I have a lot of stuff for you today. I've been trying to get it all finished up and proofread for the past several days, but somehow this seems to be turning into a never-ending post! I had originally planned to put up the remaining newspaper articles I found and everything else I'd collected about W C's time in Texas in this one post, but I still haven't managed to get farther than 1892 on the newspapers, and I found a bunch of other stuff, so it looks like it's going to take more than one post to finally finish up in Texas. Not only that, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the most logical way to present it all would be. So forgive me if things turn into sort of a mess for a while!
One of the reasons I haven't finished scanning through the newspapers for missing articles is that, for some reason (maybe because I was getting sick of reading the newspaper?), I started looking at the Texas county tax rolls instead. I wasn't even looking for W. C., but instead for his father and grandfather, because I already had a couple of those and was checking to see if I'd gotten them all. And then I had a V8 moment - why hadn't I checked the tax rolls for Taylor County? Had I done that, I might have been able to answer the question of when W.C. arrived in Buffalo Gap sooner.
The first tax roll for Taylor County is dated 1862, then the records jump to 1878. I didn't find W. C. on either of those, even though we now know that in November of 1890 he reported that he had been there for 12 years, putting him there at least by the end of 1878. I also didn't find him in 1879, but the 1879 roll had hundreds of unknown property owners on the unrendered rolls, so it is possible that he was one of those. In 1880, we finally see his name on the tax roll (line 39):
(Unfortunately, neither of these pages shows the county or date at the top, so you will just have to take my word that they are the rolls from Taylor County in 1880. Oh, and remember, click on the title and it will allow you to view the document in a larger size and/or download.)
This doesn't show W. C. owning any land property, so the assessor didn't write in exactly where he lived, but the entire page is Buffalo Gap and the surrounding acreage, so I think it's safe to say that that's where he was. (Which, of course we already know from other sources!) It shows that he owned two 'carriages, buggies, or wagons' for a value of $45 (about $1,100 today), and one 'horse or mule,' with a value of $75 (about $1,850 today - so probably a horse, and considering the value placed on the other horses/mules on this sheet, quite a decent one at that). For the state and county taxes combined (including $3 total poll tax), he owed $4.25 (about $105 today).
So nothing really new there, because we already knew from the 1880 Census that he didn't own land or town lots at the time.
The 1881 tax rolls were completed in July:
W. C. is way up at the top, on line 3. By 1881 he owned one town lot in Buffalo Gap, for a value of $50. Pretty crazy how a city lot of land was worth less than a good horse back then, huh? Speaking of which, W. C. reported (remember, the rendered rolls had self-reported values) that he still had two carriages/buggies/wagons, now with a combined value of $50 (either transportation was highly valued, or land wasn't worth much at all!), and four horses/mules for a combined value of $100.
Now, while I was searching for W. C. on the tax rolls, I was also looking for Brookresons for a later post, and while reading through the B's from 1881 I found . . . . drumroll please . . . . H. M. Blackshear! Who was none other than Harrison Malone Blackshear, who was the younger brother of W. C. Cheatham's wife, Amelia Virginia Blackshear. Wow!!!! I can't even begin to tell you how excited I was! Since I hadn't been able to find any Blackshears in the county where Amelia Virginia and W. C. supposedly got married, I just assumed that they had all gone their separate ways. I did discover (just about two hours ago!) that this brother was living with another brother in Hill County during 1880, so there's no telling why he decided to move to Taylor County, unless he and his sister remained in touch after she married and she encouraged him to join them there. (I suspected that he would have only stayed until her death in 1886, but he is on the rolls through 1888.) I kind of like the idea that he was there, since apparently W. C.'s only sibling who lived to adulthood died around 1878, so that means the kids had an uncle living near them and the family wasn't completely isolated like it had appeared. Anyway, this just goes to show that it is always better to actually read through the original documents instead of relying on the search tool!
