More Family History: A Death in Texas

We are cleaning out a storage unit (I don't want to say how long we've had it) and one of the things Tom found was a history of the Smith family written in 1990.  It had been written by someone I didn't know, Eddy Smith, from Texas.  From reading what's in it about my family, it is clear that my mother had been interviewed by Mr. Smith, so I am assuming that when she was contacted she ordered a copy for me.  I haven't done much work to track down the Smiths - my mother's mother was a Smith - because I was very intimidated by trying to sort through all the George Smiths to identify the one who is my great-great-grandfather.  So I was delighted to find the book on the dining room table when I got back into town week before last.

The George Smith who was my great-great-grandfather was born in Rutherford County, North Carolina, but later moved to Spartanburg County, South Carolina.  He married at age 33 to Atha Adaline Liles, a widow with six children.  Atha also had been born in Rutherford County and moved to Spartanburg.  One of George's brothers married one of George's step-daughters.  According to Eddy Smith, "Nancy Ann Blackwell Greenway's grandchildren remembered that their grandmother often told them that her step-father, George W. Smith, insisted that his sons get a formal education.  The daughters and step-daughters did not receive education because George W. thought it unnecessary." 

But Eddy Smith also included in his history a photocopy of George Smith's will.  George and Atha had four children, three boys (one of whom was my great-grandfather, Jones Foster Smith) and one girl.  According to his will, 

...I will that my beloved wife Adaline Smith have the use and control of my Estate both Personal and Real during her natural life or widowhood, that she educate my children Rudicil Lafayette Smith, William Washington Smith, Geneva Smith and Jones Foster Smith as well as she reasonably can, and as soon as practicable after each of them arrives to the age of twenty-one years, that she furnish each a horse, bridle, and saddle at [graduation?] and in case each child should not receive the same amount of schooling that the one or ones following short of an equal amount of schooling with the others have enough money or property to make up for said deficiency of schooling ...

Perhaps George felt differently about educating his step-daughters and his daughter.

I don't know how much education any of them got.  George died in 1877, and sometime after that all four of his children made their way to Texas.  My mother told me that her grandfather Jones Foster Smith had gone to Texas to establish himself so he could get married, but when he returned to South Carolina he found his fiancé had married someone else.  So he married her younger sister, Mary Green.  Jones's sister Geneva married Mary's brother Lewis Green.

According to Eddy Smith, Geneva and Lewis had one child in South Carolina before they left for Texas around 1891.  They settled eventually in Hunt County, Texas, where they had a large farm.  They also had a store on the farm, where their neighbors bought supplies, and they had "the only phone in the community in the early years.  Whenever death messages were received, the Green family members were sent to deliver them to neighbors."  They built more houses on the farm as their children grew up and married, and most of their children (perhaps all but one of them) stayed in Hunt County, and bought property of their own.

Eddy Smith's book has many interesting stories about Geneva and Lewis's children.  Their oldest child left for Oklahoma when he turned 18.  According to Eddy Smith, he ran off with the wife of his uncle.  One of their children "was pretty much a drifter" who ended up killing a police officer in Kansas City in 1937.  He'd been drinking, and when a police officer tried to escort him from the saloon, he took the policeman's gun and killed him.  He fled, but mistook the bathroom door for the back door.  "He was standing on the toilet seat when the police broke in and emptied their guns into the doors of the toilets and shot both of his legs full of bullets."  He died two weeks later.

One of Geneva and Lewis's daughters lost her husband and two young sons to influenza in 1919.  She remarried and had seven more children.  One of them died in 1930 at age 4 of tetanus.

But those story that most caught my imagination, on reading Eddy Smith's book, was that of Geneva and Lewis's son George, who was shot and killed on September 15, 1918, by Hubert Cotten.  According to Eddy Smith, "The real story may never be known or told as everyone involved is deceased.  I have only heard stories and no one can supply exact details."  Hubert and his brother Ira were tried for murder or manslaughter multiple times in the years that followed; Ira was eventually acquitted, in 1921, but I'm not sure about Hubert.   The newspaper headlines from Greenville, Texas, indicate he went on trial for the fourth time in 1921, right around the same time that Ira was tried the last time.  

 I found the court opinions that overturned the convictions of Ira and Hubert in 1920, and there was a little detail there about what had happened - or at least what the survivors said had happened.  George and his brother Tom got into a confrontation with Hubert and Ira one evening, after church.  Hubert had a gun, and he shot George and killed him.  It is not clear whether or not the Greens were armed; Tom said they weren't, but Hubert said both George and Tom had clubs.  Hubert said he thought George had a gun (but he had already said he thought he had a club - would he really have had both a gun and a club?).  He shot him, and when Tom came toward him after he started shooting, he shot him too.  George was 27 years old when he died; he left a wife and an infant son.  His brother Tom survived; he died in 1969, at age 77.  

The first convictions were overturned in 1920 because of improper instructions that were given to the jury. I don't know what happened at the later trials, and whether or not Hubert ever served time for George's death. If he did, it's not reflected in the Greenville, Texas, newspapers that have been indexed so far.

I've used Ancestry.com for several years to find information about my family, but you don't have to be related to people to look for information about them.  (Of course you can't find too much unless they are really old or dead.)  So I looked up both Hubert and Ira Cotten.  Hubert - who was 18 when he killed George - married and had three children, and died in 1982. There's a charming photograph of him as a toddler, and another photo of him as an old man; I can visualize him at church or at Lions Club or Rotary, just like my father and his friends.  Ira was 20, in 1918 when George Green died; he also married and had children. He died in 1981. 

All three of the survivors - Tom, Ira, and Hubert - appear to have stayed in Hunt County for the rest of their lives.  According to the 1920 appeals court decision, there were bad feelings between the Greens and the Cottens before the September evening that left George Green dead on the ground.  There must have been a cafe on Main Street, where the older men met for coffee.  Did Tom talk to them?  What did they say to each other?  Nowdays, something bad happens, people move on to a new place and leave this history behind.  But they were attached to the land, and there they stayed.