Thursday, March 13, 2025

The Not-So-Gay 90's - Interlude Three: All in a Day's Work (part 3)

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 27 

Today we are going to wrap up our look into what a day in the life of the Reverend Erasmus Miller Owen entailed during the 1890's.  Previously, we discovered that a good amount of his time was spent on preaching, attending fifth Sunday and other associational meetings, and doing whatever one would do to establish a brand new church on the frontier.  

As far as the preaching goes, he was most likely either very prepared (meaning he spent a lot of time studying and praying) or at least somewhat gifted - probably a combination of the two - since he was a "a very able and well-known Baptist preacher."  Heck (Can I say that when I'm talking about our strict preacher ancestor?!), in 1893 he "held a meeting" which led to fourteen people being baptized and becoming the founding members of a brand new (Pleasant Valley) church.  And, if you remember, within only two to three years after organizing the Wolf Valley church, the membership grew from sixteen to fifty!  Some of those people had to travel quite far to get to church.  And, the 1902 Texas Baptist Annual reported that Erasmus baptized ten of his church's seventeen members at Emma in 1901 - all within his first year there.

But today we are going to focus on a different aspect of Erasmus' preacherly duties: Marriages.  Lucky for us, the Brown County marriage books are available online, so we can see exactly who he married during the 1890's while he was pastoring and starting churches.  

Now, I couldn't decide whether showing you a bunch of marriage records would be kind of interesting, or kind of of boring.  I guess when you come across one that gives you an Aha! moment, it's kind of interesting.  For example:

The Wolf Valley Cemetery historical marker talks about how a Mr. Davidson donated his land for the Wolf Valley church and then directed that the log building be moved up the hill for its use.  Well, that was in 1887, the very year that Erasmus organized 'New Hope' (number 2) church in Wolf Valley.  Our Reverend E. M. Owen married his daughter and granddaughter.

And who remembers the newspaper article I shared way back when about the Wolf Valley Cemetery, which interviewed a man who mentioned the graves of his grandparents - George and Callie Lester - who were some of the very first settlers in the area in the 1870's?  Our Reverend E. M. Owen married them, too.

And then there was the brother of Erasmus' daughter Orlena's soon to be husband; Our Reverend E. M. Owen married him and his bride as well.

But mostly, looking at the marriage records was kind of boring.  So I thought to myself, you know what would actually be kind of interesting?  If we knew where all of those people lived in relation to Erasmus' churches.  So. . . I decided to put together a map.

Now, silly me, I thought this was going to be easy peasy - just look for the family in the tax rolls, look for their plot of land on a survey map, compare that map to a more modern map that actually had roads on it so we could put those locations in perspective, and boom!  Another glimpse into the life of Erasmus Miller Owen.

What really happened, though, is that the tax rolls only went through 1895, and half of the marriages Erasmus performed during the 1890's occurred after that.  Also, the majority of the families were either not on the tax rolls, didn't own any land on the tax rolls, or had too many men with the same last name on the tax rolls, requiring extra research to discover who the father of the bride actually was, and/or where the family was probably (possibly?) living.  It took me about ten hours of cross referencing the marriage records with the tax rolls, Ancestry family trees, the FindaGrave website, and the 1900 census (so I could find the landowning neighbors of the families who didn't own any land on the tax records, and I had to use the 1900 census instead of the closer-in-time 1890 census because, you know, the whole being lost thing and all).  Then, I had to get the bright idea that the people I still couldn't find might actually be in Eastland County to the north (most of the dead ends were!), and start the process all over again.

Theeeeeeen there was the actual map-making.  

That required me to either scan through the survey map and hope the original landowner's name jumped out at me or use the Earthpoint website to find the exact survey location, which, if I was lucky, had a name that matched what was on the survey map.  If not, or if I couldn't find it, I had to go to Google Maps and plug in the gps coordinates the website gave me.  Then I had to figure out where that was on the survey map, based on the roads.  Which, of course, required me to do a new map overlay of the survey map with a highway map that wasn't cropped down to just the May, Texas area . . . . only those map-makers weren't very accurate so nothing really lines up exactly right.

