By Tracy Gupton
Rachel Jane Carson Underwood, one of the youngest members of Stephen F. Austin’s “Old 300” Anglo settlers in Texas, is one of five prominent women in local history who will be portrayed at the November 4th Meet Your Ancestors program at historic Columbia Cemetery.
A February 15, 1896, edition of The Galveston Daily News announced Rachel’s passing surrounded by family at the home of her daughter at the intersection of Broadway and 13th streets in Galveston. Rachel Underwood took her final breath on February 14, 1896, just 10 days after reaching her 76th birthday.
She was born in Catahoula Parish, Louisiana, on February 4, 1820, the middle child of William Clark Carson and Catherine Jane Patterson Carson. As a small child of only four, Rachel and her family – which included her older brother John Patterson Carson and baby brother William – made the long trek across untamed territory in a covered wagon from Louisiana to Texas in 1824.
Rachel Jane Carson Underwood
Her father was born in New Castle County, Delaware, in 1790 and was a private in the Indiana military in the War of 1812, which was fought between the United States and Great Britain for three years, primarily over disagreements over trade, western expansion and Native American policy. Rachel’s parents had wed in Posey County, Indiana, on December 17, 1815, after the conclusion of the War of 1812.
William Carson had been struggling with ill health living in swampy Louisiana and his wife Catherine thought the Texas climate might improve her husband’s health. She was wrong. William died after being in Stephen F. Austin’s Texas colony only a few months. As new Anglo settlers in Mexico, the Carson family was given 3,706 acres in what is today known as Brazoria County, and another 722 acres in neighboring Matagorda County. William and “Caty” Carson’s grant of fertile land was between the San Bernard River and Bay Prairie.
William Clark Carson appears in Stephen F. Austin’s Register of Families known as “The Old 300” in an entry in the Father of Texas’s ledger dated July 1, 1826.
Catherine Jane Patterson Carson, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John Patterson, moved her small family into the town of Columbia following her husband’s death. She ran a boarding house that catered primarily to students of the Thomas J. Pilgrim school that operated in Columbia between 1831 and 1836.
Rachel’s older brother, John Patterson Carson, born around 1816, was a soldier in Texas’s fight for independence from Mexican rule. He died on Christmas Eve in 1856 while Rachel and John’s younger brother, William J. Carson, passed away in his early twenties on May 20, 1847.
Rachel’s mother entered into a business partnership with Ammon Underwood in 1838. They operated a boarding house in Marion (present day East Columbia). According to his diary, Ammon Underwood came to Texas in 1834 “to gratify a wild and rambling notion,” according to the book, Historic East Columbia on the Brazos, a 2009 publication of the First Capitol Historic Foundation, Inc.
Ammon Underwood served for over a year with the Texas Army during the fight for independence from Mexico. The late Wilma Ogilvie, a longtime high school teacher in West Columbia, wrote a story that ran in the July 13, 1960 edition of The Facts newspaper. In that story published 63 years ago, Ogilvie wrote, “Entries in his journal show the reader that (Ammon Underwood) often wondered if this land was worth the effort which it was requiring of him and other newly arrived colonists. He spoke longingly and often of home (in Massachusetts where Ammon had grown up).”
Rachel was only 18 when her mother went into business at Bell’s Landing with Ammon Underwood. And even though her mother’s business partner was 10 years older than Rachel, they became romantically involved and married on January 7, 1839, in the house on the banks of the Brazos River that Ammon had bought from Thomas W. Nibbs the year before. The Underwoods enlarged Nibbs’ hand-hewn cedar structure, practically doubling the size and adding a second story with the original intent to use the enlarged home as a boarding house. But instead, it became the home of the newlyweds.
The following year, Rachel’s widowed mother Catherine married Gail Borden, a widower himself, and by 1840 the Underwood house, which is today listed on the National Register of Historic Places and remains the oldest of the six houses included in the East Columbia Historic District, was home not only to Ammon and Rachel Underwood but also to Catherine and Gail Borden (the father of the man with the same name who later invented the canned milk process).
Ammon Underwood established a mercantile business at Bell’s Landing, also known as Marion in the 1800s, and after the Texas Revolution he served as postmaster of Marion from 1836 to 1845. He also owned two large cotton plantations in Brazoria County and amassed a considerable fortune, according to Historic East Columbia on the Brazos. The Brazos River continued to erode over the years and the Underwood house had to be moved several times to avoid having a portion of it collapse as the river bank continued to break away.
Ammon and Rachel Underwood were the parents of seven children, only four of which were lucky enough to live into adulthood. Rachel’s children who died young, included William, born in 1841, Mary Catherine, born in 1843, and Lendol, born in 1855. Lendol Underwood died at eight years old in 1863.
The 1960 Facts story penned by my former Columbia High School teacher read: “Ammon continued in the mercantile business after the Civil War in East Columbia until his death in his home on November 11, 1887. His wife survived him by nine years.”
The Galveston newspaper informed its readers that the body of Rachel Underwood, one of Stephen F. Austin’s Old 300 family members, would be “taken to Columbia this morning for interment.”
“There survive her four children and twelve grandchildren, most of whom were with her in her dying moments,” read the story in the Galveston newspaper.
Rachel was laid to rest at historic Columbia Cemetery beside the grave of her husband. The children that survived Rachel and Ammon were Joseph Patterson Underwood (1845-1925), Laura Jane Underwood Diggs (1850-1938), Ella Harriet Underwood Borden (1852-1912) and John Carson Underwood (1863-1926).
Sometime after Ammon’s death in 1887, Rachel moved from East Columbia to Galveston where she lived out her life with her daughter, Ella Borden, who was also a widow.
“A lifelong Christian and for more than half a century a zealous member of the Presbyterian church, (Rachel) was fully prepared for the final summons,” read the Galveston Daily News story announcing Rachel Underwood’s death. “She was loved by all who knew her and always obtained a host of friends wherever she might be.”
Tina Crawford has been assigned the role of Rachel Underwood at the November 4th Meet Your Ancestors program at Old Columbia Cemetery. Other prominent women and those selected to portray them at this year’s Meet Your Ancestors will be Sarah Lamb as Mary Bell, co-founder of both East Columbia and West Columbia with her husband, Josiah Hughes Bell; Kaye Crocker as Beth Griggs, a West Columbia and Brazoria County historian; Mary Holler portraying Father’s Day holiday creator Zula Della Winstead Loggins; and Edie Weems as Angelina Caldwell Kerr, another member of Stephen F. Austin’s Old 300 group of early Texas Anglo settlers.
Thank you Tracy for this and all of the other things you do for our history. Please keep it going.