JAMES ALFRED CALDWELL applied and received his 320 acres for Republic of Texas 3^rd Class Headright, dated July 1, 1839.  He moved his family to Texas in late 1845.  He was urged to come to Texas by his brother, John Caldwell, who had come to Texas in 1833.  There was a need for Methodist Circuit Riders, and Alfred Caldwell, being ordained in the Indiana Conference of the Methodist Church, came to Texas.  He was born February 16, 1807 in Franklin Co., Kentucky to Adam and Phoebe Caldwell, and died in Bastrop, Texas, February 25, 1854.  He married Catharine Frances O’Reilly in 1829, Indiana, and seven children were born to this union. 

THE CALDWELL STORY*

Jose Navarro, a Texas revolutionary patriot of Spanish ancestry, had a grant of seven leagues of land from the Spanish Crown.  Most of it was on the watershed of the Colorado River between what is now Austin and Bastrop.  There were no schools, and Navarro wanted his son to have a good education.  He sent the lad to a boarding academy in New Orleans.  While there, the boy was indicted for the killing of a school roommate.  Jose Navarro went to New Orleans and there found a young Tennessee lawyer, who had built a successful practice in several states.  His name was John Adam Caldwell, and it was agreed that the attorney would defend the Navarro lad for a retainer of one league of Texas land.  Roughly, a Spanish league of land was about 4,200 acres.  It was further specified that if the boy came clear of the charge, the lawyer would also get $500 in Mexican gold.  Caldwell won the case.  Shortly thereafter, he closed his business affairs in Tennessee and moved his family to Texas.  Navarro was as good as his word.  He delivered a deed of title and accompanied Caldwell to the site.  This was about 1829, and Texas was now a province of Mexico.  Caldwell was married to Lucinda Haynie, daughter of the Rev. John Haynie, who was later to follow his daughter and her husband to Texas and become one of the early Methodist circuit riders and later the first Chaplain of the Congress of the Republic of Texas.  At the greatest extent, the Caldwell lands stretched from the Colorado River southward, to the Maha Creek, and from Onion Creek where it joins the river eastward into what is now Bastrop County.  Few white settlers lived near this large tract.  John Caldwell somewhere acquired the title of Colonel.  Younger brother, JAMES ALFRED CALDWELL, still lived in Tennessee.  James had become a local Methodist preacher, and the Colonel wrote him that preachers were badly needed in Texas.  If he would move here and live, Colonel John said, he would give him some land and a house.  Preacher Caldwell’s wife, Catharine, at first, did not go for the notion of bringing up their young family “in the wilderness”.  Some time passed while the husband persuaded her.  She was about in the mood to risk it, when work arrived of a series of massacres of settlers by Indians, some of which happened very near Caldwell land.  In time, she did agree.  THE REVERAND JAMES ALFRED CALDWELL tucked his Bible and hymnbook in his saddlebag, and started riding his preaching circuit from settlement to settlement or stockade to fort.  Churches were now legal under the new government of the Republic of Texas, but for years they had been illegal while Texas was a part of Catholic Spain and Mexico.  Riding a circuit was hard and dangerous work. Most of these men died before their time.  Besides the Indians to be avoided, bridgeless flooded streams had to be crossed.  In 1854, Alfred Caldwell rode up one day to his brother’s house in Bastrop.  He was ill.  They carried him upstairs and put him to bed.  A few days later, he was dead.  Pneumonia.  His wife, Catharine O’Reilly Caldwell, developed into a real frontier woman. Many Indians were fond of milk.  Catharine would set out crocks of it, outside, when she sensed that Indians were around.  By morning the milk and sometimes the crocks were gone.  She finished raising their 7 children, in a double log cabin in Travis County, Texas.  The log cabin has been donated and moved by the family to the Texas Embassy Living Museum in Lockhart, Texas.  Catharine Caldwell lived the remainder of her life in the log cabin.  She died in 1902.  They are buried at Haynie Chapel Cemetery, Travis County, Texas, along with most of their children, and their grandson, Alonzo Martin, who cared for and lived with his grandmother, until her death. 

*Bastrop Advertiser, August 8, 1974
 

Sylvia Kennedy, Descendant