This Day In Texas History - September 22

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1821 - James Moreau Brown, businessman, was born in Orange County, New York, on September 22, 1821, the son of John M. and Hannah (Krantz) Brown. As a teenager he drove a canal boat along the Erie Canal, working with Charley Mallory, later of the Mallory Steamship Lines. He also served an apprenticeship as a brickmason and plasterer and developed ability as an architect. After his apprenticeship Brown traveled in the South. He stayed for a while in New Orleans and then lived for several years in Vicksburg, where he prospered financially. In 1843 he moved to Galveston, Texas, where he influenced the building of first brick jail and the old market. In 1848 he was elected an alderman. He entered the hardware business in 1847, then formed a partnership in 1850 with Stephen Kirkland, a blacksmith. Kirkland reportedly built the first hook and ladder truck in Texas. Brown was an original member of the first Galveston volunteer fire brigade, organized in October 1843. When Kirkland died in 1859, Brown closed the business and became president of the Galveston, Houston and Henderson Railroad. For his help in transporting men from Houston to help recapture Galveston from Union troops, Gen. John B. Magruder rewarded him with the honorary title of colonel. Brown also served the Confederacy as a purchasing agent in Mexico. By 1870 he was one of the wealthiest men in Texas, with $175,000 in real property and $100,000 in personal property. In 1871 Governor Edmund J. Davis appointed him to the Galveston board of aldermen. In 1859 he built what was reputed to be the first brick house in Galveston, known as Ashton Villa.

1836 - Michael Costley, soldier and Texas Ranger, was born in 1809. Though he may have moved to Texas as early as 1827, his arrival was more likely in the spring of 1832. He settled first in the San Augustine area and then in Nacogdoches. He served in the Texas army from June 22 to September 22, 1836, and, under Hugh McLeod, patrolled the Bexar Road between the Angelina and Neches rivers in the summer of 1836. Costley recruited a company of mounted rangers called the First Company of Texas Rangers and served as its captain from September 11 to December 11, 1836, when Sam Houston discharged him and his company for refusing to obey orders. In 1836 or 1837 he founded the town of Douglass in Nacogdoches County. Costley had married Mahalah Mussett, daughter of William Mussett, by bond (i.e., by written agreement in the absence of a priest) on January 18, 1827, probably in Missouri, and they had a son. Costley died of a pistol wound inflicted by W. R. D. Speight, the first district clerk of Nacogdoches County, on November 16, 1837. At the time of Costley's death, he and Joseph S. Able were operating a store, Costley and Able, in Douglass.

1837 - Ira Ingram, soldier, legislator, and member of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred, was born in Brookfield, Vermont, on August 19, 1788, the son of Phillip and Rachael (Burton) Ingram. After sojourning for a time in Tennessee he seems to have moved to New Orleans, where he married Emily B. Holt of Tennessee on March 13, 1823; she died in October 1824. They had one daughter. At the instigation of his brother Seth Ingram, Ira moved to Texas in January 1826 and settled in the Austin colony in the area that became Waller County. In 1828 he and his brother were partners in a merchandising establishment in San Felipe de Austin. Although defeated by Thomas M. Duke in the election for alcalde in 1832, Ingram represented the Mina District at the Convention of 1832 and San Felipe in the Convention of 1833. He also served as secretary of the local committee of public safety, organized to resist Mexican Centralist authority.

In 1834 he was elected the first alcalde of Matagorda and wrote the Goliad Declaration of Independence, signed on December 22, 1835. During the Texas Revolution Ingram participated in the capture of Goliad as commissary and secretary to commandant Philip Dimmitt. In November 1835 he requested a transfer from Stephen F. Austin. He served in Capt. Thomas Stewart's company of Matagorda Volunteers in 1836. On April 5, 1836, Gen. Sam Houston ordered Ingram, then commissioned as a major, to return to East Texas and the United States to recruit volunteers for the Texas army. Ingram was Matagorda representative in the First Congress of the Republic of Texas and was elected speaker of the House. He resigned from the legislature on May 1, 1837, possibly because of the disclosure that he had once been convicted of forgery and imprisoned in New York. He was again elected mayor of Matagorda, but died on September 22, 1837, before his inauguration. Ingram was present at the first meeting of the Masonic fraternity in Texas on January 11, 1828.

1871 - As a result of a call issued at Austin on August 5 by a combination of Democratic and Republican opponents to Republican governor Edmund J. Davis, the Tax-Payers' Convention met at Austin on September 22, 1871. Davis's opponents proposed a convention to discuss political conditions in the state and recent increases in taxation. In response to the call, meetings were held throughout the state in August to elect delegates and pass resolutions to be sent to the September consultation. The convention was held at the Capitol. Delegates represented ninety-four counties; many individuals represented several different counties. The men who appeared included some of the state's most powerful political and economic leaders and represented important interests. In order to present the impression that the convention was not political, its organizers emphasized its bipartisan membership. Strengthening this claim, the delegates elected former governor Pease as chairman. The supporters of Governor Davis, however, charged that the Democrats dominated the meeting and that it was largely political in its nature, designed to prepare for the congressional elections to be held the following November.

