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7. Amelia Williams, Cotton Farmer and Scholar
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✥ 7 ✥ Amelia Williams, Cotton Farmer and Scholar Last w eeken d I had a brush with the past—my own family’s past and Texas’s past, too. My wife and I drove over to Cameron, a county-seat town northeast of Austin, for a ceremony honoring Amelia Williams. It seems that a local foundation in Cameron, the Yoe Foundation, selects half a dozen or so distinguished natives of Milam County each year and places plaques honoring them and their achievements in the Cameron high school. Cousin Amelia, as I was brought up to call her, was born in Milam County in 1876 and taught history at the University of Texas from 1925 to 1951. Her doctoral dissertation, which she completed in 1931, was entitled “A Critical Study of the Siege of the Alamo and of the Personnel of Its Defenders.” It was the first scholarly study of that battle, and for many years was the only source for the list of the men who died there. In fact, Cousin Amelia provided the names of the Alamo heroes that are carved in stone on Pompeo Coppini’s imposing monument on Alamo Plaza in San Antonio. Of course, no such list is ever complete, even though it is carved in stone, and other scholars have added to and even subtracted from Cousin Amelia’s list of 181 defenders. One of the most recent writers on the subject, a former US Army criminal investigator named Thomas Ricks Lindley, devotes an entire chapter to a vehement attack on Cousin Amelia’s list in his book, Alamo Traces (Lanham, Maryland: Republic of Texas Press, 2003). Lindley argues that Williams purposely undercounted the number of defenders and accuses her of “misrepresentation, alteration, and fabrication of 30 ✥ data.” I get the impression that, had cousin Amelia been in the army with Lindley, he would have had her court-martialed and probably shot. Fortunately they were not contemporaries, Lindley being only fifteen when Cousin Amelia died in 1958. I don’t remember Cousin Amelia as a misrepresenter or fabricator of anything, only as a nice old lady with her silver hair in braids who was my grandmother’s cousin and who gave me an inscribed copy of one of her books, Following General Sam Houston, when I was seven. She also was the coeditor, with Eugene Barker, of Sam Houston’s papers. She once told my father that she was going to write a book about Sam Houston that would make her a lot of money because it would have a lot of sex in it, but she died before getting around to it. One of the people at the Cameron ceremony was Todd Hansen, whose new book, The Alamo Reader (Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: The Stackpole Press, 2003) is an eight-hundredpage compilation of source material on the Alamo and a must for every Alamo buff. Hansen told me some things about Cousin Amelia that I did not know, and I think they are worth passing on. Her father, Thomas Herbert Williams, was an ex-Confederate soldier who came to Texas after the Civil War. He bought a two-thousand -acre plantation in Milam County, married a local girl, and had five children, of whom Cousin Amelia, born in 1876, was the oldest. The other four, all girls, were named Harriet Emily, South Carolina, Julia Emma, and Virginia Kentucky. Thomas Herbert died when Amelia was fourteen and her youngest sister was three. His wife died eight years later, and Cousin Amelia was left at the age of twenty-two to manage the plantation and look after her younger sisters. She wrote farm contracts, oversaw tenants, sold the crops, cooked, sewed, gardened, put up preserves, killed and dressed hogs, and saw that all of her sisters finished high school and graduated from college. Somehow, she found the time and energy to graduate from Southwest Texas State Normal College, ✥ 31 [3.89.56.228] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:06 GMT) and for fifteen years between 1910 and 1925 she taught in the rural grammar schools of Milam County. Finally, in 1925, she entered graduate school at the University of Texas and chose the Alamo as her dissertation topic. She searched the records of the General Land office in Austin for the names of people who had been given a land grant because a husband or father had been killed at the Alamo, and then she drove a Model T Ford all over Texas persuading their descendants to look...