Albert Redford Nash was born October 6, 1852 in Lebanon, Kentucky to Col. Thomas Jefferson Nash and Elizabeth Flood (traditionally spelled Floed) Nash. He came to Texas with his parents when he was two years old. The family settled at Duck Creek and were engaged in farming. Rev. Nash reminisced about Dallas County when he was a boy. He told of hitching up six mules to haul two bales of cotton down to Dallas to be sold. He also recalled of going squirrel hunting where Union Terminal now sits in the central business district of Dallas. He described Dallas in the mid 1850s as consisting of seven houses, a long court house, one general store, one hotel, one blacksmith shop. Travelers had to take a ferry boat to cross the Trinity River.
In 1939, Rev. Nash wrote a letter to his children that he recalled having personally seen the famous log cabin in Dallas. For a few years he and his family lived on the farm of Watt Caruth and for two years they had lived near Cochran’s Chapel. He said that the church had been built in 1855. He remembered when he was a boy that the Duck Creek Log Schoolhouse was still fairly new, having been built in 1846, and that he had attended school at the wood frame structure that replaced it in 1862. An additional memory was that he was there in 1872 when the first train pulled into the Garland area from Dallas, and that he was on hand waiting to witness it. That same year, he met a 14 year old girl, Minerva Coleman Spellman. They would be married two years later and remain as husband and wife for over sixty years until her death in 1933.
Prior to his becoming a minister, he had worked as a farmer in Dallas and Ellis counties. He became a minister of the Gospel when he was 42 years old and served in that capacity at various churches in North Texas until he retired from active ministry in 1924 at the age of 71. During his long ministry, he was often written up in area newspapers.
The couple had one son and six daughters. Rev. Nash died in 1944 at the age of 91. Both Rev. and Mrs. Nash are buried at the historic Greenwood Cemetery in Dallas, Texas.
By Mike Magers
