Grimes County News

Home Page | Our Ancestors | Cemetery Page | Veterans Page | Census Page

		Grimes County In the News

TXGenWeb Project USGenWeb Project

Anderson Courthouse Shooting 1900

Submitted by Kathy Day

Items found in the New York Times

April 1, 1853- pg. 3 - under Texas News

The Leon Pioneer of the 23d ult has the following paragraphs: The new County of Madison includes six hundred square miles of territory, the greater part of which is out of the territory of Grimes County.

Nov. 20, 1866- Under Political Items- pg. 2

The Central Texas Record states that Judge Caldwell addressed the citizens at Anderson Texas on the 1st inst. And adds:
“He urged the adoption of the Amendments to the Constitution and other Radical measures, as the only means by which the Southern states can gain their readmission into the Union. We were pleased at the respectful attention paid him by the large audience assembled to hear a real Radical speak, as it gives the lie to the assertion that his party have trumpeted all over the North, that ‘Union men dare not address a Texas audience for fear of being hung.”

March, 2, 1868- pg. 5 - under Shooting and Lynching in Texas

We copy from the Galveston News- “The Texas Ranger says D. McKinney, lately from Austin, shot Clay Searcy, Esq. Of Anderson in Navasota on the 13th. McKinney is reported to be a desperado, and the Ranger says he behaved in an outrageous manner towards Searcy before shooting him. During the preceding of the same day, he had drawn his pistol on several barkeepers for refusing to furnish him with liquor without pay. Searcy was not killed, but we presume he cannot recover. McKinney was sent to jail at Anderson. The Ranger tells the Mayor Jones sent a party to Anderson to bring down McKinney for trial. On the way back with the prisoner, in a strip of woods, the guard was halted by a crowd of 60 armed men. They were ordered to lay down their arms and give up their prisoner. When the guard remonstrated, they were ordered peremptorily to bush up. The men were all distinguished and blackened and all spoke in broken English and Dutch. McKinney was hung to a limb and the limb broke and he fell down. He was then tied securely and hung over ten feet high and left hanging.

Dec. 4, 1869- pg. 3

The counties of McLennan, Fort Bend, Walker, Bexar, Washington, Hill, Colorado, Montgomery, Brazoria, Bastrop, Grimes, Jackson, Bowie and Cass gave Davis an aggregate majority of 6822.

August 12, 1871 - pg 2

The cotton worm is reported in Grimes and Colorado Counties, Texas

June 15, 1873 - pg. 1 - Under Mail and Telegraph

Three squares in the business portion of Navasota, Texas were burned yesterday.

Pg. 8 - under Cholera in Texas- Awful Fatality in a family of Georgia Emigrants- from the Columbus (GA) Citizen

