 Lucretia Barrett Major
Mrs.
Lucretia Major, born in 1835, Remembers Days of Covered Wagon Van Alstyne - In August of this year Mrs.
Lucretia Major of this
community will be 94 years old. Still active in faculty and the
possessor
of a splendid memory, she enjoys recounting experiences of her early
pioneer
life in South Carolina, Civil War times and the early history of
Grayson
county as she has known it in Van Alstyne.
Mrs. Major's knowledge of people and events of other days goes back over almost incredibly long periods. She clearly relates incidents now belonging to history involving friends who lived and struggled in the covered wagon era, who settled the western empire, took part in the gold rush of "49", and built up a country for which the present generation owes its gratitude. BORN IN 1835 Mrs. Major, nee Miss Lucretia Barrett was the descendant of English people who came from Great Britain during the early history of the American nation and made homes for themselves near the northern borders of South Carolina. She was born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, in Pickens county, August 4, 1835. At the age of nineteen she was married to John Wesley Major also a native of her country. His family, too, were pioneers who helped make early history; his father fought in the Revolutionary war. Mr. Major served through the four years of the Civil war, and she tells how she was left during this period to provide for herself and two small children without help and without the comfort of any news from her husband at the battlefront for long months at a time, a fate which she shared with other wives and mothers of the time. She heard of his being wounded and of his captures during the battle Fredericksburg through friends, and this information served better, she says, than the uncertainty of none . . . without further injury but he lived only until 1894. Following his death she moved her family to Texas, making her home at Van Alstyne in the residence in which she still lives. MOVES TO VAN ALSTYNE Mrs. Major united with the Methodist church early in childhood, and maintains an active interest in its welfare and progress. Other members of her family, the Barretts, proved to be almost as long lived as Mrs. Major. She has a sister, Miss Margaret Barrett of Easley, S.C., who is 92 years old, and other relatives lived nearly to the century mark. Mrs. Major is the mother of three living children, who are: Mrs. Julia Woods and J.R. Major both of Van Alstyne, and the Rev. J.D. Major of Lakeland, Fla. She has several grandchildren and a great-granddaughter, Miss Jessie Banks, a teacher in the Methodist Orphan Home near Waco.  Biography Index Susan Hawkins © 2024 If you find any of Grayson County TXGenWeb links inoperable, please send me a message. |