Biographies of Oakwood Cemetery Residents
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FAY, EDWIN WHITFIELD (1865-1920) Buried in Section 3, lot 885
Edwin Whitfield Fay, philologist, was born in Louisiana in 1865. He entered Southwestern Presbyterian University in Tennessee at the age of fourteen and was awarded an M.A. degree in 1883. Following his father's example, he became a teacher and taught at Jackson, Mississippi, Bonham, Texas, and Beaumont, Texas. He entered Johns Hopkins University and studied Sanskrit, comparative philology, Greek, and Latin for four years, then received his Ph.D. in 1890.Fay was an instructor in Sanskrit and the classics at the University of Michigan for a year before traveling in Europe and studying at the University of Leipzig. In 1892-93, he was acting associate professor of Latin at the University of Texas. For the next 6 years, he was professor of Latin at Washington and Lee University. He returned to the University of Texas as professor of Latin in 1899 and held this position until his death in 1920. Source
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online
FISHER, REBECCA JANE GILLELAND (1831-1926) Buried in Section 2, lot 428
Rebecca Gilleland Fisher, preservationist, was born in Philadelphia in 1831. Around 1837, the family arrived in Texas and settled in Refugio County. In 1840, Comanches attached the home, killed the parents, and captured six-year old Rebecca and her brother, William. The children were rescued by Albert Sidney Johnston and a detachment of Texas soldiers and taken to Victoria. They stayed with William C. Blair until they could be sent to live with an aunt in Galveston. Rebecca Gilleland attended Rutersville College from about 1845 to 1848. She married a Methodist minister, and in 1855, the Fishers left Texas for the Pacific coast. Orceneth Fisher served as a pastor there for nearly sixteen years; they returned to Texas about 1871 and resided in Austin. Mrs. Fisher was a charter member of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and served as its state president for eighteen years. She delivered an oration at the unveiling of the Sam Houston monument at Huntsville, and aided in saving the Alamo from destruction. For several years, she gave the opening prayer when the Texas Legislature convened. She was the only woman elected to the Texas Veterans Association and was its last surviving member. Her portrait was the first of a woman to be hung in the Senate chamber at the Capitol. She died in 1926. Her body lay in state in the Senate chamber where funeral services were held; her portrait was draped in mourning cloth. Source
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online
FONTAINE, JACOB (1808-1898) Buried in Colored Grounds, no tombstone but a plague in his honor
Jacob Fontaine, Baptist preacher, political and civic leader, and newspaper publisher in Austin, was born into slavery in Arkansas in 1808. He had several owners but his best known and most influential master was Rev. Edward Fontaine, a great grandson of Patrick Henry. Edward Fontaine moved to Austin as the personal secretary of Texas president, Mirabeau B. Lamar. Jacob was Edward Fontaine's sexton at St. David's Episcopal Church in Austin in 1855, but in 1860, he was attending the First Baptist Church. He began preaching in the afternoons to blacks in the basement of the old Methodist church at Brazos and Tenth streets. He and other members of the black congregation began to meet secretly in 1864 to organize a break from the white church. In 1867, after emancipation, Jacob founded the First (Colored) Baptist Church in Austin. He founded five additional churches throughout Texas. He was a janitor in the old Land Office Building, became active in Republican and Greenback party politics during Reconstruction, operated a grocery, laundry, book, and medicine store. In 1876, he established the Austin Gold Dollar, a black weekly newspaper and the first newspaper under black ownership in Austin. He and his son later founded a local chapter of the Colored Brothers of the Eastern Star. The Fontaine family lived on the Woodlawn plantation near the Austin home of ex-governor Pease. Jacob's wife was a housekeeper there and had cooked at the Governor's Mansion. From 1875 to 1898, the Fontaines lived in a two-story structure at Twenty-fourth and Orange, now an Austin landmark. Fontaine started his newspaper there, with sixty dollars he earned from the investment of a gold dollar given him in 1872 by his sister when they were reunited in Mississippi after a separation caused twenty years before by slavery. He died in 1898 at the age of 90. Source
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online
FULMORE, ZACHARY TAYLOR (1846-1923) Buried in Section 2, lot 824
Zachary Taylor Fulmore, lawyer and judge, was born in North Carolina, in 1846. He interrupted his studies in 1864 to enlist in the Confederate Army. He was captured in January, 1865, and held prisoner until May. After the war he resumed his studies and in 1867, entered the University of Virginia, where he received a law degree in 1870. That same year, he moved to Austin, Texas, and was admitted to the bar. While he was county judge of Travis County (1880-86), finances of the county were improved, a city-county hospital was established, and the county purchased the toll bridge across the Colorado River and made its use free. Governor Coke appointed Fulmore to the board of trustees of the Texas School for the Blind and he continued on that board for 22 years. He campaigned for public schools in Austin in 1880 and was a member of the school board for 17 years. He was appointed a member of the commission to organize the State School for Colored Blind and Deaf. In 1891, Governor James S. Hogg appointed Fulmore a member of the commission to revise and digest the laws of the state of Texas. He served as chairman of the board of trustees of the Texas Confederate Home for 2 years. He died in 1923. Source
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online