I think I spent another five hours making the map, which was fun for the first three hours and then increasingly not-so-much for every minute after that.

But, success!  We now have a map showing the likely approximate locations of the residences of each person Erasmus married during the 1890's.  I say likely because I had to make some judgement calls; sometimes the bride's and groom's families lived in basically the same location (so there is only one marker on the map for both), sometimes my information came from a few years before or after the marriage and the family might have moved, and some might be off a bit due to the whole maps not overlaying properly thing.

But it is pretty interesting to see how widely scattered Erasmus' parishioners were.

So, here we go.  We'll start with the marriage records (for those of us who like to collect those documents that have our ancestor's name on them), and then I'll put up the map.


Brown County, Texas
Marriage Book B, pg. 1
G. T. Rutledge & Tennie Bailey
On Thursday, the 26th of June, 1890, Reverend E. M. Owen married G. T. Rutledge and Tennie Bailey.  I have no idea what the G. T. initials stand for because I couldn't find him in any online trees.  There is no mark on the map for him either, because the only men with the same last name on the tax rolls didn't own any land.  You'd think I could have found someone with a name like Tennie Bailey in an online tree, but nope.  There was a Bailey on the tax rolls who was a neighbor of Erasmus, however, so I'm assuming that is who she belonged to.  Actually . . . I just came back to this because I noticed later that she was a Mrs., meaning a widow.  Unfortunately, I still couldn't find a tree showing which Bailey she had been married to, so I'll just keep the same mark on my map.






J. L. Kinney & T. A. Williams
On Sunday, the 12th of April, 1891, Reverend E. M. Owen married John L. Kinney and Texanna Davidson Williams.  This one was a bit of a trick to look up, because the marriage record calls her T. A. Williams.  I didn't notice until just now that it says Mrs. T. A. Williams, not Miss, which tells us that she was a widow.  She was the daughter of David M. Davidson, the neighbor of Erasmus and owner of the land on which the Wolf Valley church sat.  So this answers the question I had jotted down several weeks ago; we now know that Mr. Davidson was almost certainly a member of Erasmus' church, not the Methodist or Presbyterian congregation that shared the building.  The groom lived about a mile and a half or so to the west of the Wolf Valley church.  Texanna's brother died in 1891 and is buried in the Wolf Valley Cemetery, so it is likely that Erasmus performed his funeral or did whatever preachers did at the burials of Baptist people back in the day.




John Whiteaker & Mattie M. Roland
On Thursday, the 9th of July, 1891, Reverend E. M. Owen married John Whiteaker and Mattie Roland.  (Many of the last names were spelled differently on the marriage records than on the Ancestry family trees.)  The Roland family lived about a mile to the northwest of Erasmus, but the Whitaker family probably lived ten miles away (they were just renting on the 1900 census, so this location assumes that John Whitaker remained living on the same land for approximately ten years), about four miles to the northwest of the town of Rising Star in Eastland County.  This was the first marriage record I found with a family that resided in Eastland County, which told me that Erasmus' congregation covered a large geographic area.  Also, John's father, mother, and brother all died within the next three years and were buried in Rising Star Cemetery, so it is likely that Erasmus performed their funerals.




A. J. Kinney & L. E. Robertson
On Thursday, the 13th day of August, 1891, Reverend E. M. Owen married Andrew Jackson Kinney and Laura Emma Robertson.  Both the bride and the groom lived about two miles to the west of the Wolf Valley church.  A. J.'s brother John had been married by Erasmus just four months prior.  (And if you take a look at the actual record, you'll see that the groom's name is recorded differently on the two parts of the record - actually, now that I look at it, the first part, indicating that a marriage license was obtained, is in a totally different handwriting that the part that records the actual marriage.  I suspected it was filled out by two different clerks, and sure enough, the deputy clerk signed the bottom portion.)






