Jane C. wife of Thomas Keesee

Oct. 10 1808 Feb. 22 1897

As a wife devoted

As a mother affectionate

As a friend ever kind and true.

Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, Years 1826-1837

On 7 July 1826 in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, Thomas Keesee and Jane Caroline Green received license to marry.[2] The marriage return shows that Reverend John Williams married the couple in 27 July 1826. John Williams was a Cumberland Presbyterian minister. Minutes of the Cumberland Presbyterian synod for 22 October 1824 show him, along with other Cumberland Presbyterian ministers, commissioned by the synod to constitute the Alabama presbytery at a meeting to take place at Alexander George’s in Perry County in April 1825.[3]

Thomas Keesee was the son of Thomas Keesee Sr. (1778-1861) and wife Mary, thought to have been née McKnight. Jane Caroline Green’s brother George Sidney Green married Mary Ann Clardy, whose parents were Benjamin Clardy and Agnes Keesee. Agnes was a sister to Thomas Keesee Jr. with wife Jane Caroline Green.

The Keesee family, including the line of Thomas Keesee and Jane Caroline Green, is studied in detail in Carolyn Earle Billingsley’s Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier.[4] The book, which was based on Billingsley’s dissertation for a Ph.D. degree in American history and anthropological kinship theory at Rice University, is a multi-generational study of the Keesee family from the colonial period into the nineteenth century.[5] The historical study of this family provided by Communities of Kinship examines the extension of the cotton kingdom from Virginia and the Carolinas west into Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas as a process of kinship migration. The thesis of the book is that the settlement of the Old Southwest and the pushing of its cotton-dominated slave economy westward occurred largely via the migration of kinship networks.

Communities of Kinship offers a brief biography of Thomas Keesee Sr., father of Thomas Keese Jr. who married Jane Caroline Green, which notes the following:[6]

He was born in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, in 1778. As a young man, he and much of his family moved around 1797 from Virginia to Spartanburg District, South Carolina, where it appears he married his wife Mary, who is thought to have been a McKnight. After a decade there, the Keesee family then relocated to Sumner County, Tennessee, where Thomas Sr.’s father George Faris Keesee, who had become a prosperous planter in Tennessee, died testate in 1825, distributing considerable wealth, including enslaved people, to his children.

By the time of his father’s death in 1825, Thomas Keesee Sr. had moved from Sumner County, where his son Thomas Jr. was born 5 February 1804, to Franklin County, Tennessee. There is a Keesee family tradition that Thomas Sr. served in the war of 1812 under Andrew Jackson, though proof of this service has not been found. The family story also indicates that it was while serving under Jackson that he first saw promising lands on the Black Warrior River in what would become Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, and this is what motivated him to resettle his family in Tuscaloosa County near the border of Bibb County in or before 1821.

Thomas Keesee Sr. bought federal land in Tuscaloosa County, and then in 1837, the fertility of his Alabama land having been depleted by repeated years of cotton-growing, he moved with family members and neighbors from Tuscaloosa and Bibb Counties to Saline County, Arkansas. According to Billingsley, Thomas Keesee’s son Milton Keesee and his son-in-law Robert Calvert had gone to Saline County the previous year and encouraged the rest of the Keesee kinship network to leave Alabama for Arkansas the next year.

Having settled in central Arkansas, Thomas Keesee Sr., who was a ruling elder in the Cumberland Presbyterian church, founded a church of that denomination in Saline County. By  1840, he was the largest owner of enslaved people in Saline County, with thirty-six enslaved persons. He and seven other men in his kinship network at this point owned over 30% of the enslaved population of Saline County and held positions of responsibility and prominence in the county.

By 1848, many members of the kinship group including Thomas Keesee Sr. had migrated from Saline County to Union County in south Arkansas, seeking new, fertile land for cotton growing. The 1850 federal slave schedule shows Thomas holding forty enslaved people in Harrison township in Union County. At the very end of his life, Thomas Keesee Sr. moved to Ashley County, which adjoins Union County on the east, where he died in December 1861, distributing considerable wealth to his heirs by his will.

The brief biographical sketch of Thomas Keesee Sr. provided by Billingsley provides valuable context to understand the lives of his son Thomas Jr. and wife Jane Caroline Green up to the point that they moved from Arkansas to Texas in 1863. As noted above, Thomas Jr. was born in Sumner County, Tennessee, in 1804 before his father moved from that county to Franklin County, Tennessee, and then moved in or before 1821 to Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. As an unmarried son living at home, Thomas Jr. made the move with his parents to Franklin County, Tennessee, and then on to Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, where, as stated previously, he married Jane Caroline Green on 27 July 1826.

