Daingerfield,
the county seat of Morris County, was named for Captain London Daingerfield, supposedly
a native of Nova Scotia, but beyond that and a few other facts, Captain Daingerfield
remains a mystery man.
Morris County pioneers told stories of finding
Daingefield’s millstone and water well, which pre-dated local Anglo-American history.
These items were likely made by Acadian settlers from Louisiana Territory, but
they returned to the territory because of Indian hostilities in what became Texas.
A spring known locally as Daingerfield Spring was once a popular
camp used by Indians such as the Choctaws and Caddoes. Around 1830, Captain Daingerfield
and a company of 100 men attacked an Indian village at the spring and, after a
long, bloody fight, the Indians were driven away.
Local history says Captain
Daingerfield then settled his family around the spring, but the Indians retaliated,
killing Daingerfield, his wife and children.
The Captain and his family
were likely buried nearby with large flat rocks marking their graves. But as the
years passed, the cemetery and rocks were moved as new homes were built in the
area.
In those days, it was the custom of settlers to plant cedar trees
around the graves of their loved ones. Near the spot where the Daingerfields were
buried, large cedars are now growing.
The problem of finding more about
Captain Daingerfield is compounded by the fact that Morris and the surrounding
counties were once a part of Arkansas.
Army records in Washington have
no record of Daingerfield and, despite the efforts of several historians to unearth
more details about the captain, his family and his fellow soldiers, his disappearance
remains one of the legendary stories of East
Texas.
Some early visitors were not kind to the early town of Daingerfield.
William A. McClintock, who passed through the area in 1846, noted in his diary
that the town consisted of "three or four cabins scarcely fit for pigsties."
But
by the early 1850s the town began to grow. Sylvia Academy, a private school for
girls, opened around 1850, and in 1852 the Marshall Presbytery of the Cumberland
Presbyterian Church founded Chapel Hill College.
Bob
Bowman's East Texas
October 4, 2010Column.
A weekly column syndicated in 109 East Texas newspapers |
