WILLIAM IVERSON

The following bio was taken from page 257 of the book entitled "Rusk County History" compiled and edited and used with permission of the Rusk County Historical Commission.

Transcribed by Shirley Koym

Submitted by Gloria Briley Mayfield, Cemeteries of Texas

When William Iverson was born in 1795, his birth was duly recorded in the records of Midway Church in Liberty County, Georgia, though he was born in Burke County. His mother’s uncle, William Baker, Jr., who was then church clerk, evidently thought any descendant of the first deacon, William Baker, Sr., was worthy of mention in the church records, no matter where he lived.

Midway Church was Congregationalist, founded by Puritans from South Carolina. The Dorchester Puritans settled Dorchester, Massachusetts about 1830, many moving to Windsor, Connecticut, shortly thereafter. In 1695 a group of them settled Dorchester, South Carolina, becoming the only organized group of Puritans in the South. William Baker, Sr., was one of the group who moved from South Carolina to Georgia in the 1750’s. His daughter, Rebecca, married Samuel Jones, and their daughter, Rebecca, married Robert Iverson as her second husband in 1790. Soon after their marriage, they moved to Burke County, and Rebecca died there. Robert Iverson married again and moved to Putnam County, where he died in 1814. His older sons attended Princeton, but William didn’t graduate. He returned to Liberty County, where he married Eliza Ann Wilkins, daughter of Paul Hamilton Wilkins, a rice planter.

William and Eliza had three children, William Jr., Robert, and Rebecca. Eliza died in 1827, and William then married Sarah Ann Hand, and to them were born ten children. Four of the ten are known to have descendants in Rusk County. Julie Ann Tabitha Iverson and her husband, Travis Rousseau, were the first to arrive here. Their enthusiastic letters brought Mary Elizabeth Iverson and her husband, Dr. Zachariah C. Williams, who arrived in 1870.

James Harris Iverson married Frances Sayers in Desoto Parish, Louisiana, in 1872, and they came to Rusk County about 1892. George Allen Cadehead, whose mother was Caroline Iverson, came to Rusk County about 1900. William Iverson, Jr., the oldest son of William Iverson, died in Virginia in 1864, but his widow, Haney Ann Dawkins Iverson, and her children came to Texas, though they didn’t settle in Rusk County.

William Iverson died in 1869 in Navarro County, Texas, and Sarah Ann Hand died in January of 1870, and is buried in Shiloh Cemetery between her son, James Harris Iverson, and her daughter, Mary Elizabeth Iverson Williams.

Submitted by Mrs. W. E. Langford