Saline County, Arkansas Years 1837-1848

Following their marriage, Thomas and Jane Caroline lived in Tuscaloosa County. As a previous posting indicates, when the migration of Keesee family members from Tuscaloosa County to Saline County, Arkansas, took place in 1837 (preceded in 1836 by the move of Milton Keesee and Robert Calvert to Saline County), Thomas and Jane Caroline Keesee took part in that migration along with Jane Caroline’s brother Benjamin S. Green and, the following year, her brother George Sidney Green. As the linked posting explains, George Calvert’s wife Mary Keesee was a sister of Thomas Keesee Jr. The linked posting provides biographical information about him and the role he played in the colony of Tuscaloosa and Bibb County settlers in central Arkansas and, later, in the move of some of those settlers, including Thomas and Jane Caroline Keesee, to Texas.

Note that though Goodspeed’s history of Saline and other counties in central Arkansas, cited in the posting linked above, suggests that Thomas and Jane Caroline moved to Saline County in 1837 along with other Keesee family members, a biography of their son Thomas J. Keesee in Memorial and Biographical History of Ellis County, Texas, gives the year of their relocation from Alabama to Arkansas as 1838.[7] However, Thomas Keesee’s obituary published in the Cumberland Presbyterian on 8 January 1880 states that the move to Arkansas took place in 1837.[8] As a previous posting shows, Jane Caroline’s brother and wife Margaret sold their land in Bibb County, Alabama, on 10 July 1837 as they pulled up stakes to go to Arkansas.[9] They joined the group leaving Alabama for Arkansas in 1837 and, in all likelihood, were accompanied by Jane Caroline and husband Thomas Keesee.

Having arrived in Saline County, Thomas Keesee Jr. became an elder of the new Cumberland Presbyterian church, named Saline, which his father had founded in Saline County in 1838.[10] He also immediately began growing cotton in Arkansas, something we know from a notice in the Weekly Arkansas Gazette of Little Rock on 4 December 1839, which states that Mr. J. De Baun had bought twelve bales of cotton raised by Mr. Thos. Keesee junr. of Saline County, the largest lot Gazette writers remembered having seen in Little Rock.[11] The notice adds,

The crop of Saline will amount this year to some 250 bales, which is much greater than was ever raised in our neighborhood before. The lands of Saline county were overlooked by planters in making locations, till a few enterprising Alabamians settled there, who bid fair to produce crops inferior, in quantity and quality, to none in the south, and as soon as the article will bear a good a [sic] price, will make it a source of wealth to themselves and the country.

After noting that Thomas Keesee Jr. settled in Saline County, Arkansas, in 1838 [sic], the previously cited biography of Thomas Keesee Jr.’s son Thomas J. Keesee says, “he built the first cotton gin and press [in Saline County], and marketed the first bales of cotton in Little Rock,—which event occasioned considerable excitement and comment.”[12]

A notice printed by the Weekly Arkansas Gazette on 18 July 1838 reminds us that Thomas Keesee was producing these crops of cotton with the labor of enslaved persons: the notice states that two enslaved men, Abram and Jack, both about 25, had run away from Robert Calvert and Thomas Keesee Jr. near Benton in Saline County on the 20^th inst., and a reward of $50 would be given to anyone apprehending them.[13] Note that this notice also suggests that Thomas Keesee Jr. was farming collaboratively with his brother-in-law Robert Calvert in Saline County.

Federal land records show both Thomas Keesee Jr. and his father Thomas Sr. buying numerous tracts of federal land in Saline County following their arrival there. On 11 October 1839, both Thomases obtained certificates for sixteen tracts in Saline County, with each certificate designating either Thomas Sr. or Jr. as the purchaser. Thomas Jr. bought more federal land in Saline County on 5 September 1842, 10 July 1844, and 1 November 1856.  All of these tracts were in township one north of the county seat, Benton.

