The Hawkins Ranch in Texas: From Plantation Times to the Present

Notes

Notes Introduction . In the memorial address delivered at Warrenton, N.C., on September , , commemorating his late grandfather, John Davis Hawkins (father of the first Texan, James Boyd Hawkins) said in part: There were other branches from the Charles City stock, [Charles City County, Virginia , the birthplace of the memorialized grandfather] which migrated to other parts of the Union; one went to the state of Kentucky, which produced Joseph Hawkins, formerly a member of Congress from Kentucky, and who afterwards died in New Orleans. That gentleman traced his connexion with our family in a conversation with our distinguished and venerable fellow citizen Nathaniel Macon, Esq., who now contributes his presence to commemorate this occasion and this day.” John D. Hawkins, “Colonel Philemon Hawkins, Sr.” See Cantrell, “The Partnership of Stephen F. Austin and Joseph H. Hawkins.” Stephen F. Austin met Joseph H. Hawkins in New Orleans, where Hawkins was in the practice of law. Austin may have known Joseph’s brother, Littleberry, while attending Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, in –. As a young man down on his luck, Austin came to New Orleans, a promising commercial center, in hopes of finding almost any job. Hawkins took him in to train as a lawyer, lent him money, had Austin take his meals with his family, and eventually joined him as a partner when Austin assumed his father’s colonizing efforts. As documented by Cantrell, Austin was scrupulous in the division of his land grant with the heirs of his then deceased partner, Joseph H. Hawkins. The Joseph H. Hawkins children were George Nicholas Hawkins (the eldest son), Edmund St. John Hawkins (first to come to Texas as Austin’s colonist), Mary Jane Hawkins (wife of William Victor, who questioned the fairness of the land division), Norbourne Hawkins, and Joseph Thomas Hawkins. The estates of Norbourne, Edmund, and George were all probated in Brazoria County in . Joseph Thomas Hawkins lived until  as a planter in Brazoria County. A relative but not a son of Joseph H. Hawkins was Major John T. Hawkins, a settler in Austin’s colony. . Two collections of antebellum letters were used: the Hawkins Family Papers, #, and the Archibald D. Alston Papers, #, both of which are in the Southern Historical Collection of the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Alston Papers are the main source of letters quoted. They describe the  beginning of the Hawkins sugar plantation in Texas and the building of the Hawkins Ranch House in . Most are letters from Ariella Alston Hawkins in Texas to her mother, Mrs. Sallie Alston, in North Carolina. Other letters to Mrs. Alston from Texas are by James B. Hawkins and his daughters, Sallie and Virginia; Virginia wrote from the plantation house on Caney Creek and from the Hawkins Ranch House on Lake Austin. The Hawkins Papers consist of . linear feet of documents, most concerning the Hawkinses who stayed in North Carolina; but the collection includes letters James B. Hawkins sent from Texas to his father and brothers and letters from his brother Frank, who traveled with James to Mississippi. 206 notes to pages 3–16 . James B. Hawkins to Sarah Alston, January , , Archibald D. Alston Papers. . I was impressed by how well Ariella and the children of the plantation understood the family’s livelihood and had a literal “view” of it. On the plantation there was no separation between home life and work life. The father of the family made plans for his crops, and for the building of his sugar mill (counting every brick), and his wife and children were as fully informed as he. For wife and children there was no mystery about what the father did for a living. They could look at the fields and see his living. Benjamin Franklin’s father took him for a walk along the streets of Boston in order to see the kind of work from which he might choose a livelihood more to his liking than his father’s candle making and fat rendering business; see Schneider, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, –. Earlier agrarian and artisan work is much more visible than much of the work undertaken in of- fices today, even in farming and ranching offices. Social change has made a separation between work life and home life that obscures the work of the family breadwinner for those not directly involved. This change is apparent in the history of the Hawkins Ranch, as can be seen in the final chapter. In the s...