Biographies of Oakwood Cemetery Residents
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CALDWELL, JOHN (1802-1870) Buried in Section 2, lot 516
John Caldwell, attorney and legislator, was born on December 10, 1802, in Frankfort, Kentucky. After the War of 1812, the Caldwells moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where John studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1823. He opened a law office in Alabama, and there married Lucinda Whey Haynie. The couple traveled to Texas in 1831 and settled in 1834 in Bastrop County. He represented the county in the House and in the Senate of the Congress. He was a member of the Convention of 1845 and a state senator. In 1850 he was one of the organizers of the Colorado Navigation Company, formed to get cotton to market. He supported the South with a quarter of a million dollars in gold, for which he received Confederate bonds that became worthless at the end of the war. Caldwell built the first two-story house in the area. It came to be called the White House, and his daughter Lucinda put it on canvas. Caldwell died on October 22, 1870. Source
www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/
CARLETON, WILLIAM (1812-1865) Buried in Section 1, lot 32
William Carleton, early settler, participant in the Texas Revolution, and journalist, was born in Taunton, England, on May 7, 1812. After receiving a medical education he married Elizabeth Martha Coxhead on August 1, 1833. With his wife, an infant, and three servants, he traveled to Texas in January 1835. Alarmed by reports of military advances from Mexico, Carleton joined the Matagorda Volunteers in March. In the few days that the colonists stayed in the vicinity, some of the men slept in a shed filled with damp cotton, and from this Carleton supposedly developed a serious case of inflammatory rheumatism, for which he was invalided back to Texana. Carlton worked for a time on Galveston and Houston newspapers but eventually settled in Austin. For his loyal services at Goliad, the Texas legislature passed a special act that gave him his bounty lands. He sold them, bought presses, and established his own weekly paper, the Austin Rambler. Carleton died in Austin on November 2, 1865. Source
www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/
CARRINGTON, EVELYN MAURINE (1898-1985) Buried in Section 1, lot 115
Evelyn Maurine Carrington, psychologist, was born in Austin on August 30, 1898.From 1930 to 1941 she taught educational psychology at Sam Houston State Teachers College and from 1941 to 1952 she was on the faculty at Texas State College for Women. She had a private practice in child psychology in Dallas, and from 1955 to 1962 she also lectured at Baylor University College of Dentistry. Carrington's research interests focused on children's learning, especially the process of learning to read, and on the problems of aging. She was the author of several books and the editor of Women in Early Texas (1975). She died in Austin on October 4, 1985. Source
www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/
CHALMERS, John G. (1801-1847) Buried in the Green plot of the old grounds
John Gordon Chalmers, editor and political figure in the Republic of Texas, was born in Halifax County, Virginia, on August 25, 1803. He received his medical education at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1827 he married Mary Wade Henderson. Chalmers moved his family to Texas in 1840 and settled first in La Grange and then in Austin. He held office for a time as Secretary of the treasury for the Republic of Texas under President Lamar and later chaired the committee that drafted the resolution approving the annexation of Texas to the United States. Chalmers helped establish the Democratic party in Texas. In 1845 he became editor and proprietor of the Austin New Era. He formed a partnership with Michael Cronican to publish the Austin Texas Democrat. On January 1, 1847, he became involved in a heated argument with Joshua Holden; a fight resulted and Chalmers was mortally stabbed. Source
www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/
CHRISTIAN, EDWARD (1833-1888) Buried in Section 3, lot 770
Edward Christian, soldier and businessman, was born in Buckingham County, Virginia, on January 10, 1833. About the age of twelve, he became a carpenter's apprentice. In 1851 he and another young carpenter, Simon Loomis, moved from Alabama to Texas, where they worked together as builders and lumber dealers. After the outbreak of the Civil War the partnership was dissolved, and Christian enlisted in the Confederate Army as a private in the infantry. He served for the rest of the war and fought in the battles of Mansfield and Pleasant Hill. After the war he returned to Austin and again went into business with Loomis; in 1867 they established a planing mill and extensive lumberyards. His firm prospered and became one of the largest lumber dealers in Texas. Christian also served as a vice president of City National Bank of Austin and on the board of trustees of the Deaf and Dumb Institute Christian married Matilda Horst on April 7, 1873. He died in Austin on April 14, 1888. Source
www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/
CLARK, JAMES BENJAMIN (1831-1908) Buried in Section 3, lot 911
James Benjamin Clark, Civil War soldier, lawyer, and university administrator, was born in Pitt County, North Carolina, in 1831.He was admitted to the bar in Jackson, Mississippi. In the spring of 1861 Clark enlisted in the Eighteenth Mississippi Regiment, C.S.A.; he served for the rest of the war and became a captain. Afterward he moved to Harrodsburg, Kentucky, where he edited a newspaper and, on November 11, 1869, married Florence Anderson. On April 9, 1875, Clark moved to Bonham, Texas, where he practiced law for ten years. On the organization of the University of Texas in 1883, Clark became a member of the board of regents. On July 1, 1885, he was named proctor and custodian general of the university, a position he held until his sudden death in Austin on December 6, 1908. Clark Field, the baseball field at the university from 1928 to 1974, was named for him. Source
