Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803-1870)

    Sam Maverick, land baron and legislator, was born at Pendleton, South Carolina, on July 23, 1803, the son of Samuel and Elizabeth (Anderson) Maverick. He spent his earliest years primarily in Charleston, but in 1810 the family moved to Pendleton, where Maverick's father established a plantation and devoted much of his energy to buying land in South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia. Maverick was educated at home until age eighteen, when he left South Carolina and spent a summer studying under a tutor at Ripton, Connecticut, in preparation for entry to Yale University. He entered the sophomore class at Yale in September 1822 and graduated in 1825. He returned to Pendleton, started handling some of his father's business affairs, and developed an eye for land and a careful business sense. In 1828 he traveled to Winchester, Virginia, and studied law under noted jurist Henry St. George Tucker. Maverick received his Virginia law license on March 26, 1829. He returned to Pendleton in 1829 and opened a law office. He ran for the South Carolina legislature in 1830, but his anti-secession and anti-nullification views contributed to his defeat and led him to leave the state in 1833. He settled temporarily in Georgia, then on a plantation in Lauderdale County, Alabama, before moving to Texas in March 1835. Maverick arrived in Texas eager to start building his own land empire, but the Texas Revolution was rapidly developing. He reached San Antonio shortly before the siege of Bexar began and was soon put under house arrest with John W. Smith and A. C. Holmes on the orders of Mexican general Martín Perfecto de Cos. Forbidden to leave the city, Maverick kept a diary that provides a vivid record of the siege.

    He and Smith were released on December 1 and quickly made their way to the besiegers' camp, where they urged an immediate attack. When an attack was finally made on December 5, Maverick guided Benjamin R. Milam's division. He remained in San Antonio after the siege and in February was elected one of two delegates from the Alamo garrison to the independence convention scheduled for March 1, 1836, at Washington-on-the-Brazos. He left the embattled garrison on March 2 and arrived at the convention on March 5. While serving there, Maverick contracted a severe attack of chills and fever. After the delegates dispersed, he made his way to Nacogdoches; then, ill and aware that he was needed on family business, he departed for Alabama about the time of Sam Houston's victory at San Jacinto. In Alabama, Maverick met Mary Ann Adams, and married her on August 4, 1836, at her widowed mother's plantation near Tuscaloosa. The couple divided their time between Alabama and Pendleton until late 1837, when with their first-born, Samuel Maverick, Jr., and a small retinue of slaves, they started for Texas. In June 1838 they established a home in San Antonio. Maverick obtained his Texas law license, engaged in West Texas land speculation, and served as the city's mayor in 1839. He followed his term as mayor with a term as treasurer and continued to serve on the city council until the Mavericks joined the "Runaway of '42," a move based on rumors of pending Mexican invasion of San Antonio. They settled temporarily near Gonzales, but Maverick returned to San Antonio for the fall term of district court and was one of the prisoners taken by Mexican general Adrián Woll.

    He was released from Perote Prison in April 1843 through the intervention of United States minister to Mexico Waddy Thompson. Upon his return, Maverick, who had been elected to the Seventh Congress of the Republic of Texas, served in the Eighth Congress and was a strong advocate of annexation to the United States. In late 1844 he moved his growing family to Decrows (Decros) Point on Matagorda Bay, where they lived until October 1847. When he returned permanently to San Antonio with his family, Maverick left a small herd of cattle originally purchased in 1847 on Matagorda Peninsula with slave caretakers. It was this herd that was allowed to wander and gave rise to the term maverick, which denotes an unbranded calf. In 1854 Maverick and his two eldest sons rounded up the cattle and drove them to their Conquista Ranch near the site of present Floresville before selling them in 1856. During the years between Maverick's return to San Antonio and his death, he expanded his West Texas landholdings, which in 1851 totaled almost 140,000 acres. By 1864 they had burgeoned to more than 278,000 acres, and at his death they topped 300,000 acres. Maverick gained land primarily by buying such land certificates as headright certificates and bounty and donation certificates.