Having established himself in Saline County, Thomas Keesee Jr. began to appear in county court records as a juror — at February term 1840 in the county’s common law court in the trials of the State of Arkansas v. Ashley B. Bates, of the State of Arkansas v. James Hester, of the State of Arkansas v. John M. Hicks, of the Bank Of Kentucky v. Charles Caldwell, and in the case of Charles L. Jeffries v. Robert L. Gilchrist.[14] In August 1841, Thomas was a juror in the case of the State of Arkansas v. Asher Bagley, who, as it happens, appears in my family tree because Asher Bagley’s daughter Mary Paralee Bagley married Edward Eli Batchelor, a son of my 2-great-grandfather Moses B. Batchelor of Hot Spring and Grant Counties, Arkansas.

The 1840 federal census provides a snapshot of how Thomas Keesee Jr. had prospered (and extended his cotton-growing enterprise using the labor of enslaved persons) after he moved his family from Alabama to Arkansas in 1837: it shows him holding twenty-one enslaved persons in Saline County.[15] Jane Caroline Green Keesee’s brother Benjamin is on the preceding page of the same census.

Union County, Arkansas, Years 1848-1863

The biography of Thomas Keesee’s son Thomas J. Keesee states that his father moved from Saline to Union County, Arkansas, in 1848, settling at Hillsboro where he was, during his years in the county, the largest taxpayer in Union County, holding 150 enslaved persons.[16] This figure does not, however, correspond to the number of enslaved persons listed for Thomas Keesee Jr. in Union County on the 1850 and 1860 federal slave schedules: the former shows Thomas with thirty-four enslaved persons, the latter with thirteen enslaved persons.[17]

As a previous posting has noted, the migration of the Keesee family kinship network to Saline County, Arkansas, from Tuscaloosa and Bibb Counties, Alabama, in 1837 was followed by a migration to Saline County from the same part of Alabama led in the fall of 1841 by Reverend Joab Pratt of Enon Baptist church in Bibb County. According to Robert Crowson, when the group of settlers led by Pratt came to Arkansas in 1841, their wagon train headed into Louisiana and then north into Arkansas.[18] Crowson notes that a point in Union Parish, Louisiana, just below the state line is named Alabama Landing in commemoration of these and other settlers using this landing on the Ouachita River as a place of embarkation and transit as they settled in north Louisiana or moved north into Arkansas.[19] According to Crowson, as the migrants headed from Union Parish, Louisiana, across the state line into Union County, Arkansas, they liked the land they saw in that county and for that reason, after the group settled in Saline County in central Arkansas in 1841, Reverend Pratt and several other members of the group decided to move south to Union County in 1845 and settle there.

Carolyn Earle Billingsley notes that after 1840, “some members of the kinship group [who had come to Saline County] began to look for new frontiers and their gazes were drawn southward to Union County, Arkansas”:[20]

They had passed through this area in the 1830s on their way to Saline County, and, moreover, their kinspeople and neighbors who followed them to Saline County in the early 1840s had also passed through the territory. They had seen the potential of the fertile soils and the river access. At that time, however, the county had been too undeveloped and underpopulated to facilitate their success as cotton planters.

The move of Thomas Keesee Jr., his father Thomas, and other members of the Keesee and Calvert families in Saline County to Union County in the mid-1840s was all about finding new, fertile land on which to grow cotton. As S. Charles Bolton indicates in his history of antebellum Arkansas, a major attraction of Union County was not only that it had fertile bottomlands for cotton growing, but that transportation of crops from this region to New Orleans markets was relatively easy.[21] The Ouachita River, which forms part of the northern boundary of Union County, runs south into Louisiana, where it joins the Tensas River to form the Black River and then connects to the Mississippi. As Bolton points out, in 1842, John Meek, who had just settled in Union County, wrote his son-in-law back in South Carolina glowing reports about agriculture in this. Meek wrote that living in Union County, it was as if New Orleans were right at his door — the trip downriver from the Ouachita was easy and not long.[22]

Donald P. McNeilly notes that cotton cultivation had begun to expand along the Ouachita River by the mid-1820s.[23] By the late 1820s and 1830s, Arkansas had begun to experience a “mini-land boom,” as highlanders from Kentucky and Tennessee began settling its uplands and planters from the plantation areas of the Southeast moved into its lowlands.[24] In this period, cotton plantations and farms were being settled in various Ouachita River counties including Union County.[25] McNeilly notes that by 1850, Union was second only to Chicot County in its production of cotton.[26] By 1850, enslaved persons constituted 46 percent of the population of Union County, a figure that rose to 52 percent by 1860.[27]

