NANCE
Mary Jane Nance Houston was born in Washington County, Arkansas
near Fayetteville in 1834. This was about the time that Onesimus and Eliza
Elizabeth Wallace (another branch of the family) migrated to Fayetteville
from their home in Tennessee. Mary Jane’s parents were James Nance
(1800-1875) and Eliza Stewart (1794-1836). There is some doubt as to the
accuracy of their birth dates, but that is what I was given. We have no
record of where James and Eliza’s family originated before they arrived in
Arkansas, but it seems that Eliza probably died in Arkansas when Mary Jane
was only two years old. If she had any siblings, I don’t know who they were
nor do I know how and when she arrived in Texas and at what age. Her
husband at the time, was the Rev. Speer who left her a widow with two
children. Some time later she moved to Kyle, Texas and married for the
second time Fredrick Ezell Houston from Luling, Texas who was a much
older man and had been married twice before. They had one son, my
grandfather, James Nance Houston. Fredrick Ezell died at the age of 66
(probably from a heart attack or stroke) when Jimmy (J.N. Houston) was
only 13. James Nance Houston eventually married Roberta Wallace who
was visiting cousins living in Kyle.
Mary Jane lived to be 82 and died in Austin, Texas at the home of her son
J.N. Houston. She was a Presbyterian and after the Church service in Austin
was buried in the Kyle Cemetery next to her husband Fredrick Ezell
Houston. The newspaper obituary had her eldest son, John F. Speer living in
Dickens, Texas. No mention was made of her daughter, Eliza Jane Speer.
She was the grandmother of Oscar Parke Houston, Mary Lawrence
Houston Lowe, and Wallace Fredrick Houston. If I haven’t already, I must
mention that Mary and Fred Lowe had a daughter, Mary Elizabeth Lowe
Dodd, a Vermonter who moved to Austin with her two sons sometime in the
1970’s after a failed marriage. We did not keep in touch with this side of the
family after Lib Lowe’s father (Fredrick Lowe) died sometime in the early
1960’s. Where the family is now is not known.
Reading the names of the Nance family in their plot, I was unable to tell
who was related to whom, but I think I came close. (1) In 2001 there were
two Nance names listed in the Kyle telephone directory and one name in
Buda. (2) As a child I visited the old Nance homestead, but when I returned
years later, it had been torn down and another house built behind the
original. I was told that one of the married daughters was planning to live
there.
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Our family was not close to our Nance relatives with the exception of my
father’s cousin Hardy Nance, Sr. and his family who like us lived in Kyle for
a brief period of time and later moved to Austin. They had one son, Hardy
Nance, Jr. who settled south of Austin in the Onion Creek Subdivision.
There were also two Nance girls in that family who were very pretty. I don’t
know the family connection except that Hardy Sr. was a cousin as were all
of the living Nance relatives. It seems that the patriarch was name Ezekiel
(Zeke) Nance who was a Civil War Captain and well respected in the
community.
All of the above information is what I can remember about the family
including a newspaper article about the passing of Fredrick Ezell probably of
a heart attack or stroke. Later Aunt Mary Houston Lowe told me some
family lore when I visited her home in Burlington, VT in 1955. According
to Aunt Mary, Mary Jane was a young matron at the start of the Civil War.
Aunt Mary told me that Mary Jane had five husbands, although I know the
names of only two. The story goes that Mary Jane and her mother-in-law
drove a wagon to escape the Yankee soldiers while her husband was hiding
beneath the wagon floor boards to escape being detected. Where they lived
at the time or when or how he died I don’t know. Where was James, her
father, during this time? We seem to have lost track of him. Supposedly he
lived to be seventy-five. I have a Bible which he gave to her dated 1850.
Was he the owner of a plantation in Louisiana.
Another story told to me by my father, Oscar Parke Houston, was that the
family had once owned a plantation near Alexandria, Louisiana and was was
a prosperous land owner. It was a well known fact that during the fight
between the States the Northern Forces sent a flotilla of flat bottom boats
headed for Shreveport. Their orders were to put down the Rebel forces
there. The rag tag southern troops put up a good fight and only when they
captured some of the Northern army’s supplies did they have enough to eat
and sufficient munitions. Following the old post road, the Northern forces
were repelled by the Southerners. Then they were recalled to assist in other
near by battles. The Yankees made their retreat back down the Red River
being followed by the Southern forces all the way to the Mississippi.
