Wagon Train: Part One

Mama's father was William George Reynolds. He married Mary Middleton in Rome, Georgia on the 24th of July 1845. I have a copy of their Marriage Certificate. I have no record about any more Middletons, but I have a lot about the Reynolds Family.

William George and Mary brought their family to Texas along with his parents and brothers and sisters. Came in a wagon train when Mama was just a year old. She was 6th in the family of 8. Two were born after they arrived in Texas.

I have a document that Uncle Dan Browning, Papa and Mama’s oldest son, wrote about the Reynolds’ trip west for The Athens Weekly Review in 1941:

A Classic Pilgrimage from Rome to Athens

Ancient lore tells us that emigrants from Athens settled Rome, but that order was reversed in America. At least one caravan of covered wagons with a score or more of westward-bound souls, counting both white and black, reversed the ancient order and moved from Rome, Georgia, to Athens, Texas in the fall of 1856. It came about this way:

In the beginning of the last half of the nineteenth century, John Davis Reynolds and his wife, Katie, were living on a typical Southern plantation near Rome, Georgia. One daughter who had married Charley Finley soon came to Henderson County, Texas, and settled somewhere near Athens. An unmarried son, Jim, visited this sister and family, returning to Georgia in 1856 with glowing tales of opportunities in Texas. Having recently suffered financial reverses as most planters on the South Atlantic Seaboard did about this time, John Davis and Katie Reynolds decided to come to Texas and bring as many of their seven rambling children as they could. Eliza, who had married Jessie Forester, and Ann, who had married Marion Otts, did not come with them, but did come in a few years and were on farms in the New York, TX community when the War Between the States began in the fall of 1861.
In the "classic" caravan, besides John Davis and Katie and two or three families of Negro slaves, were the following children and grandchildren: Jim, who led the way, having been to Texas before; Julia, who later married Ambrose Coleman; Puss, who married Wick Middleton and died early; John, a boy of 13, who later was County Treasurer of Henderson County and died in the New York community in 1902 leaving a host of descendants; William, the oldest child, and his family of six children besides his wife as follows: Lou, who married John Cook and died early; John, the father of Wesley, Jim Hogg, and Fannie, who still live in Henderson County; the twin girls, Della, who died in the early twenties and Keely, the mother of Della Richardson now living in Athens, as does her brother, Dr. Will Richardson, and Nannie, the mother of the writer and the only living member of that caravan unless some of the colored members are living.

This only living member, now 85, was about a year old at that time and had learned to walk, but had to learn over after the long trip, as she did not have much time to practice on the way. I have heard Uncle Davis, who was eleven at that time, tell of this long trek. Uncle Davis drove the slave wagon. All slaves not able to walk, rode in the wagon. On the way, near a little stream called, Tippecanoe, a girl baby was born to Aunt Til, one of the slaves. She was named for the stream and called "Tip.”

On account of the hardships caused by the war and reconstruction, most of this caravan died at a very early age. The only exceptions I know of are Uncle Davis Reynolds, the father of Turner, who lived to be 75; Aunt Keel Richardson, who died in 1932 at age 79, and the only living survivor, Mrs. Nannie Browning, the writer's mother, now 85.

The head of this family named the little community of New York, near Athens, Texas. He said he wanted it to grow to its name. His family all settled there and most of them died there, and the Reynolds stamp has been placed on the community for a long time. I venture to say there will never be a time when no descendant of John Davis and Katie Reynolds lives near the old spring that had a gum tree in it for ten years when the family first saw it in 1856. Uncle Sam Hines, who died near Chandler about 35 years ago, told the writer just before he died that he placed the gum tree there in 1846. In 1901 this gum was still there where Uncle Sam placed it 55 years before. No doubt it is still there in a good state of preservation. Let me suggest to the people of New York that the annual homecoming in that community be held in 1946 at this old spring. I would like to see the old gum tree again that furnished pure Adams Ale to so many pioneers. Let us go back there and pause for a while to honor the ones to whom we owe so much.

Some day I hope to write a history of the Reynolds family. The descendants of John Davis and Katie are as the sand of the sea.

My name, of course, came from this grandmother of my grandmother. I don't know Katie Reynolds’ maiden name though. I wish I did.