I'm going to pause here for a moment and talk about dates on marriage records.  These are not the original marriage certificates.  They are a record, filled out by the county clerk.  Each record includes four dates: the date the couple obtained the license, the date the marriage was performed, the date the person performing the marriage actually signed the certificate, and the date that the certificate was taken back to the courthouse and recorded by the clerk.  It is really easy to get these mixed up, especially the one next to the preacher's signature, because who would expect him to actually sign it the day after the marriage took place?  This means that many of the marriage indexes are incorrect, so you should always look for the original record or a newspaper announcement if the marriage books aren't available.  (But!  I've already had to go back and correct two of the three I've put up here; it's really easy to grab the wrong date, so always double check!)


W. H. Thomas & Lula McDonald
On Monday, the 5th day of December, 1892, Reverend E. M. Owen married William H. Thomas and Vilula McDonald.  I couldn't find Mr. Thomas or his father on the tax rolls, but the McDonald family (and some other Thomas's) had land near the Pleasant Grove church that would be organized by Erasmus in 1893 halfway between the communities of May and Clio/Owens/Holder.  That tells us that, either one or both of these families travelled all the way up to Wolf Valley for church once a month, or Erasmus had been travelling down to the Owens area to preach and minister to people for at least half a year before constituting the Pleasant Grove church.  Cemetery records indicate that an infant brother of Vilula died in 1893, making it possible that Erasmus performed the funeral for the family.






S. J White & M. P. Tyler
On Sunday, the 15th day of October, 1893, Reverend E. M. Owen married Silas Jackson White and Mollie Tyler.  The Whites didn't appear to be landowners so I couldn't place them on a map, but the Tyler family lived way down to the northwest of Clio/Owens/Holder, so they were probably members of the Pleasant Grove church as well.  This tells us that Erasmus was still preaching there for at least a few months after the church was organized.  Silas and Mollie were living in Rising Star by the 1900 census, on which they reported that they had lost a child, and the Pleasant Grove Cemetery shows that they did indeed lose an infant in 1896.  It is likely, then, that Erasmus performed the funeral for their daughter.  







W. G. Shewmaker & Ida L. Jones
On Wednesday, the 27th day of December, 1893, Reverend E. M. Owen married William Gregston Shewmaker and Ida L. Jones.  This was another troublesome one to place on the map.  There were a ton of Jones's on the tax rolls (go figure).  In addition, hardly anyone seems to be researching this family, but one Ancestry tree cites Ida's death certificate and names her father as J. B. Jones.  However, when you look up the location of his land, it is waaaaaay over on the south-eastern portion of Brown County near the town of Blanket, where we have no evidence of Erasmus doing anything.  So I didn't mark her family on the map.  As for the Shewmakers, they didn't appear to own any land, but in 1900 William and Ida were renting land that was (I'm pretty sure) a little to the northwest of the 'town center' of May.  The 1900 census also shows that the couple had lost a child, and since the first child listed on their family tree was born in 1896 (and their next two children did not die in infancy), it is likely that they lost their first child, making it also likely that Erasmus performed the funeral. 


W. J. Tyler & Lula Tabor
On Monday, the 6th day of August, 1894, Reverend E. M. Owen married William Jasper Tyler and Lula Tabor.  The clerk wrote "Lular" on the marriage record (maybe because of somebody's accent?), and the Ancestry trees mostly call her Lulu, but the 1900 census and her headstone (she died before the 1910 census), and one of her children's death certificate all have her name recorded as "Lula".  Her family lived down near the Pleasant Grove church, very near the family of the groom, who, incidentally, was the brother of Mollie Tyler, whom Erasmus had married the year before.







