Appalachian Figures
If you stand on the public square in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, you are standing inside a story that began with a clerk, a frontier rifleman, and a small circle of town founders. In 1819 the Tennessee legislature passed a private act that created a county seat for the recently formed Lawrence County. The law named five commissioners to choose the site and lay out the town. Among them were David Crockett and a local settler and court officer, Josephus Irvine. They were ordered to buy fifty acres, survey streets and lots, reserve space for public buildings, and give the new town a name honoring naval officer James Lawrence.
Later county histories and Goodspeed’s nineteenth century sketch of Lawrence County echoed that act. They remembered Irvine not only as one of the commissioners who selected the site but as a landholder whose property bordered the town and whose name appears wherever early court minutes and deed books survive.
By the 1820s he was also serving as clerk of the circuit court. One Revolutionary War pension file from 1826 preserves both the scene and his signature. When veteran James Waters appeared in open court to describe his service, the printed transcript ends with the line “Sworn in open Court this 27th February 1826” followed by “S/ Josephus Irvine, Clerk.” It is a small detail, but it fixes Josephus Irvine the elder in a specific room, on a specific day, doing the slow administrative work that made frontier government real.
This is the world in which his son, Josephus Somerville Irvine, was born. According to later biographical sketches and his own reminiscence, Josephus and his wife Jane Patton raised several sons along Beeler’s Fork of Shoal Creek, south of the square in Lawrenceburg. The father helped lay out a county seat in the wooded hills of southern Middle Tennessee. The son would help fight for an entirely new republic hundreds of miles to the southwest.
Leaving Lawrence County for the Province of Texas
In the years after the War of 1812, families throughout the Appalachian uplands looked toward the West. Cheap land, rumors of rich soil, and the promise of a fresh start pulled migrants through the Cumberland Plateau and across the Mississippi. The Irvines were part of that stream.
In an autobiographical sketch published in the 1872 Texas Almanac under the heading “Survivors of the Texas Revolution,” J. S. Irvine recalled that he was born on 25 August 1819 in Lawrence County, Tennessee, and that his family moved to Texas in 1830. They settled first near Milam in the Sabine country, then relocated to a farm south of San Augustine.
That migration route is familiar to Appalachian historians. Families from southern Kentucky, East Tennessee, and the Cumberland Plateau followed old roads toward Memphis or Natchez, then pressed into the Sabine and Red River districts. They carried courthouse habits, church affiliations, and clan networks with them. For the Irvines, the move meant trading the limestone hills of Lawrence County for the pine forests and swamps along the Texas and Louisiana border while still remaining within a cultural world shaped by upland Protestants, small farmers, and veterans of earlier wars.
“We saw, and conquered Santa Anna”
Our best glimpse of young Josephus’s war experience comes from that same Texas Almanac sketch. Writing nearly four decades after the Texas Revolution, he described how, when word of the uprising spread, he and his brother James T. P. Irvine enlisted in a Sabine County company commanded by Capt. Benjamin F. Bryant in March 1836.
Their company joined General Sam Houston’s army on the Brazos River at Groce’s Ferry, then took part in the forced march to the field at San Jacinto. In his own words he remembered that they “were with the army in its forced march from Groce’s to San Jacinto, where we came up with, saw, and conquered Santa Anna,” serving in the regiment under Col. Sidney Sherman.
Irvine’s brief sketch in the Almanac matches up with official records. A discharge certificate from Capt. Bryant’s “Sabine Volunteers” confirms his service and notes that he fought at San Jacinto. The Republic of Texas rewarded that service with Donation Certificate No. 706 for six hundred forty acres of land and a separate bounty certificate for three months of enlistment in 1836. Those documents survive today in the Texas General Land Office files and in the Court of Claims records in Austin.
He did not stop with one campaign. The Almanac sketch and the Texas State Historical Association’s biography both agree that Irvine served in three separate enlistments. He fought at Béxar in 1835, then at San Jacinto in April 1836, and finally returned to service under Capt. William Scurlock for another three month term later that year when rumors of a renewed Mexican invasion spread through eastern Texas.
The same sketch preserves one of the most vivid family voices in the record. Irvine recalled that when neighbors questioned his mother about sending so many sons to the army, she answered that her only regret was that she did not have forty sons to send “to the army to fight for my country.” That brief statement, tucked into a Texas almanac, links back emotionally to Lawrence County. It sounds like something that might have been said on the square in a Tennessee courthouse town as easily as in a cabin near San Augustine.
In the 1870s, as Texas pensioned surviving veterans, Irvine submitted an application that repeated the facts of his service and included an oath stating that he was the same J. S. Irvine who had fought at San Jacinto in Bryant’s company. The approved pension granted him two hundred fifty dollars per year as a veteran of the revolution.
Building a new courthouse community at Quicksand
If his father’s name is tied to the founding of Lawrenceburg, the younger Irvine’s name became attached to another small courthouse community, this time in the piney woods of Newton County, Texas.
