Biographies of Oakwood Cemetery Residents
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LEE, JOSEPH (1810-1891) Buried in Sec 1, family plot (no stone)
Joseph Lee, lawyer, jurist, and legislator, was born in Butler County, Ohio, on April 14, 1810. He worked with his father as a carriage maker before he immigrated to Texas in 1840. Lee established a legal practice in the newly surveyed capital of Austin, and when Indians killed Travis County chief justice James W. Smith, President Mirabeau B. Lamar appointed Lee to fill the unexpired term. During the summer of 1842, several children were captured and taken away from their residence on Pecan Street. Lee helped in returning the remains of the little Simpson girl who was scalped during the raid. He was also a leader in the Archives War. On October 4, 1846, Lee married Sarah Grooms, who died in 1850. On January 5, 1852, he married Sarah Ogle of Austin. He ardently supported secession. He was granted a captain's commission in 1861 but never held a regular Confederate command. In the early 1880s Governor Oran M. Roberts appointed him a member of the commission that planned the construction of the present Capitol. Lee died in Austin on February 25, 1891. From tour information.
LOMAX, JOHN AVERY (1867-1948) Buried Sec 2, lot 477
John Avery Lomax, folklorist, was born on September 23, 1867, in Goodman, Mississippi. In August 1869 the family set out for Texas in two covered wagons and arrived in Bosque County. As his home was located on a branch of the Chisholm Trail, he heard many cowboy ballads and other folk songs; before he was twenty, he began to write some of them down. With that training he taught for a year at Clifton and for six years at Weatherford College. In 1895 he enrolled at the University of Texas, from which he graduated in 1897. In 1903–04 he taught English at Texas A&M. In 1904, he married Bess B. Brown. In 1906 Lomax received a scholarship at Harvard University, where Barrett Wendell and George Lyman Kittredge encouraged him to take up seriously the collection of western ballads he had begun as a youth. In the back room of the White Elephant Saloon in Fort Worth he found cowhands who knew many stanzas of "The Old Chisholm Trail." A Gypsy woman living in a truck near Fort Worth sang "Git Along, Little Dogies." At Abilene an old buffalo hunter gave him the words and tune of "Buffalo Skinners." In San Antonio in 1908 a black saloonkeeper who had been a trail cook sang "Home on the Range." Lomax's first collection, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, was published in 1910. His first wife died in 1931, and in 1934, he married Ruby R. Terrill. Lomax was one of the founders of the Texas Folklore Society and was president of the American Folklore Society. He visited prisons to record on phonograph disks the work songs and spirituals of black inmates. At the Angola prison farm in Louisiana, he encountered a talented black minstrel, Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly. Upon Leadbelly's release from prison, Lomax took him on a tour in the north and recorded many of his songs. In 1947 his autobiographical Adventures of a Ballad Hunter was awarded the prize as the best Texas book of the year by the Texas Institute of Letters. He died at Greenville, Mississippi, on January 26, 1948. Source
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online
LUNGKWITZ, KARL FRIENDRICH HERMANN (1813-1891) Buried in Section 4, lot 99
Karl Lungkwitz, early landscape painter and photographer, was born in Saxony in 1813. From 1840 to 1843, Lungkwitz received formal training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Dresden and he became one of the most promising students. He may have worked as a professional artist in Dresden. He, his wife, and brother in law, Friedrich Richard Petri, immigrated to the United States in 1850, perhaps as a result of Lungswitz's involvement in the revolution of 1848-49 and the unsuccessful insurrection against the Saxon king in 1849. They reached Texas in 1851 and the next year they settled on a farm near Fredericksburg where he remained until 1864. He and Petri could not support their families by painting and resorted to cattle raising and farming on the Hill Country frontier. After Petri's death in 1857, Lungkwitz learned photography, a profession that he followed in San Antonio with Carl von Iwonski from 1866 to 1870. He then moved to Austin where he was photographer for the General Land Office under his brother-in-law, commissioner Jacob Kuechler. He remained there until 1874. During his tenure in the land office, his daughter Martha was appointed clerk and was perhaps the first woman employee of the state of Texas. During the 1870s and 1880s, Lungkwitz taught drawing and painting in the German-English schools run in Austin by his son-in-law, Jacob Bickler. He also worked on his daughter's sheep ranch near Johnson City. He gave private art lessons in Austin and Galveston where he visited the Bicklers. Of approximately 350 of Lungkwitz's extant works, the majority are pencil and oil studies from Europe. His Texas studies and landscape paintings of the Hill Country, old San Antonio and its Spanish missions, and Austin, span four decades and provide unexcelled examples of romantic landscape scenes and visual documentation of nineteenth century Texas. In addition, two pre-Civil War lithographs and one postwar lithograph have been identified. Careful fine-line drawings done out of doors preceded finished oil paintings, which were completed in Lungkwitz's studio. His favorite subjects were the granite promontories north of Fredericksburg and the Guadalupe, Pedernales, Llano, and Colorado river valleys. These paintings portray the wilderness that was found by the German settlers as they came to Texas in the 1800s. The romantic treatment in his Texas paintings reflect his sophisticated training at the Dresden academy. A major show on Hermann Lungkwitz was exhibited by the University of Texas, Institute of Texas Cultures at San Antonio in 1983-84. He died in 1891. Source
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online