The tax rolls for 1882 also show some interesting developments:
W. C. is on line 22 (although it kind of looks like 21). He now owned four town lots in Buffalo Gap, but none seem to be the same one he owned the year before. He placed the value of the lots at $250, $25, $75 and $20, with two in each of two different blocks, so I'm guessing that the two more expensive lots were maybe larger and/or improved with buildings.
(While proofreading this post, I decided to look again for a survey map of Buffalo Gap to stick in here - I hadn't come across one when I wrote my first Buffalo Gap post. I found one. Yay!)
The star on the map shows the town square where the courthouse was located. W. C. owned the two lots outlined in yellow, which are the same size, but one was valued way more than the other so it must have been improved. The tax rolls tell us that he owned two lots in block 34, but I only highlighted one (green) because the other lot number listed (the $20 lot) doesn't seem to have actually been in that block. So either the lot number or block number is probably wrong on the tax rolls, and W. C. owned one more lot somewhere on this map. (For some reason, after I color coded this the resolution got messed up. If you click on the title of the map, above, you will see a better version, but not color coded. If you want to go to The Portal to Texas History and view the map with the zoom function, click here.)
Funny how W. C. didn't report any horses or carriages that year, because he surely had at least one of each, but it looks like a lot of other people who likewise undoubtedly had some didn't report any either. (I wonder if they actually got away with that!)
Now, if you didn't notice already, up on line 14 we can see . . . W. C.'s father, Edmund C. Cheatham! He also owned three lots in Buffalo Gap, and since the top of the page says that this is the rendered roll of residents, it means that he was living in Buffalo Gap as well at this time. The blue lines on the survey map show the lots that W. C.'s father owned, with the one to the west of the town square being highly valued. (I'm guessing due to its location and improvements, especially because it was only half the size of the normal lots.)
Guess what? There were even more interesting developments for 1883:
We can see W. C. on line 34, now owning 5 (I think - I don't completely understand what the assessor wrote) lots in Buffalo Gap, for a total value of, well, it looks like $790, but if you add in the two horses and eight head of cattle along with the values that page one shows for those, it does not add up to the total value of property reported on page two, which is $1770.
If you take a look two lines up, you will see "Cheatham & Cunningham." I am pretty sure that this is W. C., and not his father, because of the evidence in some newspaper articles that I'll be sharing below. This partnership owned two parcels of land, one that was 640 acres, and one that was 240 acres, as well as one town lot in Buffalo Gap. And just in case any of you were wondering, if this Cunningham was the J. V. who appears by himself just below W. C. on the list, that is the guy who we see in the newspaper serving as Taylor County Sheriff for years on end. It could have also been one or more of his brothers (?) as two Cunninghams were named as deputy sheriffs along with W. C. in the 1891 article I shared about the murderer's execution.
As for W. C.'s father, I didn't find his name, so who know what happened there.
Here is the survey map again, showing the new lots:
Now for 1884:
On line eight we see that in 1884 W. C. no longer had town lots, and no longer had lots in partnership with Mr. Cunningham, but instead had 160 acres of his own. (He is listed as the original grantee, so it was quite likely a homestead grant and didn't cost him much.) He also shows 1 carriage/wagon, 2 horses/mules, and 7 heads of cattle. If you look at line eight, or count down 7 different people, you will find on page two that the line that should be W. C. is reporting over $8000 in miscellaneous property. (That's like, $205,000 in today's money!) I don't think that sounds right. But I can't make any sense of it. So I am going to just ignore it for the time being.
Okay, let's stop with the tax rolls for a moment. Remember how I said I had some other random stuff to share? Well, check this out:
(On a side note, the nifty description of Buffalo Gap in the excerpt has some interesting facts about the town, so make sure you read it!)
And guess what I found this morning while looking for that book excerpt I just showed you?