Retreating south on the River Road the Yankee troupes began to ransack the
countryside. They stole plantation crops, burned inhabitants out of their
homes, and sold their stores of cotton bales on the back market. European
traders were in New Orleans waiting to capitalize on the spoils of war and to
purchase the cotton at cut rate prices. According to Parke Houston, the
Nance family was forced to flee their home and plantation. They sought
refuge in Texas eventually ending up in Kyle.
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The story continues as the family settles down on farming land northwest
of Kyle some time after the hostilities had ended. “One of the boys” (Mary
Jane’s brother or cousin perhaps) was sent with cash to reclaim their land.
He was last seen boarding a steam driven wheel boat on the Red River and
was never seen or heard from again.
The family attributed his
disappearance to “foul play” as Yankee opportunists or Carpet Baggers as
some were called were quick to settle the abandoned plantations.
I presume there is some truth to these stories. We next find Mary Jane a
grown woman with two children living in Texas. By the time she married
Fredrick Ezell Houston in 1867 she was twenty-seven, a widow with two
children living in Kyle. What happened to her children is not known.
By chance I found an account in the book “The Trail Drivers of Texas”
(3) by Jeremiah (Jerry) Nance of the experiences as a cowboy (drover) in
charge of several trail ride driving cattle to the markets in Kansas and
Nebraska. Jerry’s account, “Echoes of the Cattle Trail” can be found on p.
105 of that book. Sometimes as many as 2,100 cattle were in a herd and
came as far away as the King Ranch in southern Texas. The drovers crossed
Texas and Indian Country (now Oklahoma) to markets in the north and east.
Jerry’s account (along with Sam dun Houston’s account) is in this book.
Sam was my father’s uncle and Jerry was his second cousin. I had no clue
of their adventures until I stumbled across this book in an Albuquerque, New
Mexico, library in the late 1980’s.
After some diligent searching I found Jeremiah Nance’s (1850-1926)
tomb stone in the Nance plot along with his wife and other members of the
Nance family. Ezekiel Nance (1816-1885) was Jerry’s father and he and his
wife Martha Jane had numerous off-spring. Among them was Walter Scott
Nance 1866-1963) who had a son also with that name who may be the
Nance living in Buda in 2001. Another son of Zeke and Martha Jane was
Robert Gates Nance (1872-1947) who also had a son bearing that name and
in the Kyle telephone book in 2001. Also listed in the directory was a James
C. Nancy of Kyle. (2) How was he related to Mary Jane? There are many
unanswered questions and had I the time I could have, and perhaps should
have, followed up on many of the missing relations. Zeke Nance (Ezekiel)
who lived in Kyle was a brother to James Nance. What was Mary Jane’s
motive for moving to Kyle and what happened to her father, James?
The picture I had o Mary Jane is that of a tall woman, dark hair pulled
back in a bun, round eye glasses and wearing a black dress denoting
widowhood. Blue eyes predominated in the Nance family and my father
told me that his grandmother smoked a pipe. My father must have known
his grandmother, but he had little to say about her. What influence she had
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on her son, James Nance Houston, who was a successful businessman and
somewhat of a “dandy” we will never know.
BIBIOGRAPHY
TRAIL DRIVERS OF TEXAS, Compiled and edited by J. Marvin Hunter,
Introduction by Bryan Price (President of the Old Trail Drivers’
Association); Second edition published in 1925 by the Cokesbury Press,
First University of Texas press Edition 1985, Box 7819, Austin, Texas
78713
FAMILY LORE, told to the author by Mary Houston Lowe and O.P.
Houston who also gave names and dates.
FOOTNOTES
(1) The Kyle Cemetery is a few miles west of town and is very well kept
due in part to a generous donation by Actor Robert Redford whose ancestors
(name unknown) are buried there also. Redford was an actor and director of
note during the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.
(2) The Kyle (2001) Telephone Directory lists three Nance men. They are:
James C. Nance (Kyle), R. (Robert ?) G. Nance (Kyle) and Scott Nance of
Buda, Texas.
(3) Jerry Nance’s account of his trail driving days on the Chisholm Trail is
included in “The Trail Drivers of Texas). This book is full of interesting
accounts by the Drovers themselves plus other interesting accounts of Texas
history in the late 1800’s. Good reading if you are so inclined. The writer,
Larry McMurty, put some of these accounts in his portrait of the West in his
book “Lonesome Dove”.
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