By Tracy Gupton
Columbia Historical Museum Board Member
Among the former judges being portrayed at Meet Your Ancestors at Old Columbia Cemetery will be longtime Brazoria County Attorney Reuben Burch Loggins Jr. He will be portrayed by Michael Bailey, curator of the Brazoria County Historical Museum in Angleton.
Meet Your Ancestors is returning after a two-year absence. The event tells the stories of notables who are buried at the Columbia Historic Cemetery in West Columbia. This year will focus on the five judges interred there: William Henry Burkhart, Wesley Maston Holland, Robert Faickney, Thurman Gupton and Loggins. Costumed re-enactors will tell the judges’ stories at their gravesides.
Loggins was the son of Confederate Army veteran Reuben Burch Loggins Sr. and Mary Elizabeth Trotter Loggins of Mississippi. He and his brother, James Tillman Loggins, eventually ended up living in Brazoria County where both served in the legal field for nearly half a century. Both Brazoria County judges were born in Lodi, Miss., after the conclusion of the Civil War.
Reuben Loggins originally pursued a career in teaching. While attending school in Memphis, Tenn., he met and fell in love with fellow student Zula Winstead of Columbia, Texas, a descendant of the famed Dance family. She was the granddaughter of John Henry Dance who, along with his sons, created the Dance Gun Factory in East Columbia that manufactured many of the pistols used by Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. Zula’s mother was Della Elouise Dance Winstead, born in Alabama in 1837.
Reuben followed Zula to Texas to meet her family, and they were married in January 1891. He taught school at Reagan High School in Houston briefly before he and his bride moved to Bellville where both were teachers and Reuben furthered his studies in law. By 1893, they moved to Columbia where Reuben joined R.C. Duff in a law partnership.
Reuben and Zula were the parents of sons George Etheldred Loggins and Reuben Burch Loggins III who passed away in 1978 and 1987 respectively.
During the many years Reuben practiced law and served as a judge in the little town of Columbia, he also served 16 years as Brazoria County attorney. His younger brother, James Tillman Loggins, followed Reuben to Brazoria County in 1896. He died at the age of 75 on Jan. 31, 1942, and is buried at Angleton Cemetery.
Both Loggins brothers were Masons. Reuben was an elder of the Bethel Presbyterian Church in East Columbia.
Like his grandson, the late West Columbia veterinarian Dr. Reuben Burch Loggins IV, Reuben served for many years as an elected trustee of the West Columbia public schools. Dr. Loggins, who passed away at 76 in 2010, was a past president of the Columbia Historical Museum in addition to having served as president of the Columbia-Brazoria school district board of trustees.
Reuben died at the age of 74 on March 10, 1939, at his West Columbia home.
The Freeport Facts labeled Reuben “a pioneer citizen of Brazoria County and a member of one of the prominent old families of Texas,” in announcing his death in a March 1939 edition. “He had been in ill health for more than a year,” the obituary revealed.
Many of his descendants continue to live in the West Columbia area, carrying on the late attorney’s devotion to community service. Dr. Loggins’ son, Reuben Burch “Bubby” Loggins V, is a board member of the Columbia Cemetery Association, while Bubby’s mother, Donna Ruth Chesney Loggins, continues her late husband’s dedicated service to the West Columbia Rotary Club and the museum.
Meet Your Ancestors begins at 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 5 at Columbia Historic Cemetery on Jackson Street in West Columbia. Admission is free.
