Benjamin Franklin Greer

THE B. F. GREER FAMILY AND GREER RELATIVES

Benjamin Franklin Greer (1815-1865) married Sarah Ann Ellis (1832-1910) in Mississippi in 1847, and this family crossed the Mississippi River in 1857 n route to Texas where they settled briefly near Beaumont and then moved to Carolina area of Falls County near present-day Chilton. Three children had been born in Mississippi and the others in Texas. Ben left for he Civil War in 1863 but died in May 1865 from typhoid fever as he was returning through Tyler.

After Ben's death, Sarah began the task of farming the 313 acres which they had acquired north of Deer Creek in 1860 and 1861 and continued to rear heir children as best she could with the help of neighbors and relatives. In 1866, John Wilburn Greer purchased from the estate his cousin Ben's half interest in he farm, selling it back to the heirs in 1868 for $100. in the 1870s, Sarah married John W. Cranford, a widower 22 years her senior, but the union did not last beyond 1880. After the marriage of her youngest daughter Mittie Matilda to James Franklin Hackett in 1881, she made her home with the young couple until her death.

Sarah completed the rearing and education of her six children who were Fannie Ellen (1850-1902), Lou D'Aubra (1853-1937), Mattie Jane (1855-1905), Henry Franklin (1858-1911), John Crawford (1860- 1955), and Mittie Matilda (1863-1949). All six children married and raised their own families in Falls County. In early 1962, an incomplete survey of Ben and Sarah's descendants disclosed 233 individuals. Today many of these people's heirs live in the Marlin and Chilton areas, except for Mit's. The J. F. Hackett family review appears elsewhere.

Fannie married Luther S. Strother, Lou united with Elijah H. Hailey, Mattie exchanged vows with Nilliam D. Relf, Henry married Blanche Adams, John married Gennie Shook, and Mit united with Frank Hackett. Two couples are buried at Chilton, two in the Union Cemetery, and one couple each in the Carolina and Marlin Cemeteries.

Why did the Greer family move to Falls County? Aside from economic conditions, it appears that the earlier westward movement of both Ben's and Sarah's kinfolk contributed. Ben's older brother Asel Jr. had moved to Leon County prior to 1850, and various cousins had migrated from Mississippi to the Brazos Valley and elsewhere in Texas prior to the Civil War. Sarah's sister Lou and husband James Loftin had settled near Mooreville in 1854, and three of her brothers in the next few years gravitated from Mississippi to San Saba, St. Marys on Copano Bay, and Beeville. In addition, some of Ben's cousins had acquired land in Falls County.

Second cousins John Wilburn Greer, William Crawford Greer, and David Dixon Greer were at Cedar Springs, Pond Creek, and Navasota. Crawford at his death owned 3,333 acres of land in the W. L. Hannum League in Falls County south of present-day Rosebud which at one time had been known as Greer's Horse Lot. These people were descendants of Henry Greer who helped to found Columbus, Mississippi prior to 1820 and near whom Ben lived as a small boy with his father Edmund's family. Henry was both Edmund's first cousin and uncle. Another of Henry's descendants was Elkanhah Greer in Marshall who became a Confederate General, and other cousins lived in Milam County. Later, Charles W. Rush came to Falls County, he too being one of Henry's lineage through a granddaughter. About 1870, Ben's younger brother Edmund Pettus Greer moved from Mississippi to Lavaca County.

Ben had been born in Tennessee as his parents Edmund and Frances Greer were moving from Clarke County in Georgia to Columbus in then southern Monroe County, Mississippi. Here Ben met Sarah whose parents Alfred and Elizabeth Sutton Ellis had relocated from Lenoir and Duplin Counties: in North Carolina in 1842. Following their marriage in 1847, Ben and Sarah moved with his parents to the families plantations in Carroll and Attala Counties. We do not know about their educations, but Sarah's precise and legible handwriting suggests that she had been an observing student. Further, her father was a Primitive Baptist minister. Ben is said to have been a physician and a farmer, perhaps serving the plantation population and the Confederate forces.

The Greers emigrated from England in the late 1600s to the Gunpowder River in Maryland north of Baltimore and thence into Virginia, Georgia, and Mississippi. They had married with off springs of Henry Haynes (born 1701) in Virginia and Benjamin Hodnett (1761-1820) in Georgia. Edmund Greer (1788 - 1852 and Frances Hodnett (1791-1859) were married in 1810. Various generations of these three families - Greer, Haynes, and Hodnett - had similar migration patterns, moving westward with the frontier and locating in Texas along the Brazos River between the late 1840s and 1860. Others arrived after the Civil War.

Ben's descendants experienced almost every difficulty possible in a fatherless home during part of the Civil War and in reconstruction, discord between their mother and step-father, early deaths, and contagious disease which claimed Sarah three weeks after the demise of a Hackett grandson and a year before death of a Hackett granddaughter, all from the same malady. Despite poverty and heartaches, Ben and Sarah's descendants had strong personalities, determination to improve their lots in life, and an ability to make contributions to early-day Falls County while gaining additional respect within their communities.

Charles W. Hackett, Jr.