Martha Rodgers

Martha Rodgers emigrated from Ireland as a child with her family, settling in the Abbeville District of South Carolina. There she married Rev. John McAdams Sr., a Methodist minister who had emigrated from Scotland, also as a child.¹

To Texas

In February 1830, the McAdams family joined a caravan of ox wagons bound for the Mexican department of Nacogdoches. Martha, her husband, and their children — including fourteen-year-old John McAdams Jr. — crossed the Sabine into what would become the Republic of Texas.¹

The family settled in the eastern part of the territory. John Jr. would go on to serve thirteen campaigns with Sam Houston’s forces in the Texas Revolution, receive 1,600 acres in land grants, and found the McAdams Community in Walker County — one of the most prominent families in the region.¹

The Outlaw Raid

In 1838, outlaws from the neutral ground along the Sabine raided the McAdams-White settlement in Shelby Municipality, killing two of Martha’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 made for Huntsville, seeking their old friend Sam Houston.¹

Death

Martha died in 1853 in Panola County, Texas, two years after her husband Rev. McAdams, who died on February 2, 1851. By then their son John Jr. had built a world in Walker County — 10,000 acres, 2,000 head of cattle, and a household that took in twenty-nine orphan children.¹