J. R. Harris & Minnie L. Chartres
On Sunday, the 12th day of January, 1896, Reverend E. M. Owen married James Reuben Harris and Minnie Lee Chartres.  The Chartres family lived about two miles south of the Wolf Valley church.  I have no idea where James Harris lived at the time, since his father appears to have died when he was just a child, but it turns out that he was the brother of P. F. Harris, who would marry Erasmus' daughter Orlena two years later.  








Wm. C. McKinley & Lona E. Mayfield
On Monday, the 20th day of July, 1896, Reverend E. M. Owen married William McKinley and Lona Mayfield.  Both families appear to have lived north of Erasmus, one on the border between Brown and Eastland Counties and one on the eastern edge of the town of Rising Star.  So here we see again that Erasmus' congregation included families from the Rising Star area as well as the Wolf Valley and May communities.









A. B. Price & Susie Noland
On Monday, the 24th day of August, 1896, Reverend E. M. Owen married A. B. Price and Susie Noland/Nolen/Nowlin (???).  I couldn't find any record for either of these people online other than this marriage certificate, so I'm thinking that they either moved out of Brown County relatively soon after their marriage, or have no descendants researching them, or the county clerk got their names wrong.  (Or, of course, it could be a problem with the Ancestry search algorithm or indexing.)  Actually, it could be that they were recorded down at the bottom of a water-damaged page of the 1900 census, lost to time just like Erasmus.  There are no tax records for Brown County after 1895, but I found some members of the Price family on the 1895 tax rolls way down in southern Brown County near Indian Creek (not a very likely location) and near the town of Bangs to the west of Brownwood, but there were no Nolands of any variation in Brown County at all (a few show up in the 1890 tax rolls of Eastland County).  Wherever these two families lived, it seems likely that they were not in the Wolf Valley/May area.



James Milton Dewbre & Emma A. Delia Jones
On Sunday, the 8th day of November, 1896, Reverend E. M. Owen married James Milton Dewbre and Emma Adelia Jones.  It is possible that Emma was the sister of the Ida Jones whom Erasmus had married in 1893, but I couldn't really say for sure, because none of the few Ancestry trees for her show any siblings at all.  As for the groom, it appears that his family lived just south of the town center of May, just south of the land on which Erasmus was living during the 1880's.  By the 1900 census, however, this couple was living about a mile north of May, so basically in the same area.  And, according to the census and FindaGrave website, the couple lost their first child, so it looks like Erasmus may have conducted the funeral services for yet another infant. 






J. C. Inman & Maggie Williams
On Thursday, the 24 day of December, 1896, Reverend E. M. Owen married James C. Inman and Maggie Williams.  Maggie was the granddaughter of David M. Davidson and daughter of the widowed Texanna Davidson Williams, whom Erasmus had married way back in 1891, so we know that the bride was living just west of the church in the Wolf Valley community.  I'm pretty sure that the groom lived in Eastland County, probably in the southern portion near the town of Rising Star.










R. D. Wood & Amanda Hull
On Saturday, Christmas Day of 1897, Reverend E. M. Owen married Richard Wood and Amanda Hull.  This was another couple that I had a lot of trouble placing.  Ancestry trees indicate that she was born and lived in Rising Star, just north of the Brown County border.  As for the groom, there were Woods in both Brown and Eastland County, but the ones in Brown were way down near the town of Brownwood, whereas there was at least one Wood family (Neither the groom nor his purported father was on the tax rolls for 1890, the last year available for Eastland County.) living right in Rising Star . . . . So I'm guessing he was also from the same area as the bride.







J. N. Green & Ida May Bowden
On Sunday, the 20th day of February, 1898, Reverend E. M. Owen married Ida Mae Bowden and Judge Nathan Green.  (Judge was his name, not his occupation.)  It looks like both of their families lived down well south of the Clio/Owens/Holder area, making them the couple the furthest to the south of all of Erasmus' marriages.  (Unless, of course, some of those earlier brides/grooms actually did live near Indian Creek and Blanket.)











