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• 1 • THE ROAD TO SAN JACINTO, 1817–36 O n August 10, 1821, the merchant vessel Medford arrived at the busy port of Baltimore. In-bound from Cork, Ireland, the ship crossed the Atlantic in fifty days of uneventful sailing. Once the crew secured the moorings, its handful of passengers disembarked. Among their number, William and Olivia Lane and their seven children looked forward to their new lives in the New World. At four years of age, Walter Paye Lane, the youngest son of William and Olivia, probably could not have comprehended the significance of the new experiences arrayed before him.1 That same day, some seventeen hundred miles away, on the prairie along the Guadalupe River, Stephen F. Austin approached the villa of San Antonio de Béxar. He traveled there to request that the Spanish government confirm the colonization contract of his ailing father, Moses Austin. On August 12, he arrived at the provincial capital, negotiated for ten days and received confirmation as successor to his father’s contract to settle three hundred families in Texas. Austin had initiated events that would dominate the remainder of his life and, in time, capture the imagination of the youngster standing on the wharves with his family in Baltimore.2 Walter Paye Lane, or “Nonny,” as his family knew him, was a native of County Cork, Ireland, born to parents William and Olivia on February 18, 1817. His father, according to one description, “was of literary tastes and poor,” while another noted that he “had the reputation of being a scholarly man with fine conversational powers.” Olivia was “the wise, discreet and heroic mother.” Beyond his parents, Walter’s Irish ancestry remains unknown. Walter ’s niece noted that the Lane family had descended from English aristocracy , but William apparently claimed little of that inheritance.3 William Lane left few clues that would reveal his reasons for leaving CHAPTER 1 8 Ireland, but the depression of 1818 likely played a key role. During the Napoleonic Wars, Cork thrived as a major supply port for the British military, and prosperity created a population boom. After the British defeated the French in 1815, agricultural and mercantile prices fell, and returning soldiers exacerbated Cork’s problems with overpopulation. In the hinterland, the Irish middleman system of subletting and subdividing finite land resources contributed to the depression. Prospects of land ownership in the United States, and a chance to start anew, beckoned to many Irish families. One such immigrant of the era explained that “unless a young man has capital . . . he may toil all his life, and never find an independent feeling occupy his breast,” but in the United States, if he worked hard, “he will eventually succeed.” Under these circumstances, William Lane gathered his family, boarded the Medford, and sailed to a new life.4 When he landed in Baltimore, William declared to customs that he intended to reside in Kentucky. He may well have scouted lands or even attempted farming there, but by 1828, he had settled in Guernsey County, Ohio.Heobtainedabout125acresinOxfordTownship,northwestofFairview, a small community on the old Zane Trace, near the Belmont County line.5 The land was rugged hill country, deep in the trans-Ohio outcropping of the Allegheny Plateau, covered with a dense forest of mixed hardwoods. One local observer described the terrain as having a “romantic appearance . . . [T]here are no valleys but those shut in and surrounded by other hills, and this makes the whole scene one of beauty and charm to the passer-by.” This broken topography confined any farming or grazing to the narrow valleys and hillsides. A contemporary booster blamed the lack of agricultural production on non-resident land speculators, who owned all the good land and would not sell at reasonable prices. This section, however, was not conducive to large-scale and profitable agriculture.6 If these less-than-productive fields did not draw him there, then perhaps the promise of work on the National Road lured William Lane to the Fairview area. On March 3, 1825, the U.S. Congress appropriated $150,000 for the extension of the road from Wheeling to Zanesville, Ohio. Farmers worked on the road as laborers or contractors, and most were crews of Irishmen , who graded the route, paved the roadbed with crushed stones, and built those peculiar S-shaped bridges unique to the Wheeling-Zanesville section. By June 1826, the National Road employed 826 men. The U.S. government often paid crews in acreage along the route...

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