Robert Allan Shivers (1907-1985)

    Allan Shivers, governor of Texas, was born on October 5, 1907, in Lufkin, Texas, the son of Robert Andrew and Easter (Creasy) Shivers, and spent his early childhood at Magnolia Hills, the family home near Woodville. By the age of thirteen he was "doing a man's job" after school and during the summer at a nearby sawmill. When his father moved to Port Arthur, Shivers completed his secondary schooling, graduating from Port Arthur High School in 1924. He then entered the University of Texas, intent upon becoming a lawyer like his father. At the end of his first year he dropped out of school to work at an oil refinery in Port Arthur. But by 1928 he had re-entered the University of Texas, determined to participate fully in campus life and to graduate. He ran for and was elected president of the Students' Association and was a member of the Friars, the Cowboys, and Delta Theta Phi law fraternity. In 1931 Shivers graduated with a B. A. degree and also passed the state bar exam, although he did not receive his LL. B. degree until two years later. He engaged in private law practice in Port Arthur until 1934, when he was elected as a Democrat to the state senate, at age twenty-seven the youngest member ever to sit in that body. In 1937 he married Marialice Shary of Mission, whose father, John H. Shary, was a prominent citrus fruit grower, cattleman, banker, and realtor in the Rio Grande valley. In 1943 Shivers entered the United States Army and during the next 2½ years served with the Allied Military Government in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany.

    Upon his discharge from the army in 1945 with the rank of major (with five battle stars and the Bronze Star), Shivers became general manager of his father-in-law's business enterprises. But he soon decided to pursue an ambitious political career. In 1946 he ran for and was elected state lieutenant governor; he was reelected two years later. Together with Democratic Governor Beauford H. Jester, Shivers helped bring Texas into the twentieth century. As lieutenant governor he initiated the practice of appointing senators to specific committees and setting the daily agenda. Subsequently, the Senate passed a right-to-work law, reorganized the public school system with the Gilmer-Aikin Laws, appropriated funds for higher education, including the Texas State University for Negroes (now Texas Southern University), and provided monies for improvements of state hospitals and highways. On July 11, 1949, Beauford Jester died; subsequently Shivers assumed the governorship, which he held effectively for the next 7½ years. During his tenure he pushed through significant legislation as well as reforms of state government. He helped create the Legislation Council, which researches and drafts bills, and the Legislative Budget Board, which sets the budget for legislative consideration. Shivers also expanded state services by pushing tax increases through the legislature. His administrations thus augmented appropriations for eleemosynary institutions, retirement benefits for state employees, aid for the elderly, teacher salaries, and improvements for roads and bridges. During his terms of office the legislature also enacted laws pertaining to safety inspection and driver responsibility, legislative redistricting in 1951 (the first in thirty years), and the expansion of juries and grand juries to include women in January 1955. But Shivers was probably best known for defending state claims to the Tidelands against the Truman administration and his break with the national Democratic party over this issue. As a result, he was instrumental in delivering the state's electoral votes in 1952 to Republican nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower and the subsequent congressional approval in 1953 of the state's claim to the Tidelands.

    During the last years of his governorship, his popularity diminished. Because of his support of Eisenhower in 1952 he was accused of disloyalty to the Democratic party. He also lost support for his opposition to Brown v Board of Education, which legally ended segregation. And even though Shivers was never implicated in any way, his administration became tainted with corruption because of state scandals involving insurance and veterans' lands. After retiring from politics in January 1957, Shivers served in a number of capacities. He actively managed vast business enterprises in the valley, which his wife inherited. He served on the board of directors or as chairman for a number of banks, including the Austin National Bank (later Interfirst Bank Austin) and Texas Commerce Bank. He was president of the United States Chamber of Commerce and, for a time, chairman of the advisory board of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. In 1973 Shivers was a appointed to a six-year term to the University of Texas Board of Regents, whereupon he served as chairman for four years. During this time he donated his Austin home, the historic Pease mansion, to the university to help raise funds for the UT law school. In 1980 he was instrumental in securing a $5 million grant for the UT College of Communications, which soon thereafter established an endowed chair of journalism in his honor. On January 14, 1985, Shivers died suddenly from a massive heart attack. He was survived by wife Marialice, three sons and a daughter, and ten grandchildren. Source