Thomas Keesee and Jane Caroline Green (who are in my family tree because Jane was a sister of my 4-great-grandfather Samuel Kerr Green) are not the only folks in my family tree who moved to Union County, Arkansas, to grow cotton in the 1840s. James Russell Winn (1810-1883), a brother of my 3-great-grandfather John Alexander Winn of Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, moved with his common-law wife Margaret Shackelford from Attala County, Mississippi, to Union County shortly after 1840. James and Margaret settled at Hillsboro and grew cotton there with the labor of enslaved people, though Margaret herself was a woman of color who had been freed by the time she and James formed their non-legal lifelong union in Mississippi about 1833. The couple’s marriage was not legally sanctioned due to laws prohibiting interracial marriage, but family letters make plain that they regarded themselves as man and wife and lived together happily until both died. As the Civil War approached, James and Margaret sent their three living children from Union County to Ohio where they thought these biracial family members would be safer than in Arkansas. They bought land for them there, seeing that they got schooling at Oberlin.[28]

I grew up in Union County, Arkansas, by the way. My father’s parents moved their family there in the 1920s from Red River Parish, Louisiana, where my father was born, and he was raised in Union County. After my parents married in Little Rock in 1948 and my family had lived there up to 1958, my father moved us to El Dorado, the county seat of Union County, and I grew up there, graduating from high school in El Dorado in 1968.

Robertson and Ellis Counties, Texas, Years 1863-1879

In 1863, his father Thomas Keesee Sr. having moved from Union County to Ashley County, Arkansas, where he died in December 1861, Thomas Keesee Jr. followed family members including his brother-in-law Robert Calvert from Union County to Texas. As the previously cited biography of his son Thomas J. Keesee states, Thomas first settled “in Brazos bottom” in “Robinson” [i.e., Robertson] County, Texas, in 1863, and in 1866 he moved to Ellis County, leasing his land in Robertson County and settling on 640 acres in Ellis.[29]

Thomas’s obituary in the Cumberland Presbyterian on 8 January 1880 states,

After remaining three years on the Brazos river, near his brother-in-law, Judge Calvert, he came to this neighborhood [i.e., Ellis County, Texas].[30]

As a previous posting indicates, in 1850, Thomas Keesee’s brother-in-law Robert Calvert had left Arkansas with members of the Keesee kinship network to relocate to the fertile Brazos River bottomlands in Robertson County, Texas. Robert Calvert had been preceded in his move to Texas by Thomas Keesee’s brother Milton, who had moved from Saline to Union County, Arkansas, for a few years, serving as a state representative in his time there, and who then also settled on the Brazos in Washington County, Texas.[31] As the posting I’ve just linked also shows, at some point between July 1848 and November 1850, Jane Caroline Green Keesee’s brother Benjamin S. Green also left Saline County for Washington County, Texas, where he, too, bought land on the Brazos with Hugh Hudson Calvert witnessing that deed.

The move to Ellis County, Texas, was the final Thomas Keesee and wife Jane Caroline Green made. Thomas died near Ovilla in Ellis County on 16 November 1879 and was buried in the cemetery of Shiloh Cumberland Presbyterian church at Ovilla, of which he and his family were members. His date of death is inscribed on his tombstone, is written in his family bible register, and is stated in his obituary in the Cumberland Presbyterian.[32] Shortly before dying, Thomas made his will in Ellis County on 22 November 1879.[33]

The will reads,

Be it known that I Thomas Keesee of the county aforesaid this day being of sound mind and memory and well knowing the uncertainty of this life no do make this my last will and Testament, that is to say

First, I give my sould [sic] into the hands of a Just and merciful God, hoping for eternal life through the atonement of a Blessed Redeemer who died that man might live.

Second I give and bequeath unto my beloved wife Jane C. Keesee all the right title claim and interest I now have in both real and personal estate in said county of Ellis or elsewhere, hereby giving all my interest in and unto all lands now owned by us or either of us to be exclusively the property of my said wife during her natural life, and to be by her partitioned and divided as she may think just and right.

3^rd The personal property of every kind and description I direct that my said wife keep control, sell or dispense of as she may, at any and all times think most advisable for the interest of the estate. I do hereby appoint my said wife Jane C Keesee, sole executrix of this my last will and I hereby direct that this will shall be probated as other wills but without bond on any further proceedings in court by said executrix.

Given under my hand and seal using a [scrovil?] for seal this 22^nd day of November 1879.