    In the 1850s and 1860s he was one of the two biggest investors in West Texas acreage, and Maverick County was named in his honor. He served as a Democrat in the Fourth through Ninth state legislatures (1851-63). There he worked to ensure equal opportunity for his Mexican and German constituents, to foster fair and liberal laws for land acquisition and ownership, to develop transportation and other internal state improvements, to provide protection for the frontier, and to ensure a fair and efficient judicial system. He also worked until the outbreak of the Civil War to stem the tide of secessionism, but, seeing that a conflict was inevitable, threw his support to the Confederacy. He was one of three secession commissioners appointed by the Texas Secession Convention, and the three successfully effected the removal of federal troops and the transfer of federal stores in Texas to the state government. During the war he was elected chief justice of Bexar County and served a second term as San Antonio mayor. After the war he received a presidential pardon and was active in attempts to combat the radical Republican regime in Reconstruction Texas. He died on September 2, 1870, after a brief illness. Surviving him were his wife and five of his ten children. Maverick, an Episcopalian, was buried in San Antonio's City Cemetery Number 1. Source


City Cemetery #1
San Antonio

COORDINATES

29° 25.222, -098° 28.034

Aubrey Wilson "Moon" Mullican (1909-1967)

    Moon Mullican, "King of the Hillbilly Piano Players" was born Aubrey Wilson Mullican near Corrigan or Moscow in Polk County, Texas, on March 29, 1909. He was the son of Oscar Luther and Virginia (Jordan) Mullican. He lived on his family's eighty-seven-acre farm at Corrigan during his childhood and developed his musical skills on a pump organ his father purchased around 1917. The elder Mullican, a deeply religious man, wanted his children to learn sacred music. Though Moon served as a church organist during his teens, he developed an interest in blues music and learned to play the guitar with instruction from a black farmer. Impressed also by pianists who performed in local juke joints, Mullican developed a distinctive two-finger right-handed piano style that became his trademark. Much to the chagrin of his father, he began to play for dances as a teenager and aspired to become a professional musician. When he was about sixteen years old he moved to Houston and worked as a piano player for establishments that some observers characterized as "houses of ill repute." Sleeping by day and working evenings, Mullican may have received his nickname for his nocturnal habits during this period. For a time in the 1930s he performed with his own band in clubs and on the radio in Southeast Texas and Louisiana.

    Later in that decade and in the 1940s he became associated with bands that performed the western swing music made famous by Bob Wills. Mullican played and sang this music with the Blue Ridge Playboys, a band that included such pioneers as Pappy Selph, Floyd Tillman, and Ted Daffan; he later worked with Cliff Bruner's bands, the Texas Wanderers and the Showboys. While with Bruner, a former member of Milton Brown's Musical Brownies, Mullican sang the lead vocal on the classic Truck Driver's Blues in 1939. That same year he traveled to Hollywood, where he played a role in the movie Village Barn Dance. He also led the band that performed with James Houston Davis during the latter's successful campaign for the Louisiana governor's office in 1944. By 1947 Mullican, who had made his first recording in 1931, had signed a contract with King Records of Cincinnati, Ohio. With King he recorded two songs, Harry Choates's New Jole Blon (1947) and I'll Sail My Ship Alone (1950), that sold over a million copies each. The King recordings, which numbered 100, featured Mullican's smooth vocals and a piano style that merged swing, blues, honky-tonk, Cajun, ragtime, pop, and country music. During his years with the King label (1947 to 1956), Mullican had great success with such best-selling recordings as Sweeter than the Flowers (1948), Huddie Ledbetter's Goodnight Irene (1950), Mona Lisa (1950), and Cherokee Boogie (1951), which he coauthored with W. C. Redbird. He was less successful commercially with Foggy River, Sugar Beet, Well Oh Well, Moon's Tune, Good Deal Lucille, You Don't Have to Be a Baby to Cry, Rocket to the Moon, A Thousand and One Sleepless Nights, and others. In some of the King recording sessions Mullican was accompanied by a rock-and-roll band that featured a saxophone player.