Republic Hill
Texas State Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 15.908, -097° 43.640

Johnson Calhoun Hunter (1787-1855)

    Johnson C. Hunter, early Texas doctor and one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, was born in South Carolina on May 22, 1787. He received a diploma in medicine about 1805. In 1813 he and his wife, the former Martha Herbert of Virginia, were living in Circleville, Ohio, where Hunter practiced medicine, taught school, had a mercantile business, and acted as county judge. He moved to New Madrid, Missouri, in 1817. In 1821, after the earthquake there, he made an exploratory trip to Texas, going as far as San Antonio, where he left a supply of medicines with Juan Martín Veramendi. On that trip he selected land near the Nacogdoches Road crossing of the Colorado River. The vessel bringing the Hunter family, including five children, to Texas was wrecked on Galveston Island in June 1822. After repairing the boat the Hunters proceeded to land at the future site of Morgan's Point or New Washington. 

    From his cypress-bark home on Sylvan Beach near the mouth of the San Jacinto River, Hunter sailed the Santa María of San Jacinto and, after its loss, the Adventure, to bring supplies to the colonists. He also traded in bear oil and skins, acted as a surveyor (and as such had disagreements with Enoch Brinson, John Iiams, and John R. Harris, and practiced medicine; one of his patients was the widow McCormick, with whom a quarrel over a bill furnished several documents in the Austin Papers. As one of the Old Three Hundred, Hunter received title to a sitio of land now in Harris County on August 10, 1824. The census of 1826 listed him as a farmer and stock raiser with a household including his wife, four sons, two daughters, and three servants. In 1829 Hunter moved to land now in Fort Bend County, bought part of the Randal Jones survey, and developed the Hunter plantation on Oyster Creek. For fifty years the Hunter home was a landmark in the Richmond area. The family retreated from the plantation at the time of the Runaway Scrape, and the Mexican army camped there for three days; both Mexican and Texan troops subsisted on cattle belonging to Hunter. In October 1836 Hunter was postmaster at Rocky Well, on the road between San Felipe and Liberty. He died at his plantation on May 29, 1855, and was buried in the Brick Church Graveyard. Source

Section I
Brick Church Graveyard
Richmond

COORDINATES

29° 39.931, -095° 45.194

John Grant Tod (1808-1877)

    John Grant Tod, Sr., naval officer and one of the founders of the first railroad in Texas, was born on November 14, 1808, near Lexington, Kentucky, the youngest of the nine children of Scottish immigrants William and Margaret Tod. He attended Kentucky schools, left home at the age of seventeen, and traveled down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where he joined the Mexican navy. Some years later, through the influence of Henry Clay, he was commissioned a midshipman in the United States Navy; he served on a training ship in the Caribbean from 1830 to 1833. A fever he contracted on that duty led to his medical discharge from service in 1836. A year later he arrived in Texas with letters of introduction to Samuel Rhoads Fisher, secretary of the Texas Navy. He served briefly as a customs inspector at Velasco while he pursued a commission in the fledgling navy of the republic, which at that time was under the command of Edwin Moore and consisted of three vessels. Tod was appointed a naval inspector in 1838, charged with investigating supply purchases at the Galveston naval station, and from 1838 to 1840 was one of the Texas Navy's purchasing agents in Baltimore. In that capacity he oversaw the construction and outfitting of the ships that became known as the "second navy." In July 1839 he was appointed a commander in the navy and the following year was placed in command of the naval station at Galveston. From November to December of 1840 he also served as acting secretary of the navy.

    In 1842, in the midst of controversy over the faltering navy's finances, Tod resigned his post and went to Washington to further his own interests and to act as a lobbyist for the republic. Among other issues he lobbied the state department for annexation, although he apparently was not acting in any official capacity. In 1845 he returned to Texas carrying the official notification of annexation. During the Mexican War Tod served in the United States Navy and as an agent of the United States quartermaster general at the Brazos Santiago Depot and at New Orleans. Among other duties, he superintended the recommissioning of old Texas Navy vessels for United States service. In 1847 he resigned from the service and set out for Mexico, hoping to find some profitable business. He tried but failed to win the government mail contract for the New Orleans-Veracruz line. He returned to the United States in 1849. During the late 1840s Tod also began corresponding with Sidney Sherman over the need for railroads in Texas. By 1852 Sherman and Tod, together with eastern capitalists including John Barrett and John Angier of Boston, had founded the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway. Tod remained a principal in the company until the late 1860s. He served intermittently as treasurer and, as one of the few local shareholders, helped oversee construction and operation of the railroad. 