Thomas Keesee

Witnesses

E.C. Newton

M.M. Quaite

Among the documents in Thomas’s estate file is his widow Jane’s 6 December 1879 appeal to probate the estate, with her signature and with a statement that Thomas Keesee had died 26 November 1879 in Ellis County with property real and personal valued at $4,300. A notation on the document shows the court issuing Jane the right to probate the estate on 7 January 1880. On 22 January, E.C. Newton proved the will in court, and the following day, Jane affirmed the will as executrix, this time signing by mark, though her signature to the 6 December 1879 appeal to probate is clear and firm.

The full text of Thomas Keesee’s obituary in the Cumberland Presbyterian, written by the pastor of his Shiloh Cumberland Presbyterian church at Ovilla, Reverend Daniel Gideon Molloy, reads as follows:[34]

KEESEE.—Died on the 26^th of November, A.D. 1879, near Ovilla, Ellis county, Texas, Mr. Thomas Keesee, in the seventy-fifth year of his age.

Brother Keesee was a native of Tennessee, but in his thirteenth year went with his parents to Alabama, where he remained until he reached the state of manhood. In his twenty-third year he was married to Miss Caroline Green, who still lingers on this side “the river” among her children, waiting until the Master shall call her home. In 1837, brother Keesee went to Arkansas, and made his home in the southern part of the State, where he remained until 1864, when he came to Texas. After remaining three years on the Brazos river, near his brother-in-law, Judge Calvert, he came to this neighborhood. Brother Keesee was all his life a farmer, and was always safe and honorable in his business transactions. When about twenty-five years of age he became religious, and with his companion united with the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. He made a profession of religion in one of the great revivals of those days, under the ministry of Brothers James Guthrie and Willis Burgess, and his religion always partook of the spirit of those revivals—always alive, fervent, uniform. In this change no doubt began that Christian zeal and love for the Redeemer which have been developed in a long life of work in the Master’s cause.

The manner of his conversion is worth of note. Brother Burgess had preached a good sermon, in the usual way; and afterward his father and Col. Williams, a neighbor were engaged in very earnest conversation on the thoughts presented in the discourse. During the conversation brother Keesee became so deeply convinced of the fearful reality of religion, and of his lost condition, that he sought a secret place, and there made a full commitment of himself to the Holy One…. Brother Keesee at once took up the duty of family devotion, and steadfastly observed that duty to the last. Only a few days before his death, when he felt too feeble to lead the family devotion, he urged some of his friends present to hold family prayers; and when all shrunk from the duty he begged the physician to read a chapter, and after the reading, feeble as he was, he rose and knelt by the bed, and then offered his last audable [sic] petition for his family, those around, and for the Church. Brother Keesee’s prayers were always fervent, but at times they were attended with overwhelming emotions and tears….

Note that the obituary suggests that Thomas’s father Thomas Keesee Sr. moved from Franklin County, Tennessee, to Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, in 1817 (when Thomas Jr. was thirteen years old), but other sources indicate a date of 1821 for this move. And Thomas Keesee Jr. settled in central Arkansas (Saline County) in 1837, making his move to Union County in south Arkansas around 1848 and not in 1837 as the obituary suggests.

Jane’s Death in Ellis County in 1897

As Thomas’s will, obituary, and estate documents indicate, his wife Jane Caroline Green survived him. Jane died 22 February 1897 in Ellis County and is buried beside Thomas in Shiloh Cumberland Presbyterian cemetery near Ovilla.[35] In addition to being inscribed on her tombstone, the death date is written in Thomas and Jane’s family bible.

Prior to her death, on 17 January 1880, Jane made her will in Ellis County.[36] The original will on file in Jane’s estate file in Ellis County has her signature and that of her witness P.P. (Peter P.) Smith. On 27 May 1882, Jane made a codicil to her will, which is filed in her estate file. The codicil is signed by mark. Jane filed the codicil 7 August 1882.

On 10 April 1897, Peter P. Smith proved the will and it was filed. At April court 1897, T.B. (Thomas Bradley) Criddle, whom Jane named as her executor in the will, filed as executor, stating that the estate both real and personal was valued at about $5,000. Jane’s will, which is lengthy, indicates that she had held onto and managed extensive real estate holdings bequeathed to her by her husband Thomas. The will describes these in detail. It names her children Milton S. Keesee, Thomas J. Keesee, W.F. (William Fortenberry) Keesee, M.J. (Mary Jane) Franklin, E.L. Everett, E.E. (Eleanor E.) Tucker, leaving each of these $5. The will bequeaths to the children of Jane’s deceased daughter Anastasia S. Hammond, deceased, and the children of Jane’s daughter Louisa Hussey, also deceased, $5. The will divides Jane’s real and personal property between her two youngest sons John Hill and George S. Keesee. Jane spent her final years living with her son George and his family.

