Sarah Leah Nobles

Sarah Leah Nobles was born on September 11, 1807, in Laurens County, South Carolina. She would live eighty years, surviving two husbands — both killed in early Texas — and raising a family that became one of the founding clans of Walker County.¹

First Marriage: Richard Bankhead

Sarah married Richard Bankhead of Tennessee. They had five children: William Newton, James Marion, Mary Elizabeth, Eady Elmyra, and Mary Frances (“Frankie”), born July 17, 1834. When Frankie was only a few months old, the family set out for Texas, settling near the future townsite of Huntsville.¹

Shortly after their arrival, Richard Bankhead died from exposure, leaving Sarah alone with five small children in the Texas frontier. He died on January 17, 1835.¹

Second Marriage: George A. Lamb

Sarah later married George A. Lamb, a 2nd Lieutenant in the Texas Volunteers, born October 3, 1814, in Laurens District, South Carolina. On April 21, 1836, Lamb was killed at the Battle of San Jacinto — the decisive engagement of the Texas Revolution, in which Sam Houston’s forces routed the Mexican army and secured Texas independence. Sarah was widowed a second time, at the age of twenty-eight, with her children still young.¹

Legacy

Despite these losses, Sarah raised her children to adulthood in the new Republic of Texas. Her daughter Frankie married John McAdams Jr. on November 14, 1849 — a union that joined the Bankhead and McAdams families and produced seven children, including Margaret (“Tommie”), whose daughter Ethel Arrine Thompson married James Walter Morris Sr., linking the McAdams line to the Morris and eventually the Ledbetter families.

Sarah Leah Nobles died on March 31, 1888, at the age of eighty. Her life spanned the entire arc of early Texas — from frontier settlement through the Revolution, the Republic, statehood, the Civil War, and into the post-Reconstruction era.