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Andrew Farney Smyth, soldier and riverman,
son of Andrew and Susannah Smyth of North Carolina, was born "on
the road going through Tennessee" in 1817 and reared at his
father's mill near Moulton, Alabama. He lived most of his life
in Jasper County, Texas, where he was a planter, lumberman, and
riverman. He left home in the autumn of 1835 with a party of
other youths who journeyed overland to Texas with the intention
of joining the celebrated Red Rovers,qv
a volunteer company from Courtland, Alabama, formed to fight in
the Texas Revolution.qv The
runaways were delayed in Nacogdoches and later learned that most
of the Red Rovers had been massacred at Goliad. Smyth went south
to join his elder brother George Washington Smythqv
in Jasper County. He enlisted with the Jasper Volunteers, was
made first lieutenant, and with the company marched out to join
the revolutionary army,qv but
arrived after the battle of San Jacinto.qv
As a member of the Jasper Volunteers, Smyth rode from San
Jacinto in the escort that took the Mexican army back to the Rio
Grande. With the war over, and a land grant in hand, he returned
to Jasper County, where he moved in with his brother, whom he
assisted in the operation of a cotton plantation on Walnut Run.
Andrew, a trained surveyor like his brother, also assisted
George in that capacity. In years to come, when the elder
Smyth's public career took him elsewhere, Andrew managed
George's farms and other interests in Jasper County.
As early as 1838 he began his career as a
riverman by building flatboats, which he would load with Jasper
cotton and float on the Angelina and Neches rivers to the Gulf
of Mexico at Sabine Pass. On the coast he would sell cotton for
his various Jasper clients and then sell the boat for lumber,
before heading home on horseback to Jasper. By the mid-1840s he
had seen the advantage of upriver commerce and had built the
keelboat Jasper, on which, with a flotilla of flatboats,
he would descend the river with cotton, corn, and tobacco. From
his clients' cotton money he would make purchases as they
requested, fill the Jasper with them, and then have the
boat towed home. In this middleman role he made valuable
business contacts in Galveston, New Orleans, and St. Louis. At
the outset his crew worked on shares; later he found it more
advantageous to pay wages. In 1844 Smyth journeyed to Kentucky,
where he married Emily Allen, daughter of Benjamin and Nancy
Allen of Owensboro, and niece of Francis M. Grigsby (Mrs. George
W. Smyth). To this union were born five children. First the
Smyths occupied a log house on high bluffs where Indian Creek
pours into the Angelina. In 1845 a friend purchased for Smyth
1,060 acres of land on the Angelina River at Indian Creek, two
miles upriver from Bevilport. In 1849 Smyth acquired the title
to this land. In about 1850 the Smyths moved to a new frame
house toward the center of their property and away from the
river. A T-shaped structure with an open central hall they
called the entry still stands much as it was when they knew it.
The house was apparently built in part from timbers from the
keelboat Jasper. Captain Smyth-as he was by then
universally called-developed a variety of business endeavors
through the 1850s. He built two water-powered mills on Indian
Creek, one a gristmill and the other a sawmill. Each had a great
turbine wheel. His business accounts show that by 1855 he
employed some eighty people full-time at Smyth Mills. The
several slaves he owned were domestic workers. In 1856 he
entered a partnership with William A. Ferguson to establish a
general merchandise store in Bevilport. The partnership was not
successful, and Smyth, finding himself near bankruptcy, turned
to friends among the commission merchants in Galveston for
assistance in buying Ferguson out. He saved the store, which, as
Smyth's Mercantile, he kept in operation for many years after.
Smyth joined the Jasper Volunteers in
February 1862 but left the company within a month and returned
home. His activities during the Civil Warqv
remain something of a mystery; he served part of the time as
county judge, even though it is clear from his papers that he
was actually away from Jasper County much of the time. After the
Civil War he purchased the first of his two steamboats, the
Camargo. Though it was highly profitable, the boat had
mechanical difficulties and was replaced in the early seventies
by the Laura, a new boat, which Smyth bought in
Evansville, Indiana. This sternwheeler was the premier vessel on
the Neches for a quarter century, a familiar sight at Sabine
Pass and, on occasion, at Galveston. Used both for freight and
passenger service, she made the journey from Bevilport to the
coast and back (thirty-five days each way) on a regular basis,
stopping at many now-vanished villages. She provided the first
dependable, scheduled transportation in lower East Texas. In
Beaumont, Texas, on a stop of the Laura, on October 22,
1879, Smyth died suddenly of unknown causes. He is buried in
Magnolia Cemetery in Beaumont, where a Texas state marker honors
his service in the Texas Revolution.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: William Seale, Texas
Riverman: The Life and Times of Captain Andrew Farney Smyth
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966).
William Seale
- Handbook of Texas Online, s.v.
","
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/SS/fsm54.html
(accessed March 4, 2008).
(NOTE: "s.v." stands for sub verbo, "under the word.")
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