This financial journal had the following article:
So just a bit of background: the U. S. went through an economic depression between 1883 and 1885, which was actually the third longest depression in our history. So a whole lot of businesses were in trouble at the time. (In fact, I have an article from Bradstreet's from 1885, which says that a total of 11,620 businesses failed in 1884.) Right after this paragraph, the journal listed business owners who were in trouble. On the list for Texas I found W. C.:
The top of the page was dated October 6, 1883, so we are backtracking a year. Do you see what this says the assets of his store were? $8,000. Well, now that tax assessment makes perfect sense!
What this also tells us is that, not only was W. C.'s store in trouble by the end of 1883, but he probably started the business before the depression hit, right? The 1880 census reported that he was stockraising in that year, but maybe he saw that there was a need for another general store (the town went from just 100 people in 1878 to around 600 by 1884!) and thought it was a great business opportunity. That actually sounds like him, doesn't it? Anyway, I'm not sure what the article means with its "attached" and "assigned," maybe there was a lien placed on the business or something. (A lot of the businesses listed above his said things like "is advertised to be sold out by the sheriff" or "has filed a petition in insolvency," so this wording does not indicate that his business was done for yet.) Maybe it even had something to do with the reason he listed valuable assets but not a town lot on the tax rolls the following year.
Now here is a newspaper article I came across ages ago that I wasn't sure was our guy or not:
Fort Worth Daily Gazette
(Forth Worth, Tarrant County, TX)
30 May 1884
So, according to the National Archives, Forth Worth didn't actually house a district court until 1896, but Dallas, which was right next door, did. The National Archives website also says that Abilene didn't have a district court until 1896 either, but there are newspaper articles saying W. C. was called for jury duty for the district court in 1889, and he was running for district clerk in 1888, so maybe the dates online are not correct. Anyway, all three cities were in the Northern District, which means that any district court case that residents of those towns would have been involved in could have been tried in any of the cities that actually had a court. This article says that the case is vs. "W. C. Cheatham et al," which could include his business partner/s (remember Cheatham & Cunningham?), and the three promissory notes in the amount of $915.56 (about $23,500) could have been for goods they purchased for that general store W. C. is listed as the proprietor of. Considering the fact that W. C.'s business was in trouble by October of the preceding year, and that he had about $8000 in 'liabilities,' I think this article seems pretty likely to be our W. C. Cheatham. Not only that, but the only other W. C. Cheatham I have run into in all my months of research was that cousin over in Clarksville in Red River County, where he seems to have lived until he died in 1876, so, yeah, I'm pretty confident on the identification.
(Update: When I originally wrote this, I was assuming for some reason that the district court was a U. S. district court. I later discovered that each county in Texas has a state district court. Later in this post we will see that W. C. was getting his goods for the Alliance store in Dallas, so it is likely that that is where he purchased the goods for his Buffalo Gap store as well. So, it makes sense that the person he purchased from would file the case in his own county.)
So, while doing a newspaper search to check a date for something later in this post, I came across this series of articles from a Galveston newspaper. I ignored most of the hits for "Cheatham" in the Galveston papers when I was searching before, because they were never him. But one popped up just now that said "W C Cheatham et al," and I was like, well now I know that it probably was our guy!
The Galveston Daily News
(Galveston, Galveston County, TX)
16 Jul 1884
Here is another lawsuit over money owed by W. C. Cheatham et al, this time in the sum of $2100 (nearly $54,000 today!) owed to a different person/company. It says "judgement by default," which means that W. C. and his partners lost the case because they failed to take some sort of action, like maybe they failed to appear in court. (Notice that this court notice is from a different city than the other one - I'm pretty sure that Galveston was in a different district that Taylor County; I'm guessing because the plaintiff filed in the other district.) Poor L. & H. Blum - do you see how many lawsuits they have at the same time? There were more than 25 total cases naming them as the plaintiff in that term of court alone. I guess it's not surprising if they were a wholesaler and so many businesses failed during 1884.
The Galveston Daily News
(Galveston, Galveston County, TX)
11 Oct 1884
This shows a court date three months later, and I'm guessing that it is for additional debts because, a) the previous one had a judgement by default, and b) this says "suit on notes: continued." Which isn't surprising because the other two suits didn't come even close to the $8000 he owed.
