I had some really good times while at SXSW last week talking about Elvis.com. One of the best happened because on my way to the airport to return to Tennessee, I couldn’t resist stopping at the Texas State Capitol.
I was hundreds of miles from home and did not expect to run into anyone from Tennessee. But as soon as I passed through the metal detectors, I looked up and spotted fellow Tennessean Davy Crockett (1786-1836).
David Crockett, painted by William Henry Huddle in the Texas State Capitol building in Austin, Texas.
For the last several weeks, I have been digging into the ancestors of my second-great-grandmother, Nancy Mariana Johnson Castellaw (1844-1921). Nancy was the grandmother of my grandmother, Elizabeth Castellaw Williams (1915-1998), and she grew up in the part of Haywood County that later became Crockett County.
That gave me my first small Crockett connection. Nancy’s maternal grandfather, Francis M. Wood (1777-1843), my fourth-great-grandfather, came from North Carolina and joined the early settlers in the future Crockett County area of Haywood County.
By the 1840s, the people in that corner of Haywood County had joined with neighbors in Gibson, Madison and Dyer counties to ask the Tennessee General Assembly for a county of their own.
The path was not simple. Local residents pushed for a new county in 1832 and again in 1845, but those first efforts did not work. The General Assembly finally created Crockett County in 1871 and named it for Crockett, the Tennessee congressman who died at the Alamo. They kept the theme going by naming the county seat Alamo.
One of the earlier 1845 efforts still interests me because it included names from Nancy’s world. Among those tapped to help the proposed county get started were David Whitaker, Nancy’s brother-in-law, and Isaac M. Johnson, a neighbor and possible relative.
My second Crockett connection comes through my third-great-grandmother, Eleanora Harriet Dougan Williamson (1818-1860), wife of Beverly M. Williamson (1813-1877) of the Providence community along the Haywood and Madison county lines. Harriet was the great-grandmother of my grandfather, Lloyd “Bo” Williams (1910-2008).
Three of Harriet’s first cousins, James Dougan Jr., Thomas Dougan and Robert Dougan, sons of Revolutionary War soldier Col. James Dougan (1754-1837), reportedly settled around Reelfoot Lake along with members of the Crockett family.
The connection tightened when James Dougan Jr. married Clorinda Boyett Crockett, the widow of Davy’s son William Finley Crockett. That makes Davy Crockett, with some genealogical gymnastics, the former father-in-law of the wife of my third-great-grandmother’s first cousin.
Dawn at the Alamo by Henry Arthur McArdle
Back in Austin, the South Foyer was not the only place I found Crockett.
A Capitol tour was just beginning, so I joined the group and followed along. When we entered the Texas Senate Chamber, I noticed a massive painting on the back wall. I guessed, correctly, that it showed the Battle of the Alamo.
McArdle’s painting has its own almost mythic history. He painted an earlier version in 1875, but it burned in the 1881 fire that destroyed the old limestone Capitol. Recreating the scene became something of an obsession, and the version I saw in the Senate Chamber was the one he completed in 1905
A beam of sunlight from a high window crossed the painting while I stood there. I am not going to tell the good people of Texas what to do with their paintings, but direct sunlight and historic oil paintings generally do not need to mix.
The painting, Henry Arthur McArdle’s Dawn at the Alamo, shows Crockett in the lower right, still fighting after, at least in the artist’s imagination, he has run out of bullets. McArdle gave him “Old Betsy” and had him swinging it at the enemy.
That may not settle any Alamo history debates, but it does make the
After I arrived home, I began doing a little research on Crockett and realized how much of his story sits at the intersection of history, legend, politics and family memory. He was a Tennessean, a soldier, a state legislator, a U.S. congressman, an opponent of Andrew Jackson and, finally, one of the men whose death at the Alamo turned him into something larger than life.
Those who want to go deeper will find plenty to read, including Crockett’s own autobiography and later biographies.
For more of my genealogy research, visit rscottwilliams.info.
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