T. L. Dewbre & Gertie Boland
On Sunday, the 24th of April, 1898, Reverend E. M. Owen married Thomas Dewbre and Mahala Gertie Boland.  Erasmus had married Thomas' brother two years prior; his family lived near the town center of May.  The Boland family lived about three miles to the southeast of Erasmus; I'm not sure if that area was considered a part of the Wolf Valley or May community.  The bride's mother would pass away the following year, so it is possible that Erasmus performed her funeral before he moved from Brown County.










E. L. Stevens & Rhoda Womack
On Wednesday, the 30th day of November, 1898, Reverend E. M. Owen married Eddie Lee Stevens and Rhoda Womack.  Neither family owned any land, but a year and a half after their marriage, both this couple and the bride's widowed mother were farming on rented land somewhere in the Rising Star area, so that is probably where they were living before their marriage as well.  











W. R. Plummer & Eula B. Garrett
On Sunday, the 27th day of August, 1899, reverend E. M. Owen married Walter Plummer and Eula Belle Garrett.  This was the last couple he married in Brown County, Texas.  The families of both the bride and groom lived just to the west of May.  The groom's brother had died in 1894 (back when the family was living down in the Clio/Owens/Holder area - he is buried in the Pleasant Valley Cemetery) so Erasmus probably conducted that funeral as well.











Wow.  That took forever!  I wanted to check out the marriage records from Eastland County as well, just in case Erasmus happened to marry anyone while he was up in Rising Star, but wouldn't you know, they aren't online anywhere.  (Those west Texas rural counties have very few records online.)  From the Brown County records, we can see that Erasmus performed marriages on every day of the week except Tuesday and Friday, although he only performed one marriage on a Saturday in the entire decade.  Sunday was by far the most popular day for the marriages to take place, probably because the couple would just stay after the church service and get married.  (Most marriages in the past were not conducted in churches and there was no party to celebrate unless the family was wealthy.  Oftentimes, the bride and groom would just drive their wagon up to the front door of the preacher's house and he would come out and marry them without them even stepping down from the wagon!)  Anyway, Erasmus married couples from the May, Wolf Valley, and Pleasant Grove (Clio/Owens/Holder) areas on Sundays.  And, for some reason, Thursday was the most popular day for couples from Wolf Valley and Rising Star.  In addition to the weddings, Erasmus was likely involved with helping quite a few bereaved families bury their loved ones.  I sorted the cemetery records for the six cemeteries closest to where these families lived, and came up with sixteen persons who died during the 1890's (on top of the ten already mentioned up above) who shared surnames with individuals who were married by Erasmus in the 1880's.  (I'm sure there were more; I was just doing a quick scan.)

I'm going to put up a map now so you can visualize the vast area over which Erasmus ministered to his flock(s).  Remember, this is just for the 1890's - we'll do this again when we go back to his first decade in Brown County!  I combined a Brown County map with the bottom portion of a map of Eastland County so we can see the Rising Star area as well.  (The border between the two is highlighted in yellow.)  Once again, I marked the land that Erasmus was living on during this time period in purple.  Yellow is the land he also owned during the 1890's.  Indigo is the land that he owned for a few years before donating a portion to the Wolf Valley school district and then selling the rest to his son-in-law, Ben Mallory.  I already marked his 1880's land down beneath May since I am planning on using the same map and just adding the 1880's marriages to it later.  You'll notice that there is an orange box up north of the town of Rising Star; I just discovered that Erasmus owned that piece of land as well, but only for a short period of time.  We'll talk a bit about that later.  The faint red line running south from May to the town of Holder shows that in Erasmus' day there used to be a road between the two towns.  Now for the map:

1961 Highway Map
Brown County, Texas


Okay.  Next time, we are going to finish up the 1890's so that we can work our way backwards to the 1880's before going back even further and looking at the San Saba County era of Erasmus' life.  See you then!

                                                                                                                                                - Therese



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