So back to 1884:
El Paso Daily Times
(El Paso, El Paso County, TX)
20 Nov 1884
This one is a bit iffier, because El Paso, although almost due west along the railroad line from Abilene, is much farther away. Which makes me wonder if the town had anything to do with anything, or did Mr. Swain move there from somewhere else where he interacted with W. C.? The thing that makes me think that this has to be our W. C. is that I didn't come across any other Cheathams in Abilene until several years after this. And of course, I have no evidence that W. C. was a deputy tax collector, but I didn't have any evidence that he was a deputy sheriff until I happened upon that one newspaper article. It does sound like something he would do, though, right? So I'm leaning heavily toward believing that it was actually him. I don't know, is it just me, or does Great (Great) Grandad's story just keep getting crazier?
Okay. I think I'm following a somewhat chronological course here, so let's get back to the tax rolls.
There's W. C. on line 33. He didn't report any land property at all in 1885, even though the newspaper reported in July that he was farming that year. He only reported 2 carriage/wagons, 8 head of cattle, and $250 in miscellaneous property. He didn't even report a horse, which is, once again, fairly ridiculous (I mean, not only would you want a horse for plowing your fields, but what was he going to pull those two carriages/wagons with?!)
So, now I'm going to give you all a little glimpse into what I'd like to call 30 minutes in the life of Therese as she conducts her genealogical research. While I was looking through and downloading the tax rolls last week, I was jotting down notes for each year. For some reason I didn't make a note for 1886, so just now I was like, was there no tax roll record available for 1886? I went back to check, and there was. So I was like, did I not find W. C. on there? So I went back to see if I just missed him. Nope. So I looked at the end of the records to see if I could find him on the unrendered rolls. And I did:
There's his name on line 25. It shows that nobody reported ownership of the 160 acres that were originally granted to W. C. So while trying to upload the image above, I discovered that I actually had downloaded tax roll pages for W. C. for 1886:
See? His name is on line 31. He just didn't report his land! Now, I think to myself, How did I not see him just now when I re-checked the rolls?!! And then I think, this is the year that his wife died, so maybe that is why he didn't report (because I see that his wife's brother's name is two lines up on the unreported list also), but he actually did report his other property, so who knows what was going through his mind! Anyway, this whole bit of confusion makes me think that I should go back to all those years I already stuck up in this post that he didn't report any land property and check the unrendered rolls. But wait! It just dawned on me that he wasn't the original grantee on any of his earlier property, and the unrendered lists usually only show those names, so that would only work for 1885. (Let me go check!)
Okay, I checked. W. C. wasn't there. But you know who was? His father, E. C., and S. M. Blackshear, not H. M. Blackshear, which could be Amelia Virginia's other younger brother, Simeon Marshall (her father had the same initials, but falls off the records long before this and is presumed to be deceased). And now I'm thinking to myself, I didn't find W. C.'s dad on any of the rolls after 1882, but maybe I just didn't check all the names on the unrendered lists (because they are not arranged in nice alphabetical order, so maybe I decided it was too much trouble). Maybe I'd better go back and recheck those too?
Let me tell you, things can sure get messy when I actually try to make sense of the jumble of information I'm collecting, instead of just tacking it all on to my Ancestry page.
Do you all see why sometimes I feel like I have so many facts stuffed into my head that they are leaking out of my ears? I have no less than ten sheets of paper with random notes to myself sitting here on my desk right now - they are such a mess of unorganized scribbles as to be practically worthless!
I actually had to snip this from three different places and paste them together so you could actually see what the list was all about. This is from the Journal of the Senate of Texas, 1885, which basically is a record of all the senate sessions. This shows that in March of 1885, W. C. was a notary in Buffalo Gap.
And here is something from a year later:
I found W. C. on two separate pages in this book of national directories for 1886 - 1887:
This shows us that W. C. was still a notary public in Buffalo Gap.