I’m unclear as to who E.L. Everett is. Thomas and Jane Green Keesee’s daughter Emeline married Sidney T. Wheelis and had died in Union Parish, Louisiana, in 1868, but the will does not name her as one of Jane’s deceased daughters whose children received an inheritance. There is no other daughter among Thomas and Jane’s children who had a given name beginning with E. except Eleanor, who married Barnard H. Tucker and who is named as E.E. Tucker in the will.

Jane’s executor Thomas Bradley Criddle, who pastored Central Presbyterian church at Waxahachie, Texas, from 1873-8, was married to Hannah May Quaite, a daughter of William Green Lee Quaite, a Cumberland Presbyterian minister whose second wife was Jane’s niece Mary M. Calvert, daughter of Robert Calvert.[37] Mary M. Calvert is the M.M. Quaite who was a witness of Thomas Keesee’s will. Hannah May Quaite was a daughter of William Green Lee Quaite by his first wife Hester Patterson. Peter P. Smith, who witnessed Jane’s will, was a son of Mary Calvert by her husband prior to William Green Lee Quaite, who was Dr. Peter H. Smith.

In the preceding account of the lives of Thomas Keesee and Jane Caroline Green, note the big lacunae in my research: I have not searched deed records of Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, Saline and Union Counties, Arkansas, and Robertson and Ellis Counties, Texas, for information about them. I’m sure there’s quite a bit of information in deed books of those counties that would flesh in more details of their history.

---

[1] See Find a Grave memorial page of Jane Caroline Green Keesee, Shiloh cemetery, Ovilla, Ellis County, Texas, created by Geno-seeker, with tombstone photos by cindy williams and Kelli Smythe. In December 2000, Barbara Scott Wyche of Richmond, Texas, a researcher of this family, sent me a photocopy of several pages from the bible register. Barbara Wyche told me that she does not know where the bible itself is. Her photocopy did not include publication information, and appears to be an incomplete copy of the register providing only birth and death dates and not marriage dates; sources citing the bible indicate that the marriage of Thomas Keesee and Jane Caroline Green is recorded in the bible, so it appears there was a page in the original bible with marriage dates. The birthdates of Thomas Keesee and Jane Caroline Green and their first three children Robert Calvert, Mary Jane, and Anastasia Keesee are all written in an “old” hand that is, I suspect, the handwriting of either Thomas or Jane Caroline.

[2] Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, Marriage Records Bk. 1823-1845, p. 84. The marriage record is abstracted in Pauline Jones Gandrud, Alabama Records, vol. 8: Tuscaloosa County (Tuscaloosa, 1978), p. 78.

[3] Cumberland Presbyterian Church, General Assembly, Semi-Centennial General Assembly of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, Containing Circular Letter, 1810; Historical Memoranda, 1810-1880; and Semi-Centennial Exercises and Addresses, 1880 (Nashville: Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 1880), p. 20.

[4] Carolyn Earle Billingsley, Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004).

[5] William D. Lindsey, “Carolyn Earle Billingsley (1948–2018),” Encyclopedia of Arkansas. See also Billingsley, “Antebellum Planters: Communities of Kinship on the Cotton Frontier,” East Texas Historical Journal 39,2 (2001), pp. 58-74; and Billingsley, “Settlement Patterns in Saline County, Arkansas,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 52,2 (summer 1993), pp. 107-128. See also Carolyn Earle Billingsley, “The Keesee Family,” at Genealogy.com.

[6] Billingsley, Communities of Kinship, pp. 36-8.

[7] Goodspeed’s Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Pulaski, Jefferson, Lonoke, Faulkner, Grant, Saline, Perry, Garland and Hot Spring Counties, Arkansas: Comprising a Condensed History of the State, etc. (Chicago: Goodspeed, 1889), p. 234; and Memorial and Biographical History of Ellis County, Texas (Chicago: Lewis, 1892), pp. 476-7.

[8] Cumberland Presbyterian (Nashville, Tennessee) 18,26 (8 January 1880), p. 5, col. 6.

[9] Bibb County, Alabama, Deed Bk. E, pp. 380-2.