The Texas State Historical Association’s entry on Quicksand, Texas, notes that when Newton County organized, the first officials met at the home of Josephus S. Irvine in what was then called Quicksand, a short lived county seat on a branch of the Sabine. Local histories of Newton County, including Josephine Cochrum Peavy’s early thesis and the Newton County Historical Commission’s Glimpses of Newton County History, elaborate on that picture. They place Irvine among the earliest settlers and record that civic business first took place literally under his roof.
Tax records fill out the portrait. Drawing on original county tax rolls and the 1860 federal census, the TSHA biography describes Irvine as serving as Newton County’s tax assessor and collector from 1856 to 1860. In 1860 his property was valued at five thousand dollars. The 1861 tax roll shows that he enslaved one person.
Those figures are small by the standards of the plantation belt but significant in the pineywoods economy of eastern Texas. They also remind us that an Appalachian origin did not necessarily mean distance from slavery. Families who left regions like Lawrence County sometimes stepped more deeply into the slave economy as they moved southwest. Irvine’s Methodist faith and Masonic connections, both recorded in later biographical sketches, placed him squarely within the middle tier of white Southern society that both supported and benefited from the institution.
Sabine Pass Guards and the Swamp Angels
When the Civil War began, Irvine was in his early forties. Once again he raised a company. Local tradition and the biographical entry on the Siege of Béxar Descendants site report that he organized a unit of Newton County men that became Company C of James B. Likens’s battalion of Texas Volunteers.
After a reorganization in 1862, the unit emerged as the Eleventh Texas Infantry Battalion, better known as Spaight’s Battalion. The Handbook of Texas describes it as a mixed command with about four hundred men, drawn from prewar militia such as the Sabine Pass Guards. It notes that the original officers included Josephus S. Irvine as major, with James B. Likens and Ashley W. Spaight as fellow field officers.
A surviving muster roll, reprinted in Jefferson County History, gives a closer look at one of the companies that came out of Newton County. Under the heading “Company C, Spaight’s Battalion (formerly J. S. Irvine’s Co. Newton County Volunteers)” the compiler notes that the company’s first commander was Capt. Josephus S. Irvine, a veteran of San Jacinto, and that he had commanded Fort Sabine during the first Union attack on Sabine Pass in September 1862.
The battalion some of whose companies were nicknamed the “Swamp Angels” spent much of the war along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast, guarding passes and rivers and fighting in the wet bottomlands that defined that theater. W. T. Block’s history of Spaight’s Battalion and Alwyn Barr’s study of Polignac’s Texas Brigade both emphasize the miserable conditions the men faced, from yellow fever and dysentery to long marches through bayous and cane brakes.
One of the battalion’s hardest fights came in September 1863 at Fordoche or Stirling’s Plantation in southern Louisiana. Contemporary accounts and the diary of Captain George W. O’Brien, later published in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, describe how Spaight’s men helped surround and capture a Union force that had been probing inland from the Mississippi. Cooper Ragan’s article on the O’Brien diary notes that Josephus S. Irvine, by then major of the battalion, led men in that engagement.
The victory came at a cost. Irvine’s own son, James Patton Irvine of Company C, was killed at Stirling’s Plantation, a fact that appears both in Ragan’s work and in later local histories.
By late 1864 yellow fever and the accumulated strain of campaigning had caught up with Irvine. The TSHA biography records that he resigned his commission in December of that year due to illness. The battalion continued to serve in the Trans Mississippi Department, later forming part of the Twenty first Texas Infantry Regiment, but without the man who had once led it as a company captain and then as a major.
Wilson Chapel and the long tail of memory
After the war Irvine returned to Newton County. He had married Nancy McMahon in 1838, and together they raised a large family whose descendants would connect genealogists in Tennessee and Texas more than a century later.
He died on 17 May 1876. His grave lies in what is known variously as Irvine Cemetery or Wilson Chapel Cemetery, on a low rise in the woods of Newton County. The Texas State Historical Association notes that a state marker was placed there in 1963. The Newton County TXGenWeb page for the cemetery, along with photographs on Find a Grave, shows a stone that identifies him as “Maj. Josephus Somerville Irvine,” lists his birth and death dates, and names him as a veteran of San Jacinto and a Confederate officer.
The 1963 dedication brought his story back toward Lawrence County. Cooper K. Ragan, whose Handbook of Texas entry remains the best short scholarly overview of Irvine’s life, delivered an address at the unveiling of the monument. Ragan’s speech, preserved in a small booklet, drew on archival work in Austin and local tradition in Newton County and helped link together scattered sources such as the O’Brien diary, the pension file, and county records.
Meanwhile, genealogists and local historians in Tennessee continued to study Josephus Irvine the elder. Lawrence County histories and the early county record compilations kept in the archives at Lawrenceburg still point visitors to the 1819 act that names him alongside David Crockett and others as a commissioner, to the land tracts he held around the town site, and to the court minutes that record his work as clerk.