And this shows us that he was a real estate agent. So I guess that's what he decided to do after his dry goods store failed? Boy, do I wish I had access to the Buffalo Gap newspapers from this time!
While I'm still on 1886, do you remember this?
The Taylor County News
(Abilene, Taylor County, TX)
27 May 1887
Remember how I thought that, because W. C.'s wife and father were on the resident rendered roll it meant that they were living in Taylor County and reported it themselves (or W. C. reported for Amelia Virginia)? Well, the quality of this newspaper was pretty bad, but look what I found in the tax rolls:
(Okay, I have to admit, I actually saw this while I was looking back at that post for something I was writing later in this post, which made me go back to the tax rolls and look through them for the fourth time! Then I thought it would be too confusing to comment on this way down there after the 1889 rolls, so I came back up here and stuck this in. Facts running out my ears, folks!)
This shows us that W. C.'s wife and father had owned 160 acres each in addition to the four town lots in Abilene (so not the same ones as before in Buffalo Gap!) for E. C. and the four town lots in Abilene for Amelia Virginia. But, what I couldn't read on the newspaper article above because of the poor quality, is that they no longer owned any of that land. It had been, presumably, sold. ( The rolls show the same, new owner in 1885 and 1886, and actually, on the form just below this paragraph, I just noticed that one half of that same acreage is in the hands of a different owner yet - so much for not finding E. C. on any rolls after 1882 - I just missed him!) Anyway, these might have been investment properties that were arranged by W. C., you know, because he was a real estate agent and all that, and maybe they had been sold to help W. C. pay off that debt he had gotten himself into when his store failed. (At first I thought that the fact that his wife had 160 acres granted to her meant it was a homestead grant, which made me wonder if women could get homestead grants back then - I just looked it up, and yes, they could. But now it dawns on me that it couldn't have been unless she got it way back in 1880 - I explain this later - which there is no evidence of on the tax rolls.)
W. C. is way up on line 4. Once again, he is not reporting any land. This time he did report two horses, but no carriages/wagons, and only 4 head of cattle. For some reason I don't think these tax rolls show a very accurate representation of what people actually owned. And now, of course, I will have to go back and check the undrendered rolls to see if his land is there. Yep.
This one looks pretty much the same as the one from the year before. But here is an interesting fact: The tax assessor and the tax collector were two totally different people. And guess who the tax collector was? None other than J. V. Cunningham. (He was the sheriff, and apparently the sheriff was the one who collected the taxes.) Starting in the year 1885. Soooooo, maybe there was something fishy going on - maybe they had a little agreement that if W. C. didn't report, and the assessor had to mark the land as having an unknown owner, Mr. Cunningham wouldn't have to collect anything from him. Hmmmm. (Of course, he would then run the risk of having his lands sold at the sheriff's sale, but if his buddy was the sheriff, he could always save W. C.'s land until the end when there might not be anyone left to bid on it - there were a lot of unrendered lands! Or, maybe the deal was he would just bid the amount owed for taxes each year and get it back, but he would have had an extra four months or so to get the tax money together.) I hate to suggest something so disparaging about somebody who is no longer alive to defend himself, especially when he was my great great grandfather, but it does look a bit suspicious! And take a look at this:
Most years there is a page like this at the end of the rendered resident rolls. (This is how I knew J. V. Cunningham was the tax collector.) Here is a detail of that little piece of paper attached at the right:
Do you see what I see? Look at the stamp. It is from the comptroller's office. And look who signed underneath the stamp. The Honorable Wm J. Swain. Ring a bell? From the newspaper article I showed you a little while ago? Apparently the comptroller was a state office - basically the state tax collector and accountant. Mr. Swain was the comptroller from 1882 - 1887. So the fact that the newspaper article came from El Paso really didn't have anything to do with anything. I guess that's just where the guy's house or office was or something! So now I'm even more sure that that article is about W. C. (Now that I think about it, if the sheriff was the tax collector, does that mean the deputy sheriffs were deputy tax collectors? We know W. C. was a deputy sheriff in 1891, but maybe he had been for a long while. In fact, if you go back to my previous post, here, and look at the newspaper article from February of 1889, it actually showed that the county received money from W. C., which I didn't know what to make of when I first posted it!)