Through the politeness of Col. P.S. Holt of this city, we are enabled to lay before our readers, the following particulars of an awful calamity, which has recently befallen the family of Mr. George Moore, late of Crawford Co., GA who removed to Texas but a few weeks ago. The scene of disaster is Grimes County, Texas, near Anderson and the writer of the letter to Col. Holt is Mr. J.W. Barnes, formerly of Hancock Co., GA.
The family of Mr. Moore consisted of himself and wife; his son-in-law, Mr. Crute and wife; children and grandchildren to the number of 15 (whites) and about 60 blacks. They left New Orleans for Galveston on one of the steamships plying between the two places, sometime about the last of January or first of February, in company with over 400 other emigrants. On arrival at Galveston, Mr. Moore’s family took up their line of march for Grimes County, where he had a planting interest and whither his son, George Moore Jr., had preceded him a year ago. After passing Houston, the cholera broke out among the negroes, several of whom died on their way to Grimes County and several more after their arrival in the neighborhood. The disease was thus communicated to the white family, of whom 15 in number, all were attacked but Mrs. Crute and infant child, and of all attacked, on the 15th of February, the last date of the letter of Mr. Barnes. Twelve had died or all but a lad named “Gus” presumed to be “Augustus” but whether the son of Mr. Moore or an adopted child does not appear from the letter of Mr. B. Of the negroes, 50 out of the 60 had been attacked with the disease, of whom about 20 had died, at the time of the writing and the disease has communicated to the family of negroes who had previously been in Texas, one of whom “Bill” was dead and the disease still unsubdued. Mr. B does not state whether George Moore Jr. was one of the victims of the cholera, but we presume he was not or Mr. B would have particularly mentioned it.
Mr Barnes attributes this awful calamity to the fact of the emigrants being too crowded on the steamship, and to the filthy state of the negroes, department on board, together with their exposed situation after landing and during their winter traveling, destitute of the necessary medical attention and comforts of life, and he urgently warns his friends in Georgia from taking the New Orleans and Galveston route, declaring that the Fall and not the Winter, season is the proper time for emigration to Texas and the land route the only safe one. The following extract from the letter of Mr. Barnes, gives an appalling picture of the death-bed scene of that ill-fated family:
The white family were all confined in a log house on the place above mentioned, about 16 x 18 feet, but well-finished and tight, and on yesterday, my heart was made to bleed, indeed, at the awful scenes around me. I was requested by Moore to write his will and drew near where he was lying to give him my undivided attention while he was performing this important duty; and immediately after I began to write, he remarked to me, ‘to condense the matter as much as possible, for my time is short’ and true, it was, thought his mind was clear and collected, he grew worse very fast and more than once asked ‘to condense’ and the Doctor told me to do what I did quickly and just here the groans and ejaculations of a dying grandson (some twelve years of age) were uttered in tones too tender and pitiful to be unheeded by any in the range of his shattered voice, and among these cries was a request by his mother to ‘pray that I may die easy’ and again ‘Oh! Mother, meet me in heaven; Oh! mother, write to my aunt in Georgia, I am going to heaven; all of you must meet me in heaven’ ‘mother, are all of my little brothers and sisters gone in Heaven but me! All but my baby son! Well, ma, you must come and father, too.” The strain was kept up for more than an hour and besides this, here lay two sons, one on each side of a dying father, writhing with the agonies of “cramp” peculiar to cases, just before going into a collapse, and now and then would come up the deep and fervent prayer from an old and sainted mother and lamentations that would not fail to bring tears from a strangers eyes. Imagine the groans and half suppressed prayers of a daughter, whose father, brothers, and child were all dying about her, and she not hope left but that of herself, her mother and husband would soon be grappling with that ‘monster’ which could not be stayed and you will have a faint idea of Mrs. Crute’s situation at this juncture. Pardon me, my dear sir, if I have trespassed upon your feelings by communicating such unwelcome tidings and my apology is that I can think of nothing else, talk of nothing else, write of nothing else. My feelings and sympathies have been so much engaged for this poor family, I can think of but little else.

Mance Lipscomb, 80 A Blues Guitarist [No date given]

Mance Lipscomb, sharecropper blues singer and guitarist, was buried today in this small east Texas farming community where he died January 30 at the age of 80.
More than 100 friends and relatives visited the small wood frame house on the outskirts of town where he lived. Although he recorded several albums for a record company, Mr. Lipscomb earned little more than $1000 a year from royalties.
The son of a former Alabama slave, he helped support his sharecropping family of 10 brothers and sisters by laboring in the fields. He received his first guitar at the age of 13 from a traveling gambler, and he played the battered castoff at parties of black field hands beneath the trees along the river.
Mr. Lipscomb played blues, breakdowns and ballads, often earning less than “4 bits a night.” He mastered the bottleneck style, sliding the glass tube up and down the neck of his old guitar, “making it cry.” It took 50 years of playing before he was noticed by anyone outside of the river bottom. In 1960, two folklorists heard of the blues singer while driving through east Texas. They returned in two weeks and recorded 40 to 40 of Mr. Lipscomb’s songs and the next year, when he was 68, he took the first of several trips out of Texas to appear at the Berkeley California folk festival.

Grimes County In the News