By Tracy Gupton
Columbia Historical Museum Board Member
Now in my third year as president of the Columbia Cemetery Association (CCA), I and other CCA board members take pride in serving as keepers of the flame and caretakers of West Columbia’s historical graveyard. A dozen Texas Historical Commission markers adorn the hallowed grounds of Old Columbia Cemetery, indicating the great significance our little town situated between the San Bernard and Brazos rivers played in early Texas history.
Around 1823 Josiah Hughes Bell first plotted the layout of the new town of Marion along the western banks of the Brazos River on land he and his wife Mary received from Stephen F. Austin as “Old 300” settlers in Texas. The town was more commonly referred to as “Bell’s Landing” in its earliest days by the visitors and new residents of the fledgling community.
About a decade later Josiah Bell created the nearby community of Columbia a few miles west of Marion and established the Bell Plantation for himself and his family. It was on this land where an infant named Clinton Terry Duff was buried in the final days of 1833. The baby was less than 5 months old.
What is today regarded as one of the oldest cemeteries in Texas began as the burial site for this infant who died on December 28, 1833. There are no Duffs listed among Stephen F. Austin’s original Anglo Texas settlers from the early 1820s, but there are many Duff family members interred at historic Columbia Cemetery. The registry of Columbia Cemetery occupants lists 24 Duffs as well as several others with the maiden name Duff.
Other early citizens of Columbia were buried in the same area as the Duff baby before Columbia’s founder, Josiah Hughes Bell, was laid to rest there himself. Bell was buried beneath the majestic oaks on his plantation when he died May 17, 1838. Bell’s wife Mary and their adult children deeded the land to the Bethel Presbyterian Church in 1852 for a public cemetery, which is where Mary and her mother, Elizabeth McKenzie, are also buried.
The most recent dedication ceremony of the many state historical markers at Columbia Cemetery honored Mary Eveline McKenzie Bell. She died May 30, 1856.
With the passage of time the town on the Brazos River called Marion was eventually renamed East Columbia while the neighboring community became West Columbia many years after it served as the first capital city of the Republic of Texas in 1836. Several people from that historic era in Texas history are buried at Old Columbia Cemetery. The first Texas Historical Commission markers were dedicated at Columbia Cemetery in 1936, one hundred years after Columbia served briefly as the new republic’s first capital.
While I take pride in being a sixth-generation resident of the West Columbia and East Columbia area, there are many local families who share the same bragging rights. Among those families whose local roots dig even a little deeper are the Duffs and Mavericks.
Their lineage connects with officers who fought valiantly in battle during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and both world wars. Other branches of the Duff-Maverick family tree involve a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, two former mayors of San Antonio and a decorated World War I hero.
Albert Maverick III, who married Louise Gordon Duff in 1942, participated in Troop Carrier Command in the European Theatre during World War II. An Army veteran, Albert was a 1940 graduate of the University of Texas School of Law. He was buried next to his wife of 51 years at Columbia Cemetery following his death in Houston on October 30, 2005. Louise Duff Maverick, the sister of Clinton Terry Duff Jr., died in Houston at 72 in 1993.
Albert Maverick’s ancestor, Samuel Augustus Maverick Sr., served as a delegate to the Texas Republic Constitutional Convention in 1836 and was a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. This Samuel Maverick was elected mayor of San Antonio in 1839 and later was a member of the Texas State Legislature in 1845.
Albert Maverick III’s great-uncle, Fontaine Maury Maverick, was a former U.S. Congressman who received a Purple Heart and Silver Star for his bravery as a first lieutenant in the infantry during World War I. Maury Maverick was a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1935 to 1939 and followed in his ancestor Sam Maverick’s footsteps by serving as San Antonio’s mayor from 1939 to 1941.
Frederick Joseph Duff, born in Columbia in 1859, married a female with the familiar name of “Clinton Terry” in 1884. She was the daughter of famed Confederate military leader Clinton Lucretius Terry who was mortally wounded at the Battle of Shiloh in Hardin County, Tennessee, on April 6, 1862. He had replaced his brother, Colonel Benjamin Franklin Terry, as leader of Terry’s Texas Rangers when Ben Terry was killed at the Battle of Rowlett’s Station in Hart County, Kentucky, during the Civil War.
These Terry brothers and Fred Duff’s wife Clinton were descendants of Colonel Nathaniel Terry and Colonel Benjamin Terry of Virginia who served in the Revolutionary War with Gen. George Washington.
Frederick Joseph Duff and his wife, Clinton Terry Duff, are buried at Old Columbia Cemetery. Fred Duff died in Beaumont, on August 19, 1932, and his wife was interred next to him when she died at 89 in 1951 in Beaumont. She was born in East Columbia on May 9, 1862, a month after her father succumbed to his wounds at the Battle of Shiloh.
Her mother, Ariadne Gautier, married William Tyler six years after Colonel Terry’s death and, after her second husband died, purchased land along the Brazos River in East Columbia in 1871 and built a home. “Arie,” the daughter of Dr. Peter Gautier who settled at Columbia in 1841, married for a third time when she became the bride of Henry H. Swymmer.
Family history reveals that Ariadne Gautier narrowly escaped being massacred by a band of Indians in her early days in frontier Brazoria County. She was born in Florida in 1834 and was buried at Columbia Cemetery when she died in Beaumont in 1910 at the home of E.J. Duff. The Swymmers sold their beautiful home in East Columbia in 1897 to Frank Bowden Chilton who had been a captain in Hood’s Texas Brigade during the Civil War. Chilton then deeded the home, which now sports a Texas Historical Commission marker, to his daughter, Mary Louise Chilton (1877-1973), in 1900. She married Austin Y. Bryan (1863-1930), the grandson of Stephen F. Austin’s sister, Emily Austin Bryan Perry, and in 1919 the Bryans sold the East Columbia house to Sands Smith Weems Sr., a West Columbia merchant who has many descendants also interred at Old Columbia Cemetery.
The Duffs and Weems families rank near the top of the list of having the most relatives interred at historic Columbia Cemetery in West Columbia while my family, the Guptons, can’t be too far behind.
