A Visit from a Girl Pioneer of Illinois Territory and Grandmother Pioneer of Dallas County, Texas
Narrator: I’m standing near my ancestor’s grave in the W. W. Glover Cemetery in Dallas, Texas, to tell you part of her story in first person.
Huldah: This is the story of my family, including my sisters, Anna buried right here, and my younger sister Emily, buried right across White Rock Creek, my brother and sister-in-law buried right here.
Our parents were born in the northeast part of what is now the United States of America around the time George Washington won the Battle of Yorktown. They were still infants when the last Red Coated British soldiers were kicked right out of New York City never to return. By the turn of the century (1800) they were both in South Carolina and married to each other.
I and 10 brothers and sisters were born there in South Carolina. On Christmas Day 1816, two years to the day after the end of the War of 1812, we loaded everything into covered wagons and started on our journey to the Illinois Territory. I was 13, my youngest brother was two months old. The rest of us were from two years to 14. We traveled along the roads westward including the National Highway. We went through the Allegheny Mountains to the Illinois Territory.
In the spring we found a place to build our log cabin on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River. Right close to where the Missouri River joined to make an even bigger river. Two years after the cabin was finished, Illinois became the 21st state in the United States of America.
I married Mr. Moore when I was 17, and we lived near my family and three of my sisters and their husbands. There was flooding of the rivers into our crop land, so a after a few years we moved to higher ground near a town where my father was the first school teacher.
My sister Emily, married to John Beeman, had eight children born in Illinois and came to East Texas. Then they and my sister Anna’s older boys went west of here to live in Bird’s Fort where Hamp Rattan was killed by enemy Native Americans. That is a story in itself that people here today can tell you about. The John Beeman family was literally the first family of Dallas and their daughter married the founder of Dallas, John N. Bryan.
My Cox nephews also lived with them in Dallas. Is anyone here today from that Beeman family?
(Response was “Yes.”)
My sister Anna and her little boys were close behind the Beemans. Any of Anna’s family here today?
(Response was “Yes.”)
Then one of the twins, our younger brother W.C. and his wife, Nancy Beeman Hunnicutt, came to
homestead right over there (pointing north across Military Parkway) to live and farm. They started the Hunnicutt School for their children. Some of their kids are buried right under the ground where we are standing. You can see that school for yourself because it is still open! Now called Bayles Elementary in the Dallas schools and it is just north of here.
Have you heard of the big street called Buckner Blvd.? It was a little dirt road up until the 1920s. When people started driving cars instead of mules, my nephew Ike Hunnicutt helped make all the roads better. He is buried here. Ike sold some of the Hunnicutts’ land to help Buckner’s Orphans Home expand their crop land. You can see one of the old brick buildings today. Any Hunnicutts here today? (Response was “Yes.”)
Back to my life in Illinois in the 1850s. My mother lived with me and died while at my home. One of my sons came to Dallas and made a claim to settle and improve land then came home to Illinois. Then he and my daughter-in-law died! Their newborn son, Tom, came to live with me. Can you believe that something I did in 1859 was in a Dallas newspaper in 1989?
This was reported:
“Grandmother Huldah and Uncle Jim brought the infant, Tom Moore, to Dallas County to claim the
homestead of his deceased parents. A milk cow was tied to the back of the wagon for the baby’s milk. Huldah fed the milk to Tom ‘with the aid of a goose quill, drop by drop, as bottles and nipples were yet unheard of.’”
(Suburban Tribune, published Dallas, Dallas, Texas, 7/7/1989)
And that is true with a lot of details that I could add. Tom crying, so many diapers washed, the dusty roads, the wagon-rutted muddy roads, the weather…. After we made baby Tom’s claim sure in the courts, Jim, Tom and I went back to Illinois where I stayed until after 1870 when I joined my many relatives and neighbors who already lived here in Dallas. Tom was living with my son Hartwell Hunnicutt Moore in Dallas in 1880. He lived the rest of his life right in this area of Dallas County.
Descendant Becky Clay is here today with cousins who are Tom’s childrens’ children. My grandson Tom died before Becky was born, but she heard about him and he today in 2023 is still called “Pa Moore.”
We, my sisters and brother, many times asked the Lord Jesus to watch over our children and all our
descendants for Him to keep them safely in His care. Did He answer our prayers for you?
Information sources: Libraries- S.M.U. and Dallas Public, Federal Census Records, Madison County Illinois Records, History of Greene and Jersey Counties, Illinois, Springfield, Ill.: Continental Historical Co., 1885, Page 828 (“Between the mouth of Wood River and the American Bottom”) and p. 1000 (“First school was taught by Hartwell Hunnicutt in 1824 in a log cabin on Section 23. He was a teacher in the schools of the township for a number of years.”)
(The above is intended to be the first installment of an expanding memorial, growing as more chapters are added by Huldah’s descendants. A costumed reenactment was done by descendant Lara Sain Gonzaga at the Pioneer Picnic, May 6, 2023. – Kathy Ann Reid)