On the first day of the convention the delegates selected a committee headed by railroad promoter and politician James W. Throckmorton to meet with Davis, and the Committee of Twenty-One, led by former governor A. J. Hamilton, to prepare reports and resolutions for consideration. On September 23 the work of Throckmorton's committee was frustrated when Davis refused to meet with the members and criticized the work of the convention. On the twenty-fifth the Committee of Twenty-One issued reports and proposed resolutions drafted by its three subcommittees. A subcommittee chaired by William Walton reported violations of the state and federal constitutions and of the law by the Davis administration. This group concluded that Davis had imposed a despotic government upon the state and catalogued twenty-one incidents it believed illustrated the governor's illegal behavior. Among the incidents cited by the subcommittee were the governor's school law and school tax, a law prohibiting the carrying of arms, the use of the state police in elections, and a redistricting of the state's legislative districts. A second report from the subcommittees on taxes and statistics, chaired by Christopher C. Upson, investigated charges that Davis and the legislature had wasted taxpayers' money and imposed excessive taxes on the state. The committee reported that taxes had risen between 1866 and 1871 from $956,850 to $2,120,605 and that possible railroad subsidies might increase the latter figure by $14 million. Permissible rates in the same period had risen at the state and local levels from $.22 on each $100 worth of property to $2.175. The report concluded that expenditures and taxes were in excess of legitimate and necessary wants of the people and requested that the legislature reduce both. Upon the basis of the subcommittee reports, the Committee of Twenty-One introduced resolutions to rectify the situation. The convention adopted these resolutions, named a committee to memorialize the legislature for seeking redress, advised the people of the state not to pay the 1 percent school tax, and appointed a committee to prepare an address to the people on how to resist taxes. The latter committee encouraged appeals to the state courts and ultimately even to Congress and the president.

The Tax-Payers' Convention had immediate effects. Throughout the state, taxpayers followed the convention's advice and secured injunctions against the collection of state taxes in local courts. The state Supreme Court repeatedly ruled in favor of the constitutionality of the tax laws, but litigation continued on Republican taxes until after the end of the Davis government. The failure to collect taxes crippled the government's major programs, especially the schools, and hindered efforts at obtaining loans in the North. In addition to causing a taxpayers' revolt, the convention undermined faith in the Davis administration among northern Republicans. Publication of the convention's reports tarred Davis and his supporters with a reputation of corruption and graft. The charge was enough to convince many Republicans in the North that Davis deserved none of their sympathy. This limited the governor's ability to obtain political help in Washington. The convention also contributed to a complete defeat for Texas Republicans in the congressional elections of 1871. Democrats gained control of three out of the four seats held by the Republicans. The loss of the congressional seats helped the Democrats move rapidly towards completely recapturing control of the legislature in 1872 and the entire state government by 1873.

1872 - James A. Head, legislator and Texas Ranger, was born in Alabama or Georgia in June 1797 and moved to Texas in 1835. On October 26, 1835, he enlisted at San Felipe de Austin in Silas M. Parker's ranging company, said to be the first Texas Rangers, and served until he was discharged at Fort Sterling on January 25, 1836. After the Texas revolution Head began farming in what was then called Navasota County, where he served in a company of minutemen. In 1840 he was registered to vote in Washington County but owned 17,789 acres in Robertson County. Head was elected justice of the peace of Navasota (now Brazos) County on March 1, 1841, and was later that year elected to the House of Representatives of the Sixth Congress, where he served until 1842. He was elected chief justice of Brazos County in September 1848 and was reelected in August 1850. He soon resigned from the bench; his successor was elected on August 8, 1851. By December 1852 Head was a resident of Robertson County. He died on September 22, 1872. He was married and had children.

1876 - The Houston Ship Channel, one of the busiest waterways in the United States, achieved its earliest significance as a link between interior Texas and the sea. It traces its origin to early trade on Buffalo Bayou, which heads on the prairie thirty miles west of Houston in the extreme northeastern corner of Fort Bend County and runs southeast for fifty miles to the San Jacinto River and then into Galveston Bay. Recognizing the potential of the stream, the brothers John Kirby and Augustus Chapman Allen laid out the town of Houston at the head of navigation on Buffalo Bayou in 1836. The first steamboat, the Laura, arrived there on January 22, 1837. As the waterway proved to be the only one in Texas that was dependably navigable, planters over a large area brought their cotton to Houston to be shipped by barge or riverboat to Galveston, the best natural port in Texas. The city fathers established the Port of Houston on January 29, 1842, and the following year the Congress of the Republic of Texas granted the city the right to remove obstructions and otherwise improve the bayou. After Texas entered the Union, free wharfage was given to boat owners who contracted to keep the channel clean.

In the late 1850s Houston merchants chafed at the policies of the Galveston Wharf Company, which controlled Galveston harbor, and attempted to reach the sea without going through Galveston. After the interim of the Civil War, they renewed their efforts. In 1869 they organized the Buffalo Bayou Ship Channel Company to improve the channel, and in 1870 they persuaded Congress to make Houston a port of delivery. The United States Army Corps of Engineers surveyed the channel and recommended a width of 100 feet and a depth of six. Still, because of inadequate appropriations, this effort brought few improvements. At this point the Houstonians found an ally in Charles Morgan, a pioneer in Gulf Coast shipping who had also run athwart the Galveston Wharf Company. Desiring to bypass Galveston, Morgan bought the Bayou Ship Channel Company in 1874 and within two years dredged a channel from Galveston Bay to the site of present Clinton near Houston. The first ocean vessel arrived there September 22, 1876.
[ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/rhh11 ]