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

Chapter 1. North Carolina Roots

Chapter 1 North Carolina Roots John Davis Hawkins was feeling that worrisome shudder that so often afflicts members of an older generation when looking at the young and finding them undisciplined. Hawkins was a North Carolina lawyer and planter, an alumnus of the University of North Carolina, and for fifty years one of its trustees. His eldest son, James Boyd Hawkins, a boy of sixteen at the time, whose life would be lived out in Texas, was approaching college age. Should this son attend his father’s revered alma mater, the University of North Carolina? The father had grave doubts and confided them in a letter to his classmate John Branch, the secretary of the navy. He told Branch that the students were too little disciplined by the faculty and that they were more given to “extravagant dissipation and drunkenness” than to “emulating each other for literary form.” John D. Hawkins wrote this gloomy evaluation and said it made him think of West Point as perhaps a better alternative. But first he would like to make a visit there himself to get more information on West Point educational methods. Could John Branch, as secretary of the navy, possibly arrange to have him appointed an official visitor there the following June? James Boyd Hawkins (–) indeed enrolled at West Point as a member of the class of . If careful planning, hard work, and diligence were inculcated at West Point, its influence on him was certainly apparent from  until his death in , in the way he set up and operated his Texas plantation and later cattle ranch. At the very time of John D. Hawkins’s worry about the youth of the day, his own father, Philemon Hawkins (the third of that name; see Hawkins genealogy) was also worried: that the younger Hawkins generation would not know or appreciate the fine character traits of his own 16 plantation beginnings father, Philemon the second. On September , , at his father’s request , John D. Hawkins invited family and friends to come to hear a finely-crafted tribute that he wrote and delivered. The speech was twice published as a pamphlet, first in  and again by his youngest son, Dr. Alexander Hawkins, in . In it John D. Hawkins tells a captivating story in the young life of the heralded Philemon (see endnote). John D. Hawkins praised his grandfather mainly for his work ethic. That was what the young should emulate, he said: hard work, avoidance of debt, attending to crops and to business. These habits and virtues would be rewarded by the accumulation of worldly goods, which would make one more useful to others. Having had no education himself, Philemon the second had greatly valued it for his own sons, two of whom he sent to Princeton: Benjamin and Joseph Hawkins. Benjamin (–), the uncle of John D. Hawkins, became so adept in French that he was asked to serve Gen. George Washington as a translator for French troops during the American Revolution. In the vigorous ending of his speech, John D. Hawkins forcefully impressed upon his audience the importance of his grandfather’s character and example: When we take a review of his rise and progress in life, and contrast them with the idleness and dissipation of the present day, we are ready to exclaim, that degeneracy is surely among us. He lived within his income, and caused it continually to increase; by which he was not only increasing his ability to live, but to increase his fortune, and to add to his power to be useful. . . . Let us then emulate his virtues, inculcate his habits, and instill into the minds of our children the examples of his prosperous and useful life; and when each rolling year shall bring around the day of his birth, let us hail it as his natal day, and endeavor to imprint it deeper and deeper in their hearts. James B. Hawkins did not stay at West Point to graduate and never embarked on a military career. Instead he married Ariella Alston in . After their marriage at her father’s residence, Butterwood, near Littleton in Halifax County, North Carolina, the couple spent the next ten years living in North Carolina, in close touch with their respective families. Both the Hawkins and the Alston families were planters and used a slave workforce. In North Carolina the extended Hawkins family had various business pursuits related to agriculture—milling, potash production, cotton ginning, [13.58.247.31] Project MUSE (2024...