Grayson County TXGenWeb
 
Kilgore Family

The Kilgores were in the news many times in the last three decades of the 19th century, and it was not always for making bricks or building houses. 
In late November of 1876, S. C. Kilgore was assaulted by a "negro," who was convicted a few months later and sentenced to two years in the penitentiary. [Denison Daily Cresset, Saturday, April 7, 1877, pg. 4]  Subsequent news stories about S. C. and his two sons raise the question of whether the assault may have been provoked. In July 1888 the older son, Thomas E. "Ed" Kilgore (1866-1897), killed a man in Ladonia, a little town southeast of Bonham in Fannin County.


In the spring of 1889 Ed was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to two years in the penitentiary. In October of that year his younger brother, Wert B. Kilgore (1868-1919), was fined $14.25 for aggravated assault in Denison. Two months later Ed Kilgore was pardoned by the governor, after serving six months of his two-year sentence, based on the governor's opinion that the eveidence in the case was conflicting and even "untrue" thus it was "a proper case for executive clemency."


A few months after the troublesome affairs with his sons, the barn on the Kilgore's property accidentally burned.


Ed had been engaged to Fannie Jackson, daughter of a prominent family in Ladonia. Fannie had lobbied hard for Ed's early release from prison. But by the time he arrived back in Ladonia to marry her, she had changed her mind about marrying him. Ed's reaction to her rejection was to spend the next several years impugning the chastity of Fannie and her younger sister to anyone around town who would listen. After simmering for seven years, Fannie decided she had endured enough. She went gunning for Ed.   She hit him with five out of six shots from her revolver. Her brothers added four or five more, and Ed expired from the aggregate effects of the bullet holes. As she fired the last shot into his prone body, Fannie was heard to exclaim, "You coward, you have slandered me long enough!" Public sentiment around Ladonia was that Ed's killing was long overdue, and no one was ever convicted of it. The story of the shooting was a sensation in newspapers across the country.


A week later, Miss Jackson along with her brothers were placed under a bond of $1,500 each, which was quickly paid.  On August 30, Fannin County Attorney A.J. Nichols sent a letter to Addie Kilgore informing her that Miss Jackson and her four brothers had been indicted on first degree murder charges for the murder of her son, Ed. [The Sunday Gazetteer, September 5, 1897, pg. 4]  Just over a month later the jury in the case of Texas vs, Miss Fannie Jackson, father and brothers was discharged on account of a hung jury; ten of the jury members had been in favor of convicting Miss Jackson although all were voted to discharge the father and brothers. [The Sunday Gazetteer, October 10, 1897, pg. 1]  Miss Fannie Jackson did later marry and died in 1925.



In 1898, a year after the Jackson family killed Ed, his father and surviving brother were involved in a "row" in Durant, Indian Territory.  Fines of $20 and $10 were levied against S.C., age 60, and Wert, age 30, respectively. [The Sunday Gazetteer, August 24, 1898, pg. 3]  The following year Wert was fined again for assault and robbery of a young farm boy who had ridden the train with him into Denison from the west, amongst other incidences of violence and lawlessness.





1899 was also the year that S. C. Kilgore was stricken with paralysis, unable to "articulate."  He applied for a Confederate veteran's pension. The application was denied, because he owned too much property to qualify as an indigent. After his death in 1902, he was praised in his obituary as a pioneer citizen, responsible for building "many of the substantial business and resident houses of Denison" with "brick supplied from his own yards."




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