Michel Branamour Menard (1805-1856)

Michel Branamour Menard, Indian trader, entrepreneur, and founder of the Galveston City Company, the only son of Michel B. and Marguerite (de Noyer) Menard, was born on December 5, 1805, at La Prairie, near Montreal, Quebec. The illiterate youth became an engagé of the American Fur Company at Detroit about 1820 and worked in the Minnesota area for two years. In 1822 he joined his uncle, Pierre Menard, former lieutenant governor of Illinois, in the fur trade at Kaskaskia, where he learned to read and write French and eventually English. While working for Menard, he became a resident trader to a band of Shawnees living near Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. He was chosen a chief and moved with the tribe to the White River in Arkansas Territory and later, in 1828, to the Red River below Pecan Point. On December 1, 1829, Menard applied for citizenship in Nacogdoches, where he continued to collect skins and furs from the Shawnees and other Indians. He also began trading at Saltillo, Coahuila, exchanging horses, mules, and permits to locate Texas land for manufactured goods. By 1834 he owned 40,000 acres scattered from the lower Trinity River above Liberty to Pecan Point. He built a combination sawmill and gristmill on Menard Creek in 1833, which he operated with the aid of his cousin, Pierre J. Menard, and other relatives who moved to Texas. He continued to send forest products to Menard and Vallé and the American Fur Company until 1836.

Menard represented Liberty County at the Convention of 1836 and, though he believed independence impractical, bowed to majority will and signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. President David G. Burnet named him to negotiate a peace treaty with the Shawnees, Delawares, and Kickapoos in northeastern Texas. Among Menard's land speculations was the 1834 arrangement to acquire title to a league and labor on the eastern end of vacant Galveston Island, a site forbidden to non-Hispanic Texans without permission from the president of Mexico. Menard was unable to develop it prior to 1836, and his title was questioned by rival claimants during the First Congress of the Republic of Texas. He had to pay the republic $50,000 to clear his title and had to take in many other partners besides the original investors, Samuel May Williams and Thomas F. McKinney. The Galveston City Company was organized in April 1838 and began issuing deeds to investors and purchasers. Menard, as Texas commissioner, unsuccessfully sought a loan from the United States for the new republic in 1836–37 and represented Galveston in the Fifth Congress, 1840–41.

He married four times. His first wife, Marie Diana LeClerc of St. Genevieve, whom he married about 1832, died of cholera aboard a ship en route to Texas from New Orleans on May 14, 1833. He married his second cousin, Adeline Catherine Maxwell, in late 1837, but she died during the yellow fever epidemic in Galveston in July 1838. Next he wed Mary Jane Riddle in 1843; she died in 1847. His fourth wife was Rebecca Mary Bass, a widow with two daughters whom Menard adopted in 1850, the same year the couple became parents of a son. Menard struggled to make his speculations and businesses more profitable, but financial reverses in 1856 finally hurt him severely. Menard was a Catholic and a Mason and was known as a great raconteur. No two accounts of his life are the same, due to his prodigious tales to friends and family. He died at home in Galveston on September 2, 1856, and was buried in the Catholic Cemetery in Galveston. Source

Old Catholic Cemetery
Galveston

29° 17.574, -094° 48.738

Isaac Van Dorn (1801?-1860)

Isaac Van Dorn (Vandorn), one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, was born in Pennsylvania about 1801. At the age of fourteen he was indentured to a farmer for seven years, whom he eventually left. He traveled first to Kentucky and by 1822 to Texas, where he sojourned first at San Felipe de Austin and the Cedar Lake area before settling on Live Oak Creek in what is now Matagorda County. In July 1826 he petitioned for land in the Austin colony, and on April 14, 1828, with partner Daniel E. Balis as one of the Old Three Hundred families, received title to a sitio of land on Caney and Live Oak creeks, now in southeastern Matagorda County. In January 1827 Van Dorn attended a meeting supporting the Mexican constitution and condemning the Fredonian Rebellion. In February 1830 one Isaac "Vandoin" (probably Van Dorn) was serving as síndico procurador at the regular meeting of the ayuntamiento of San Felipe de Austin. In June 1832 Van Dorn fought in Aylett C. Buckner's company at the battle of Velasco. He was a member of the committee of safety and correspondence at Matagorda in October 1835 and in December was recommended by Joseph W. E. Wallace to Henry Smith as a lieutenant in the artillery. On May 3, 1837, Van Dorn married Amanda Malvina Reader of Adams County, Mississippi; the couple had ten children and were members of Christ Episcopal Church in Matagorda. In July 1837 Van Dorn was elected the first sheriff of Matagorda County, and in late January 1840 he was appointed a commissioner to examine for fraudulent land title claims in the county. In the 1850 census he reported owning three slaves. He died on May 30, 1860, and is buried in the Matagorda Cemetery. Source

Section D
Matagorda Cemetery
Matagorda

28° 42.011, -095° 57.330

William Jarvis Cannan (1808-1881)

William Jarvis Cannan, soldier at the battle of San Jacinto, was born in Edgefield, South Carolina, in 1808 and moved to Texas in 1835. He was in the Texas army from March 1 to November 1, 1836, and took part at San Jacinto as a private in Company H, First Regiment of Texas Volunteers, under Robert Stevenson. For his service Cannan was granted a bounty warrant for 640 acres in Brazoria County. In 1837 he married Matilda Jane Lonis. They had four sons and a daughter. After his wife's death at Brazoria in 1850, Cannan married Parmelia A. Wilcox; they became the parents of three sons and a daughter. Throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction era, the Cannan family figured prominently in the Texas cotton trade. Cannan died in September 1881 and was buried in the Oyster Creek Cemetery four miles from Velasco. Source

Hudgins Cemetery
Oyster Creek

29° 00.477, -095° 18.986

Isaac Herbert Kempner (1873-1967)

I. H. Kempner, millionaire investor and one of the originators of the commission form of city government, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the oldest son of eleven children of Elizabeth (Seinsheimer) and Harris Kempner. His father had emigrated from Poland, worked as a day laborer in New York, and eventually gone into the cotton warehouse business in Galveston. Kempner attended Washington and Lee University in Virginia until his father's death in 1894 forced him to drop out at age twenty-one and take over the family enterprises. He and his brother Daniel expanded the Kempner cotton business and branched out into real estate speculation. Kempner was elected a director of the Galveston Cotton Exchange and served continuously as either director, president, or vice president of that organization for nearly fifty years. He served as Galveston finance commissioner from 1901 to 1915 and as mayor from 1917 to 1919. In 1906 he and W. T. Eldridge acquired a 12,000-acre sugar mill, plantation, and refinery in Sugar Land. They operated under various names from that time, continually expanding their control over the sugar-refining industry, until they held a virtual monopoly by the 1930s. After Eldridge's death in 1932 the Kempners consolidated this venture under family ownership and the name Imperial Sugar Company. Kempner and his youngest brother, Stanley, also took over the Texas Prudential Insurance Company. The brothers were active in banking and held a controlling interest in United States National Bank in Galveston, where Lee Kempner was CEO. In 1902 Kempner married Henrietta Blum; they had five children. Kempner died on August 1, 1967, in Galveston and was buried in the Hebrew Benevolent Society Cemetery there. Source

Hebrew Benevolent Society Cemetery
Galveston

29° 17.566, -094° 48.841