The McAdams Community

In February 1830, a caravan of ox wagons rolled into the Mexican department of Nacogdoches. Among the travelers was Rev. John McAdams Sr., a Methodist minister who had emigrated from Scotland to South Carolina and then Tennessee, his wife Martha Rodgers from Ireland, and their large family. Their son, fourteen-year-old John McAdams Jr., would grow up to become a soldier, patriarch, and the founder of a community that still bears his name.

Texas Revolution

The young John Jr. returned to Tennessee in 1833, then came back to Texas in time to serve with the revolutionary forces. On April 30, 1836, he enrolled in the Texian Army from Shelby Municipality and served in the San Augustine Volunteers under Captain John M. Bradley, then under Captain William Scurlock through October 1836. He arrived at the San Jacinto Battleground too late for the April 21 engagement itself, but served thirteen campaigns — four years and four months — with Houston’s army. For his service he was issued one pair of brogans and twenty-four dollars.

He later received land grants totaling 1,600 acres — 320 acres in Smith County in 1838, and 1,280 acres in Angelina County in 1881.

The Raid

Late one night in 1838, outlaws from the “neutral ground” across the Sabine — the lawless strip between Texas and Louisiana — raided the McAdams-White settlement. They killed two of John’s brothers, Joseph and James, and took nearly everything the families owned. The surviving McAdamses and Whites packed what remained into ox wagons and headed west, seeking their old friend Sam Houston.

Building a Community

In 1844, McAdams purchased 1,042 acres from Daniel Boone Guerrant and Green Spillers and built a home near what is now the McAdams Cemetery in Walker County. He married twice — first Hester White in 1838, who bore him five children before her death on January 16, 1849.

“John, when I die, I want to be buried under this hickory tree,” Hester told him. He honored her wish, and that hickory tree became the beginning of McAdams Cemetery — a burial ground still in use over 175 years later.

His second wife, Mary Frances Bankhead, was fifteen when they married on November 14, 1849. She was the daughter of Richard Bankhead and Sarah Leah Nobles, whose own story was intertwined with the Battle of San Jacinto — Mary Frances’s stepfather, George A. Lamb, was killed in that battle.

Together, John Jr. and Mary Frances had nine children, including Margaret “Tommie” McAdams, who would marry Thomas Jefferson Thompson and become the maternal grandmother of the Morris children.

Patriarch

McAdams became a towering figure in Walker County life. He gave his home to twenty-nine orphan children over the years. He donated lumber for churches and two schools. He gave land for a church. At his peak, he owned 10,000 acres of land and 2,000 head of cattle.

Sam Houston was a lifelong friend of the McAdams family and made frequent weekend visits to their country home near Huntsville.

In 1887, John McAdams Jr. became the first postmaster of McAdams, Texas, a position he held until 1889.

Legacy

McAdams died on September 11, 1892, near Maysfield in Milam County, at the age of seventy-seven. He was buried in McAdams Cemetery beside his first wife Hester, under that same hickory tree.

His granddaughter Tommie married Thomas Jefferson Thompson, and their daughter Ethel Arrine Thompson married James Walter Morris — the barber of Huntsville. Their daughter, Margaret Alline Morris Craig, would eventually write all of this down in Stories and Poems, preserving the memory of the community her great-grandfather built from the Texas wilderness.

And Margaret’s daughter Barbara Jean would marry William Burl Ledbetter — son of a colonel, grandson of Missouri and Arkansas — bringing the McAdams line full circle into a new family. The McAdams Community, the cemetery, and the hickory tree endure.