See? This is why I love research - it's so much fun when all the little pieces start to fall into place!
Here are the tax rolls from 1888:
W. C. reported land again this year (line 35), 160 acres with a value of $500 (which was more than his 160 acres was valued in either of the previous two years). But you know what? The document shows that the original grantee was not W. C., so this was a different 160 acres. Which made me wonder what happened to his original land, which sent me back to the unrendered rolls, which is where I found them, still owned by "unknown" and worth $400.
The really strange thing is that, according to the newspaper article I showed you, W. C. was the keeper of the poor farm this year. I did some searching to see if the poor farms were always on county land or were ever housed on private farms. I didn't find out, but I did find an excellent paper about poor farms that you can read here. To me it's just weird that he wouldn't report his land in the years we know he was farming (like 1888, when he entered all kinds of crops in the fair!), but then he would report it in a year that he wasn't on his own land. It also seems weird that he would purchase more land when he already had some that he wasn't reporting. Of course, that national directory above showed that he was a real estate agent in 1887, so maybe the land was just an investment. Who knows. Oh, but I forgot to say, he also reported 2 carriages/wagons, 6 horses/mules, and 6 head of cattle.
And speaking of entering crops in the fair, I came across something that I thought was interesting and thought I'd share it. Did you know that the premiums were put up by the businesses in the towns? I didn't either until I started reading the entire paper. This is what W. C. stood to win for his entries according to an article from July 26, 1888:
sorghum: either $5 of building materials, 1 bottle of fine whiskey, or one plow worth $12.50
corn: a charter oak stove with gauze wire doors valued at $30
sweet potatoes: a box of assorted canned goods
beets: a $5 hat
Those were pretty good prizes, considering an entire carriage or wagon only cost $25 and an unimproved town lot was going for as little as $30!
And here are a couple of brief clips from the newspaper, just to give you all a a sense of the times:
The Abilene Reporter
(Abilene, Taylor County, TX)
2 Nov 1888
It seems like there was a story about a train robbery in almost every edition of the paper (once a week) back then. Most of them seemed to either be Mexicans robbing trains, or robbers robbing Mexican trains. I'm not sure which this is referring to!
The Abilene Reporter
(Abilene, Taylor County, TX)
23 Nov 1888
Yes, the "Whitechapel fiend" is none other than Jack the Ripper. It's pretty strange to imagine W. C. sitting in his parlor reading about the case as it was unfolding, huh?
Okay. Here are the 1889 tax rolls:
W. C. is on line 36. He still has the same acreage as the previous year, with 1 carriage/wagon, 9 horses/mules, and 14 head of cattle. Once again I am a bit confused, because this is the year that W. C. seems to have moved to Abilene. Now, you might be saying, yeah, but he wasn't there until fall, right? Well, that's what I thought, until I looked back just now at the newspaper articles in my earlier post and saw that he was already the business manager of the alliance store by the middle of July. And then I came across these new articles that the search tool on The Portal to Texas History missed:
The Abilene Reporter
(Abilene, Taylor County, TX)
22 Mar 1889
This implies to me that he was already in Abilene by March of 1889.
The Abilene Reporter
(Abilene, Taylor County, TX)
10 May 1889
The Abilene Reporter
(Abilene, Taylor County, TX)
13 Dec 1889
The Taylor County News
(Abilene, Taylor County, TX)
13 Dec 1889
In my earlier post there was an article saying that W. C. had been out of town arranging for a large invoice of groceries from "the east." I guess now we know where that was exactly.
And here is one more that was published in The Abilene Reporter some time during 1888 (I accidentally did not put the entire date in the file name when I saved it, so I don't know which month it was!