[10] Billingsley, Communities of Kinship, p. 82, citing Goodspeed’s Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Pulaski, etc., p. 240.

[11] “Cotton,” Weekly Arkansas Gazette (4 December 1839), p. 2, col. 1. See also Billingsley, Communities of Kinship, pp. 111.

[12] Memorial and Biographical History of Ellis County, Texas, p. 476.

[13] “Fifty Dollars Reward,” Weekly Arkansas Gazette (18 July 1838), p. 4, col. 2.

[14] See “Saline County Common Law Court (Jurors) 1837 – 1842,” abstracting information from Common Law Book A, at the USGenweb site for Saline County.

[15] 1840 federal census, Saline County, Arkansas, p. 211. See also Billingsley, Communities of Kinship, p. 138.

[16] Memorial and Biographical History of Ellis County, Texas, p. 476.

[17] 1850 federal slave schedule, Union County, Arkansas, Johnson township, p. 559; 1860 federal slave schedule, Union County, Arkansas, Johnson township, p. 323B. Billingsley gives the 1860 figure as eighty-two: Billingsley, Communities of Kinship, p. 138. My reading of the document, however, shows the number as thirteen.

[18] Robert Crowson, “From Alabama to Arkansas: An 1841 Journal,” Bibb Eagle (February 1978). Reprinted in Grassroots, Journal of the Grant County [Arkansas] Museum 8 (July 1988), pp. 8-9.

[19] See John R. McKinnie, “History of the Alabama Landing,” at the Shiloh to Canaan blog, which says that the landing for which the settlement gets its name is the first bluff with gravel banks on the Ouachita River as one moves along the river south from Camden, Arkansas. Because of its convenience for those traveling on or crossing the river as a point of embarkation and crossing, “by 1830, Alabama Landing was a center for passengers coming to Union Parish or going northwest.”

[20] Billingsley, Communities of Kinship, p. 63.

[21] S. Charles Bolton, Arkansas, 1800-1860: Remote and Restless (Fayetteville: Univ. of AR Press, 1998), pp. 19, 55.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Donald P. McNeilly, The Old South Frontier: Cotton Plantations and the Formation of Arkansas Society, 1819-1861 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), p. 15.

[24] Ibid., p. 16.

[25] Ibid., p. 18.

[26] Ibid., p. 126.

[27] Ibid., p. 132.

[28] See William D. Lindsey, “Brown or White Sugar: The Story of a Mixed Race Plantation Family in Nineteenth-Century Arkansas, Part 1” Arkansas Family Historian 48,1 (March 2010), pp. 5-23; Brown or White Sugar: The Story of a Mixed-Race Plantation Family in Nineteenth-Century Arkansas, Part 2,” Arkansas Family Historian 48,2 (June 2010), pp. 83-96; Brown or White Sugar: The Story of a Mixed Race Plantation Family in Nineteenth-Century Arkansas, Part 3,” Arkansas Family Historian 48,3 (September 2010), pp. 159-172; and “Brown or White Sugar: The Story of a Mixed-Race Plantation Family in Nineteenth-Century Arkansas, Part 4,” Arkansas Family Historian 48,4 (December 2010), pp. 235-247.

[29] Memorial and Biographical History of Ellis County, Texas, p. 476.

[30] See supra, n. 8.

[31] Billingsley, Communities of Kinship, pp. 120-1, 132.

[32] See Find a Grave memorial page of Thomas Keesee, Shiloh cemetery, Ovilla, Ellis County, Texas, created by Geno-Seeker, with a tombstone photo by Kelli Smythe. On Thomas and Jane’s family bible, see supra, n. 1. For Thomas’s obituary in Cumberland Presbyterian, see supra, n. 8.

[33] Ellis County, Texas, Will Bk. A, pp. 209-210. The original will is in Ellis County, Texas, estate file 357. It appears not to have been written by Thomas himself, but has his shaky signature, suggesting that he was probably very infirm at the time the will was made.

[34] See supra, n. 8.

[35] See supra, n. 1.

[36] Ellis County, Texas, Will Bk. A, pp. 565-570. The original will is in Ellis County, Texas, estate file 1047.

[37] Billingsley, Communities of Kinship, pp. 68-9. And see William G.L. Quaite’s obituary in Cumberland Presbyterian, 19 September 1895, p. 159, as transcribed at Carolyn Earle Billingsley, “Descendants of William Calvert and Lucy Rogers,” at Genealogy.com.