim. At sixteen he was up to his ears in the Texas Revolution, a private in Captain Andrew Briscoe's company of Liberty Volunteers. He participated in the siege of Bexar and was with the detail that guarded baggage, the sick and the wounded during the Battle of San Jacinto. Then he went with Rusk's army to Goliad to give decent burial to the charred remains of those massacred on March 27, 1836; on his seventeenth birthday, June 8, 1836, he was discharged and made the journey back homeo n foot. For his military service he was awarded bounty and donation grants; the donation grant, located in Jefferson County, he patented; the donation grant, which he sold, was in Denton County. Again, a quarter of a century later, when his country needed him, he served her during the Civil War being detailed to procure beef for the Confederate Army.
At nineteen William McFaddin married Rachel Williams, daughter of Hezekiah and Nancy Reams Williams of Beaumont but formerly of St. Helena Parish, Louisiana. After his marriage, William became serious about bettering his condition in life, which is to say he set about amassing wealth. As he put it, he was only a farmer and a stock raiser, but he succeeded so well that by 1850 he was able to employ a resident teacher for his children. In 1854 he built one of the few antebellum mansions in Southeast Texas, which was, according to one account, for forty years the finest residence in Jefferson County." [More Early Southeast Texas Families, by Madeleine Martin, Nortex Press, 1978.)
(The 1850 Census indicated that William was worth $3,024. By 1860, he was the sixth wealthiest individual in the county with a "worth" on the census of $43,000. By the mid-1890s, when his son, "W.P.H." McFaddin was in charge of the family business, they owned companies involved in ranching, rice farming, irrigation, and rice milling, and reportedly owned more than 140,000 acres of land across the state of Texas and beyond.) [email David McFadden, 21 July 2000]