John McAdams Sr.

Rev. John McAdams Sr. was born in Scotland and emigrated to America as a child with his family. He became a Methodist minister and settled in the Abbeville District of South Carolina, where he married Martha Rodgers, an Irish emigrant who had also arrived as a child.¹

To Texas

In February 1830, the McAdams family came to Texas by ox wagon, settling in Shelby Municipality (present Panola County) in the Department of Nacogdoches. John’s son, John McAdams Jr., was about fourteen years old at the time of the journey.¹

The family arrived during the colonization era, when Stephen F. Austin’s empresario grants were drawing settlers from across the South. East Texas was still Mexican territory, and the Shelby Municipality sat near the disputed “neutral ground” along the Sabine River — a region plagued by outlaws and border disputes.

Tragedy

Late one night in 1838, outlaws from the neutral ground raided the McAdams-White settlement in Shelby Municipality, killing two of John’s sons — Joseph and James — and taking nearly all the family’s possessions. After the raid, the surviving McAdamses and their neighbors the Whites packed their remaining goods into ox wagons and headed for Huntsville, seeking their old friend Sam Houston.¹

Death

John McAdams Sr. died on February 2, 1851, in Panola County, Texas. His wife Martha Rodgers died two years later in 1853, also in Panola County. Their son John Jr. had by then settled in Walker County, where he founded the McAdams Community, raised a family numbering in the hundreds, and became one of the most prominent landowners in the county.¹