www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/
COLQUITT, OSCAR BRANCH (1861-1940) Buried in Section 3, lot 1051
Oscar Branch Colquitt, politician and governor, was born on December 16, 1861, at Camilla, Georgia. The family moved in 1878 to Daingerfield, Texas, where young Colquitt worked as a tenant farmer and attended the Daingerfield Academy one term. After a brief apprenticeship as a newspaperman, he founded the Gazette at Pittsburg, Texas, in 1884. He married Alice Fuller Murrell on December 9, 1885. Colquitt served as state senator from 1895 to 1899 and was the author of delinquent-tax laws that earned him a statewide reputation. He was the state revenue agent during the last eight months of 1898 and, as the tax expert of a special tax commission, wrote the report that this commission submitted to the legislature in 1900. He served as railroad commissioner from 1903 to 1911. He was elected governor in 1910 as an anti-prohibitionist. After being reelected in 1912, he held the office until 1915. His administration achieved a reform of the prison system, improvement in the physical plants and management of the eleemosynary institutions, great advancement in the educational system, and a number of measures designed to improve the lot of laborers. Colquitt was pro-German from 1914 to 1916 and tried to secure the financial assistance of the German government in buying the New York Sun. Although he remained interested in politics, Colquitt devoted the next decade to serving as president of a Dallas oil firm. 1n 1928 he bolted the Democratic party and headed the "Hoover Democrats" of Texas. Colquitt was a self-made man, obstinate yet affable. Though not a polished orator, he was a convincing speaker and possessed of the "color that drew a crowd"; he was one of the most effective stump speakers in the history of Texas. He died on March 8, 1940. Source
www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/
COOK, ABNER HUGH (1814-1884) Buried in Section 1, lot 158
Abner Cook, carpenter, architect, and contractor, was born near Salisbury, North Carolina, on March 15, 1814. He moved to Texas in 1839. In October 1839 he was one of the founders of the first church in Austin. Cook later built the congregation's first log church with his own hands. On September 15, 1842, he married a widow, Mrs. Eliza T. Logan. In 1847.Cook built a large residence for Thomas William Ward, veteran of the Texas Revolution, and one of the wealthiest men in Austin. This was a two-story frame house with a single-story portico, late Federal in style. He built a two-story frame house for Dr. Samuel G. Haynie. Cook soon bought the latter house and lived in it for the rest of his life. Cook was contractor for woodwork on the 1852 state Capitol. Early in the 1850s Cook built his own brick kiln on the banks of Shoal Creek and became part owner of another lumber mill near Bastrop, thus assuring his building projects of a dependable and economical supply of building materials. The earliest work to show his change in style was a farmhouse which, though a single story, is prefaced by a box-columned portico with a weighty entablature. In 1854 Cook began three great brick houses with Greek Ionic porticoes stretching across their front. These were houses for State Treasurer James H. Raymond and State Comptroller James B. Shaw, and the Governor's Mansion. The building committee for the mansion consisted of Raymond, Shaw, and Governor Elisha M. Pease, who was the first occupant of the mansion and who later bought Shaw's place and named it Woodlawn Mansion. Cook's largest residential project of the postwar era was a two-story Italianate house for cattle baron Seth Mabry at Twelfth and Lavaca. Cook was the most significant designer of Greek Revival buildings in antebellum Texas. Such works as the Pease-Shivers House the Governor's Mansion, and the Neill-Cochran House combined a monumentality of form and a sophistication of detail rarely seen in Texas. He died on February 22, 1884, in Austin. Source
www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/
CUSHNEY, WILLIAM H (1819-1852) Buried in Section 1, Cushney lot
William H. Cushney, early newspaperman, was born in Fonda, New York, on September 15, 1819. He moved to Texas in 1840 and served for a time in the Texas army. Cushney settled in Austin in 1845. He published the Austin Texas Democrat for a time before founding the Austin State Gazette in August 1849. Cushney married Lydia Jane Brown, sister of Frank Brown, in 1846. Cushney died on November 24, 1852, while visiting a friend's home in Independence, Washington County. Source
www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/
CUSTARD, WILLIAM (1810-1895) Buried Section 1, Custard lot
William Custard was born around 1810 in Ohio and migrated to Waterloo on the Colorado River across from Mr. Barton’s place in the Republic of Texas in the 1830s. William received a Fannin 3 land grant. He owned town lots and buildings used for government and commerce in the heart of Austin. Custard became a charter member of the First Baptist Church in Austin. He was a carpenter, stonemason, farmer, businessman, and landlord. He rented executive office space to President David G. Burnett in 1840 and 1841. As a soldier for the Republic of Texas, he served nine months.. On December 30, 1842, Custard and William Bell defended Austin in the Archives War. Just southeast of Waller Creek, Indians ambushed Bell on January 1, 1843. He was killed and scalped. Bell’s body was brought to town and laid to rest in the old cemetery, now known as Oakwood Cemetery. Custard was not married when he came to Texas. He married Mary Ann Bell on February 3, 1844, the widow of his friend William Bell. On October 1, 1854, Mary Ann died after childbirth. Custard later married Clarinda ‘Clara’ Stanfield on May 22, 1855. Custard died in Hutto and was laid to rest on September 12, 1895. Excerpted from tour information by David Martin.
