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Note: n S.E. Clabaugh: Mother's oldest brother was named Houston and the next William. These two volunteered for the Mexican War and fought under Genl. Taylor. Immediately following that war Grandfather Wallace sold his farm in Ala. and moved to Texas, buying a home about 4 miles from Jacksonville, Cherokee Co., which he improved and lived on until his death about 1882. My mother was married to Hayes Wright at Jacksonville when she was 16 years old. He was a farmer by trade, owned considerable land and some slaves. Becoming afflicted with T.B., he moved with his family to Bosque Co. about 1860 and made leather for the Confederate government - but died in the spring of '65 - leaving five children . . . so my father (C.F. Clabaugh) and mother (Martha Rachel Wallace) were neighbors, widower and widow, and were married in about '68 or '69 and I was born June 10, 1870 at my father's home on Willow Creek. My father, then 60 years old, died in Sept. following, when I was only 3 months old. (Martha was then 33.) (As I was growing up) Martha had a large number of horses and cattle and the older boys helped care for them . . . sometimes the boys would gather up 50 or 100 head in the early fall and drive east to sell. These trips took months and carried them as far east as Georgia. (In 1873, my mother married) F. W. Faulkner of Georgia, a very handsome scoundrel and of good family, educated and refined appearance. But it was a most unfortunate marriage for he proved to be an adventurer who really married my mother to get and spend her property. Within a year he had persuaded her to sell my father's place and to send him back to Georgia with a herd of horses, then to go with him to Texarkana, a new booming railroad town, where he left her broke with a bunch of children on her hands and (Faulkner's son) Walter having been born by that time, 1875. So she ran a hotel there until late fall of '77 when she got enough ahead to buy tickets and have shipped to Waco the few things we had left. I'll tell you a little of my life in Texarkana, it was all hardships. I know my stepfather made me go to the bakery through the snow barefoot and that my feet bled before I got back, marking the snow red . . . (Once we got back to Texas) I was in my native element and many of the spring days I roamed among the flowers and the grass 3 to 5 feet high. I've seen flocks of hundreds of prairie chickens that rise and fly like quail with the noise many times multiplied . . . we could go most anywhere without roads on horseback or in wagons.
Note: Excerpts from the 1936 autobiography of Edmund Cumberland Clabaugh, as edited by his grandso
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