Farmers, Ranchers, the Land and the Falls - Texas Parks & Wildlife ...

Farmers, Ranchers, the Land and the Falls
families had homesteaded adjoining 160-acre tracts. (See map of land grants in
the Pedernales Falls State Park.) 22
A number of other settlers moved into the immediate vicinity of the Falls
at about the same time as the Wilsons did, or soon afterward. In March 1874
Mrs. Mary Terry, who seems to have been a widow with children, homesteaded a
160-acre tract adjoining the lands occupied by the Wilsons a few months earlier. 23
At about that same time, J.H. Davis, James B. Raines and others brought their
families and established farmsteads in the area north and east of Greene Wilson’s
tract. The family of Thomas Jay Hugh (T.J.) Trammell also moved to the
Pedernales area during this period, traveling (according to family lore) in a wagon
train with other families, perhaps including the Raineses. 24 Like the Wilsons,
the Raineses and the Trammells were old-stock families with southern roots; the
three families were interrelated, and it is possible, even probable, that they had
known each other well during the 1850s, when all three families had been living
in Hot Springs County, Arkansas.
James B. Raines had been born in North Carolina about 1824, and had
married his wife Nancy in Mississippi in 1844. In 1850 the Raineses lived
in Clear Creek, Hot Springs County, Arkansas, where they probably met the
Wilson family, who were also living in that area at the time. In September 1865,
the Raineses’ first daughter, Mary Ann, married Greene Wilson in Colorado
County, Texas. Three years later, in 1868, their fifth daughter, Elizabeth (Betsy),
married T.J. Trammell in Colorado County. 25
T. J. Trammell had been born on August 23, 1847 in Hot Springs County,
Arkansas; his father was from Georgia, his mother from Arkansas. By March
1868, he was living in Colorado County, Texas, where he married Betsy Raines,
who was 16 years old at the time. Just where T.J. and Betsy lived just after
arriving in the Pedernales Falls area is not clear; perhaps they shared quarters
with the Raines family. In any case, in August 1879 they moved onto the A.C.
Hughes tract, across the Pedernales River from the Wilsons and the Raineses.
(See land grant map.) The land had been surveyed for Hughes earlier that year,
but according to a contemporary account, he and his wife Alice never lived there.
The Trammells bought the tract from Hughes and patented it with the state;
they were almost certainly the first Anglo settlers to actually live there. 26 The
Trammells lived on the Hughes tract for six years, and it was most probably they
who built the stone house that can still be seen in the vicinity of what is now
called Jones Springs. T.J. classifed himself as a “farmer” for the census enumerator
in 1880, and probably grew crops on a field enclosed by rock walls, still visible
today, just west of their house. 27
8