Fred B. JACKSON

The following bio was taken from pages 257-258 of the book entitled “Rusk County History” compiled and edited and used with permission of the Rusk County Historical Commission.

Transcribed by Gloria Freeman Riley

Submitted by Gloria Briley Mayfield, Rusk County TX Coordinator

We Jacksons have two daughters, Nancy and Dorothy. Nancy, a schoolteacher, is married to Clarke Fairchild and lives in Albany, Oregon. Dorothy married James Hudson and lives in Lawton, Oklahoma. They have two children, Kathy Jean and Michael. James is in the army. My father was James Thomas Jackson; my mother was Gauda Priscilla Easley, and her father was James Benjamin Easley. He came from Georgia to Texas as a widower, with his family. His wife, my grandmother, Samanthia Eugenia Gresham, died September 9, 1879 as a result of burns received when their home burned. She was trying to recover a trunk that contained gold my grandfather had mined as a young man in California. The gold was later recovered from the ashes of the home. When James B. Easley arrived in Henderson, he intended proceeding to California but was persuaded by relatives who were already settled here to settle in Rusk County. In 1882 he bought four hundred and thirty-nine acres of land, of which I still own one hundred and twenty acres near Grandview Community. My great-grandfather, William Pyrant Easly, married Priscilla Dismuke. Several children were born to them. Priscilla was the daughter of Finney Dismuke and his father was John Dismuke of Baldwin County, Georgia. John Dismuke died in 1817 in or near Milledgeville. William Pyrant Easly was a doctor and a slave and plantation owner on Alcovey River in Walton County, Georgia. It has been said that he ran away from home in Virginia when he was a boy. My mother told me that “Pyrant” was a name that had stayed in the Easly family for generations. I found records of a Mary Pyrant of Colonial Virginia, who married an Easly. She had a son, Pyrant Easly. I was not able, however, to connect this information with William Pyrant. Samanthia Eugenia Gresham was the daughter of William Gresham and Mary Eallenor Stroud. Her grandparents were Orio Stroud I and Milcah Trammell. Milcah Trammell was the daughter of Thomas and Mary Turner Trammell, originally from Virginia. They lived in Georgia after the Revolutionary War. Mary Turner Trammell died in Chambers County, Alabama, at the age of one hundred years. She drew a pension because of Thomas Trammell’s service in the Revolutionary War. James Thomas Jackson’s father was William L. Jackson. He married Louiza P. (Pascal?) Nance in 1860 at Mountville, Georgia. He was in the Civil War and was killed in the Battle of Gettysburg. My father, John Thomas, was born three miles north of Westpoint, Georgia, near the Chattahoochee River. After the Civil War, Louiza married Thomas Martain, who took her to Carrollton, Georgia. Then after their children were born, they, with my father, came to Henderson. Thomas Martain had heard that land was cheap in Texas. After Martain arrived in Texas, Thomas changed the spelling of his name to “Martin.” I have cousins here by that name. My wife, Hattie Howell Watts, came from a large family. Her father and mother were James Fountain Watts and Sally Clifford Parker. Watts was the son of a German, who had had his name changed from “Stynager” or Steiner to John W. Watts by an English merchant ship captain, so that he could sign on as an English subject. He left the ship at New Orleans. Sally Clifford was the daughter of Joel and Nancy Sandifer Parker. They had a large family and settled in Short Pone (Compton) Community, having come from Georgia. Written by Fred B. Jackson