    In 1949 he joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, where he was probably the first singing piano player to perform as a solo act on a regular basis. He remained with the show until 1955. During his career he traveled and performed across the United States as well as in Europe and Vietnam and entertained with such well-known artists as Hank Williams, Ernie Ford, and Red Foley. At one stage in his career, Mullican had his own radio show on station KECK in Odessa. He also appeared as a guest on the ABC television program Jubilee U.S.A. and entertained periodically on the Big D Jamboree in Dallas. Mullican, who in conjunction with partners owned several nightclubs in Texas, served as a supporting musician on more than 200 recordings by other performers. The legendary singer Jim Reeves was a member of a Mullican band that played in the Beaumont region during the late 1940s. In 1958-59 Mullican recorded in Nashville for the Coral label, a subsidiary of Decca Records. His records for Coral were remakes of songs that he had previously performed for King, as well as such new releases as Moon's Rock, I Don't Know Why (I Just Do), Jenny Lee, Sweet Rockin' Music, and The Writin' on the Wall. Hoping to benefit from the ascendancy of rock-and-roll in the United States, Coral sought to incorporate this style with the more traditional honky-tonk, swing, and blues forms that had made Mullican a star. However, the Coral recordings achieved virtually no commercial success and little critical acclaim. Some observers believe that Mullican's strongest performances for Coral consisted of the songs that he performed in the more conventional country style, as opposed to the newer sound. From 1960 to 1963 Moon was a member of Jimmie Davis's band. He recorded for several minor companies at various times in his career. He made his final hit record, Ragged but Right, on the Starday label in 1961. He also recorded a few songs such as Quarter Mile Rows, Colinda, Mr. Tears, Make Friends, and This Glass I Hold, for the Hall–Way label in Beaumont between 1962 and 1964. Though his health declined in the 1960s, when he underwent several illnesses, he continued to perform. On January 1, 1967, he died of a heart attack at his home in Beaumont. Source

Section 19
Magnolia Cemetery
Beaumont

COORDINATES

30° 06.338, -094° 06.080

Zeno Phillips (1802-1835)

    Zeno Philips, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, on July 19, 1824, received title to a sitio of land in what is now Brazoria County. The census of March 1826 classified him as a farmer and stock raiser, a single man aged between twenty-five and forty, with one servant and twenty-two slaves. In March 1829 Philips and John R. Harris acted as partners in one of the first large contracts for cotton in Texas, when they bought about 100 bales from Jared E. Groce. Philips was a lieutenant colonel in the local militia in August 1829. The same year he was defeated as a candidate for regidor. In December 1830 he was administering the estate of Joseph White. Source

Note: Unmarked. This small field was originally the site of the Phillips family cemetery. Although there were once several stones, none exist now. Outside of the historical marker at the gate, nothing remains that denotes this as a burying ground. 


Phillips Family Cemetery
West Columbia

COORDINATES

29° 09.202, -095° 42.439

John Hancock (1824-1893)

    John Hancock, congressman and judge, son of John Allen Hancock, was born near Bellefonte, Alabama, on October 24, 1824. After attending the University of East Tennessee at Knoxville, he worked on his father's Alabama farm before he began to study law at Winchester, Tennessee. He was admitted to the Alabama bar in 1846, then moved to Austin, Texas, in January 1847 and began a lucrative law practice. In 1851 he was elected district judge of the Second Judicial District for a term of six years; he resigned at the end of four years to resume his law practice and engage in planting and stock raising. He earned a high reputation for soundness of legal opinion and promptness in dispatch of business. Hancock was elected to the Texas legislature as a Unionist in 1860. 

    During the Civil War he was an avowed Union man but took no part in active hostilities. In March 1861 as a member of the legislature he declined to take the oath of allegiance to the Confederate States and was expelled from the legislature. He practiced in the state courts but refused to conduct any legal business in the Confederate courts or in any way to recognize their validity or constitutionality. In 1864 he left Texas for Mexico, where he remained for several months. He was in New Orleans at the time of Robert E. Lee's surrender, whereupon he returned to Texas. Hancock was a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1866 and was conspicuous in that body for his efforts in favor of reconciliation and the restoration of the Southern states to the Union. He declined nomination to Congress in 1870 but subsequently ran on the Democratic ticket and was elected to the Forty-second Congress; he served from 1871 to 1877. He returned in the Forty-eighth Congress, 1883-85. He supported the Indian peace policy of the Grant administration, which called for placing Indians on reservations under government supervision. Hancock married Susan E. Richardson in November 1855. He was a member of the Episcopal Church. He died on July 19, 1893, in Austin, and was buried in Oakwood Cemetery. Source

Section 3
Oakwood Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 16.605, -097° 43.580