The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 29, July 1925 - April, 1926 Page: 63
330 p. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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The City of Kent
The men would halt and wait until this momentous subject was
settled, when once more he would order them to march. These
interruptions usually occurred three times before they finally went
to work. Just such army and navy tactics prevailed in everything
the colonists undertook to do."
There were many natural causes for the failure of the "City of
Kent." The nearest town was the infant Waco, then nothing more
than a wide spot in a road that was not! The colonists were only
ten miles or so from Fort Graham, and there was one store near
the fort. Two companies of soldiers at the fort under Major
Arnold and Dr. J. M. Steiner were placed there to keep the Indians
down. But soon after the colonists arrived, the fort was moved
on up north to Fort Belknap in the neighborhood of Comanche
Peak. The Indians were particularly bad that winter and the
colonists were terrified. They had suffered untold exposure on the
journey up from Houston, and the houses and dug-outs in which
they were forced to live that winter were unsanitary. The change
from England to Texas, and the importation of fine old English
liquors with them are reasons also attributed by Mr. Frazier as
causes of the colonists' final dispersion. That first winter many
fell sick and died. The remaining settlers were disheartened,
some of them heart-broken. They wrote back to friends in England
that the country was of no account, that there was no timber, "not
even a riding switch to be found on the whole 27,000 acres." (It
is true that now the land is wooded only in the valleys, although
there are, of course, the scrawny native cedars on the hills.) Such
letters prevented any more English from coming out to Texas and
may have been a contributing reason for the failure of the company.
The colonists finally abandoned the land, and it went back into
the hands of the original owners.
The fate of several of the individual colonists is known. There
was a family named Plowman or Ploughman, we are told, who
moved up to Fort Belknap when Fort Graham was abandoned and
who prospered greatly. Their descendants may still live in Texas.
Mr. Frazier speaks of one young Englishman, who squandered
what fortune he had and went on the rocks. While he was down
and out in Waco, trying to do manual labor for which his mag-
nificent education poorly fitted him, Mrs. Katherine Ross, wife of
Captain Shapley P. Ross, the famous Indian fighter and mother of
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 29, July 1925 - April, 1926, periodical, 1926; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117141/m1/71/: accessed April 30, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.