Taken together, the markers at Wilson Chapel and the acts in Nashville tie father and son into a single story. One helped fix a courthouse on a hill in the Appalachian borderlands of Tennessee. The other carried that courthouse culture west, fought three times for Texas independence, raised another courthouse community on the Sabine, and led men through some of the most difficult campaigns of the Trans Mississippi Civil War.
Appalachian routes to the Gulf Coast
For Appalachian history, the Irvine story matters for several reasons. First, it underscores how deeply the Texas Revolution and later Texas politics were intertwined with upland Southern migrations. A boy born within the orbit of the Cumberland Plateau, to a father busy laying out a courthouse town in Tennessee, ended up fighting at Béxar and San Jacinto, then organizing county government in the pineywoods.
Second, the sources that preserve his life show the value of reading across scales. A federal pension application in Washington, D.C., for a Revolutionary War veteran happens to record the signature of a county clerk in Lawrenceburg. A Texas almanac printed in Galveston offers an autobiographical letter from that clerk’s son. Muster rolls from a small Confederate battalion in the swamps near Sabine Pass identify that son as a major and note his earlier role at San Jacinto. Local cemetery surveys and a historical marker cement his reputation in stone. Only when those primary sources are read alongside county histories, biographical dictionaries, and modern scholarship do they reveal the fuller path from Beeler’s Fork to Quicksand.
Finally, Josephus Somerville Irvine reminds us that Appalachian stories do not always stay inside the mountains. Families from places like Lawrence County carried their accents, church memberships, and ideas about justice across state lines. In his case, those ideas took institutional form in two very different courthouse towns, separated by a thousand miles but linked by law, war, and family memory.
For visitors to Lawrenceburg, one way to see that connection is to read the 1819 act that bears his father’s name alongside Crockett’s. For visitors to Newton County, another is to walk up the slope to Wilson Chapel and read the grave of the son who is remembered as a veteran of Texas independence and of the later Confederate war. Between those two markers lies a migration route that helps explain why Appalachia and Texas share more stories than their geography might suggest.
Sources & Further Reading
Texas Almanac for 1872 and Emigrant’s Guide to Texas, “Survivors of the Texas Revolution,” especially the autobiographical sketch signed J. S. Irvine. Available via the Texas Almanac site and the Portal to Texas History.TX Almanac+1
Louis W. Kemp, “IRVINE, JOSEPHUS SOMMERVILLE,” in Kemp Sketches, San Jacinto Museum of History, typescript SJV439, including transcriptions of his discharge, land grants, and pension documents.San Jacinto 2022+1
Republic of Texas and State of Texas veteran pension and land grant records for Josephus S. Irvine, Texas State Library and Archives Commission and Texas General Land Office, as reproduced in the San Jacinto Museum biography and related files.San Jacinto 2022+1
“IRVINE, JOSEPHUS SOMERVILLE,” Handbook of Texas Online, by Cooper K. Ragan, Texas State Historical Association, with bibliography pointing to Ragan’s 1963 monument address and to “The Diary of Captain George W. O’Brien, 1863.”Texas State Historical Association+1
W. T. Block, “A History of Spaight’s 11th Battalion, Texas Volunteers, C.S.A.,” East Texas Historical Journal 30 (1992), and related summaries of Spaight’s Battalion and Polignac’s Brigade that discuss Irvine’s role as captain and major, the battalion’s campaigns, and the death of his son James Patton Irvine.SFA ScholarWorks+1
Jefferson County Historical Commission, Jefferson County History (2015), which reprints the Company C muster roll identifying “Company C, Spaight’s Battalion (formerly J. S. Irvine’s Co. Newton County Volunteers)” and noting Irvine’s San Jacinto service and command at Fort Sabine during the Union attack of 24 September 1862.Jefferson County TX
“The Diary of Captain George W. O’Brien, 1863,” ed. Cooper K. Ragan, Southwestern Historical Quarterly 67 (1963–64), a detailed primary source on Spaight’s Battalion in Louisiana and a key reference for Irvine’s Civil War service.JSTOR+1
“Quicksand, Texas,” Handbook of Texas Online, and the Newton County Historical Commission’s Glimpses of Newton County History, for the story of Newton County’s organization, Quicksand as county seat, and county officials meeting at Irvine’s home.Texas State Historical Association+1
Irvine Cemetery / Wilson Chapel Cemetery pages on Newton County TXGenWeb, along with Find a Grave memorials, for transcriptions and photographs of Josephus S. Irvine’s grave and the text of the state historical marker erected in 1963.County GenWeb+1
“Tennessee Private Acts of 1819, Chapter 127” and “Administration – Historical Notes, Lawrence County,” University of Tennessee County Technical Assistance Service, along with Goodspeed’s History of Lawrence County, for the elder Josephus Irvine’s role as commissioner in founding Lawrenceburg and his landholdings around the town site.County Technical Assistance Service+1
Pension application of James Waters, S39113, Revolutionary War pension file, as transcribed at RevWarApps.org, which records the attestation “S/ Josephus Irvine, Clerk” and confirms the elder Irvine’s service as clerk of the circuit court of Lawrence County in 1826.Revolutionary War Pensions