The Abilene Reporter
(Abilene, Taylor County, TX)
1888
This gives you more information into exactly what kinds of things the farmers alliances did for farmers. It's pretty ironic, too, that the article says that the alliance in Abilene had finally gotten out of trouble, but that it was recommended that farmers alliances NOT run general stores, which is pretty much what W. C.'s branch continued to do, with him running it. And you know, I'd been thinking for a while now that it was pretty strange that W. C. would move to Abilene to run the Alliance store and only stick with it for a year, but it turns out that his successor (you know, the guy who I thought was helping him run the store but I guess was actually taking over the store for him!) only lasted in the position for five months!
I thought about wrapping this up here since the 1880's were done, but there are only tax rolls available online for Taylor County through 1892, so I might as well finish up with them.
In 1890, W. C. (line 42) was once again not reporting any land. Which isn't surprising because a) he was always doing that, and b) there is overwhelming evidence from the newspaper articles that he was actually living in Abilene during that year. Here's the problem: He did report 1 carriage/wagon, 7 horses/mules, and 12 head of cattle, along with $450 of miscellaneous property. If he was living in town, why did he still have 7 horses/mules and 12 cows? Where was he keeping them? Maybe he was renting a house that was on a lot big enough to have a barn/stable? (Maybe he voted to let the town cow roam as it pleased because sometimes his own cow was out and about in town?) If you look back at the downtown maps I put up in my earlier post here, you'll see that many dwellings had stables out back, so I guess it's possible. According to my notes, I did not check the unrendered rolls for W. C.'s land. I think I'm going to skip it this time, because I have spent way too long on this post already! Well, actually, it's going to bug me if I don't, so I'll be right back.
Okay. I went through all 174 pages and didn't find his name listed in the "original grantee" column anywhere. I also didn't come across either of the Blackshears. This makes me think that maybe those lands were indeed homestead grants, and since they didn't fulfill the terms, the land reverted back to the federal government. I just looked up the terms, and basically W. C. would have had to live on the land (proven by constructing a livable dwelling) and farm it for five years after he received it, and if he lived elsewhere for a period of at least six months at any time during those five years he would not be allowed to apply for a patent of ownership and the land would be lost. Since the tax rolls first show W. C. as having land granted to him in 1884, he would have had to live on it and farm it until 1889. And since he seemed to have been in Buffalo Gap all that time, I can only speculate that maybe it is because he moved onto the poor farm or those other 160 acres he reported in 1888 and thus did not fulfill the terms.
So, now on to 1891:
We can see W. C. on line 13, and "W. C. & Co." on line 14 (not to be confused with "Cheatham & Cunningham," this would be W. C.'s commission and real estate business in Abilene). He reported that he himself owned 3 lots in Abilene, no carriages/wagons, 3 horses/mules, 5 head of cattle, and 4 hogs. For his business, he reported no land, no carriages/wagons, 4 horses/mules, 2 head of cattle, and "goods/wares/merchandise" with a value of $2500 (almost $75,000 today). The lots he owned were three of the eights that we kept seeing changing hands in the newspaper articles.
And the last one:
According to the newspapers, W. C. would remain in Abilene for the next two years or so, presumably doing his consignment thing, before moving back to Buffalo Gap, and I'm guessing taking up farming again. But that is it for the Taylor County tax rolls that are digitized online. So I think we are done with the years 1880 to 1900!
Whew! I thought I was never going to finish this post! I'll see you all again in about two weeks, at which time we will finally leave Texas behind. Then I've got some more things that I've found from Duncan, and after that we'll finish up with the newspaper articles from Laveen.
- Therese
I really feel you on this research thing. My brain starts swimming in data and then I wake up the next day going.... OMG I need to go look at x to solve the mess.
ReplyDeleteOr the other thing is since I have been working Cedar Mtn history for a few years, I will go someplace and go .... Ahhh Haaaa - remember that thing? Then the pieces fall into place.
Keep up the good work and glad you finished the tax rolls. Got to feel good - so good!!