    In 1851 he was appointed the Texas delegate to the London Industrial Exhibition. He served as assistant state engineer and river-work superintendent in 1857 and for two years supervised improvements on the Guadalupe and Colorado rivers. Just before the Civil War Tod worked for the federal government as assistant superintendent of construction of the Galveston customhouse and post office. During this time he also began to develop several business interests along Dickinson Bayou in Galveston County. His Dickinson Packery, financed initially with money from a northern partner, continued to operate on a limited basis throughout the Civil War, even supplying beef to the Confederate Army. After the war the business prospered for a while, but was bankrupt by 1871. Tod married Abigail Fisher West of Delaware on July 1, 1851, in Baltimore; they were the parents of three children. They lived in Galveston, Houston, and Richmond before moving to Harrisburg in 1866. Tod died at Harrisburg on August 14, 1877, and was buried in the family cemetery there. Source 


Glendale Cemetery
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 43.180, -095° 16.460

John Tennant Balch (1812-1900)

    John Balch, San Jacinto veteran, was born September 6, 1812 in Greene County, Tennessee. He and his brother came to Texas from Maryland in April, 1835, and on October 7, John joined the army. He participated in the Storming and Capture of Bexar as part of John York's Company in December, 1835, and fought at the historic Battle of San Jacinto under Alfred H. Wyly on April 21, 1836. After San Jacinto, Balch left the service and married Elizabeth Rogers in Nacogdoches County on January 21, 1841. He was awarded a land grant for his service to the Republic and used this to acquire property in Dallas County around the springs between Mesquite and Kleberg. He moved to the town of Chireno in Nacogdoches County later in life and died there on June 3, 1900. He was buried in Cove Springs Cemetery in Nacogdoches.


Cove Springs Cemetery
Nacogdoches County

COORDINATES

31° 33.953, -094° 25.489

Sarah Emma Edmundson Seelye (1841-1898)

    Sarah Seelye was born Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmundson in New Brunswick province, Canada, in December 1841. To avoid an unwanted marriage, she ran away from home when she was seventeen, disguised as a boy. She continued her male masquerade as a publisher's agent in the midwestern United States and, on May 25, 1861, enlisted in Company F, Second Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment, under the alias Franklin Thompson. For nearly two years she served in the Union Army undetected, with assignments including male nurse, regimental mail orderly, and brigade postmaster, and on special assignments for the secret service. Ironically, in the secret service duty she penetrated Confederate lines "disguised" as a woman. Fearing her guise would be discovered when she became ill with malaria in 1863, she deserted and resumed a normal existence in Ohio as a female. After regaining her health she again volunteered as a nurse, but this time with the Christian Sanitary Commission at Harper's Ferry, and as a female.

    Under a shortened version of her maiden name, S. Emma E. Edmonds, she wrote a fanciful, but highly successful, account of her experiences in the army, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army (1865). The popularity and exposure she gained from the book and its revelation that she had deserted the army at one time led the government to cancel her pension. She later married a childhood neighbor, Linus Seelye, and reportedly had five children, three of whom died in infancy. A congressional bill in 1884 recognized her service to the Union and granted her a pension of twelve dollars a month. The charge of desertion from the army was removed by Congress in 1886. In the early 1890s the Seelye family moved to La Porte, Texas, and on April 22, 1897, Sarah Seelye became a member of the McClellan Post, Grand Army of the Republic, in Houston, Texas - the only woman member in the history of the GAR, though as many as four hundred women may actually have served in the Union army. At the time of her death Seelye was writing her memoirs of the Civil War. She died in La Porte, Texas, on September 5, 1898. Three years later, at the insistence of her fellow members of the McClellan Post, her remains were transferred to the GAR plot in the Washington (German) Cemetery in Houston. Source 

Note: Her last name is spelled incorrectly on her stone.

Section B
Washington Cemetery
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 45.873, -095° 23.307