SONS OF DEWITT COLONY TEXAS James (Santiago) McGloin Irish Empresario & Co-founder For more biographical information, Search Handbook of Texas Online McGloin did not find Bexar the sleepy Spanish town of adobe houses, especially during the year 1842. There was a great excitement and apprehension with the series of raids that took place that year. On March 5th General Rafael Vasquez made a dash to San Antonio de Bexar with 500 men. He held the place for two days, appointed Mexican officers for the town, and returned to Mexico. On September 14th, 1842, General Adrian Woll took San Antonio by surprise when he arrived with 1400 troops. He captured the few soldiers that were at Bexar and the personnel of the session of District Court: judge Hutchinson, former governor James Robinson, and Samuel Maverick. A small group of soldiers, the Texas Rangers under Captain Jack Hays and some of the militias, hurried to San Antonio de Bexar. Nearby the Texas soldiers and General Woll fought the Battle of Salado Creek six miles east of San Antonio. After nightfall, Woll withdrew. Captain Dawson, with 53 volunteers trying to join the Texians, was surrounded by Woll near Salado Creek. Thirty-five were killed and fifteen were captured. Only three escaped. Woll withdrew from San Antonio, and on September 20th he took the captives to Mexico, including Hutchinson, Robinson, and Maverick. These raids were followed by Somervell's Expedition into Mexico and the well-known Mier Expedition which ended in the drawing of the black and white beans. It is quite possible that during this time McGloin thought Juan Seguin's warning to the people of Bexar urging them to evacuate. But he could not have regretted moving away from San Patricio, even though sorrow had come to James McGloin at Bexar, beginning with the death of his little daughter, Theresa Jane. She was buried in San Fernando's Camp Santo Sept. 19, 1842, and her name now appears on the bronze tablet attached to a huge granite monument which contains the names of all who were buried in Camp Santo, now owned by the city and called Milam Park. [Burial Records entry #93, San Fernando Church, interview with Juan O. Leal, curator of the Governor's Palace and translator of the records April 29, 1977] The following year a son was born to James and Eliza McGloin; he, too, was baptized in San Fernando Church June 18, 1843, and named Edward for his grandfather McGloin, a farmer in Castlegal, County Sligo, Ireland. [Baptismal Records, entry #746, San Fernando Church, San Antonio, Texas] He was the last child to be born to Eliza and James McGloin, for on October 15, 1844, Eliza Cummings McGloin died and the following day was buried in Campo Santo. [Burial Records, entry #168, San Fernando Church, San Antonio, Texas] Having been left a widower and having bought McMullen's San Patricio property, McGloin was more than ready to leave San Antonio de Bexar. There are no records to tell how McGloin managed his motherless family, four children and an infant, during the time that he stayed in Bexar. It is safe to assume that his mother-in-law, Esther McMullen, must have helped him to find someone to run his house and care for the children. What must have been her sorrow to have lost her only child. She was in her 68th year and was to lie beside her daughter in two years entry. [Burial Records, entry #168, San Fernando Church, San Antonio, Texas #263, Nov. 10, 1846] All that can be gleaned from the Bexar County Records about James McGloin during his post-war stay in San Antonio de Bexar is that he was active in business matters and in legal matters as well. Regarding the legal matters in which James McGloin was involved, in the second year of the Republic of Texas was a law suit, namely, McMullen and McGloin vs. the Republic of Texas. On June 12, 1837, the Congress of the Republic of Texas passed a law, "in order to settle the claims of the empresarios, they are authorized to institute a suit against the president of the Republic of Texas and his successors in office ... and it shall be tried as all land suits are required to be tried." [Gammel's Laws of Texas, Vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 1324] The following December McMullen and McGloin filed suit against Sam Houston and the Republic of Texas in the District of Harrisburg for premium lands which they believed were owed to them for the following alleged reasons found in the court proceedings of that case:
Conditions caused by the revolution made it almost impossible to get any more settlers, and the order not to issue any land titles after November 1835 put an end to colonization. There were, no doubt, some potential colonists who were cut off from receiving their land on that date. Perhaps McGloin had in mind those soldiers who were stationed in San Patricio with Johnson and Grant as the following letter attests and was used as evidence in the law suit:
Whether the empresarios would have been able to fulfill their contract for 200 families if the revolution had not occurred, no one can say. They had been given a four-year extension on their contract which extended it to 1838. This may have caused them to believe they could have completed it. To quote further on the same day of court:
There seems to be a discrepancy in numbers here, namely, the issuance of 200 land titles to 100 colonists by the fall of 1835, when in fact, only 84 had been issued. It is doubtful that 100 more colonists were admitted by October 1836 by the agent that they left there for that purpose. Nowhere had the author found in the records that there was an agent named to admit colonists in the absence of McMullen and McGloin. Besides conditions were such that no colonists who wished to live peaceably would come to San Patricio for that purpose. The petitioners brought up the law of June 12, 1837, which gave them the right to sue the Republic of Texas. Furthermore, the petitioners put Sam Houston on the defensive when they demanded that:
In the spring term of court in March 1838 Sam Houston put the burden of proof on them and answered them thus:
In November of 1838 McMullen and McGloin asked for a writ of injunction enjoining the commissioner of the land office from issuing grants within any of the ten leagues which they claimed as their premium lands namely, five leagues at the junction of the Nueces and Frio Rivers, two at the junction of the Rio Frio and the San Miguel, and three adjoining the town tract of San Patricio to the north. The purpose of the injunction was to have these specified leagues in reserve until the law suit was ended. The injunction was granted. It seems, by the wording of their petition, that McMullen and McGloin were trying to apply the Mexican law of colonization and the Mexican Constitution in order to get the premium lands they wanted, when, In fact, they no longer applied to the independent Republic of Texas. The case was continued until 1838, it was continued again until the spring term of 1839, and was also continued in May 1840. On May 2, 1840, the case was transferred to Travis County "it being the present capital of the Republic" as case #1. Five years later in 1845, November 21, the plaintiffs and the defendant consented that this case be transferred to the county of Travis . . . " It was ordered by the court that the papers be transmitted to the District Court of Travis County. During the spring term of 1847, Governor James Pinckney Henderson by his attorney, John W. Harris, Attorney General, said, "the plaintiff's petition is not sufficient in law." He also said that the late Republic was and the present State of Texas is sovereign and cannot be sued without its consent and that no consent has been given so as to enable the plaintiff to institute or maintain his aforesaid suit ..." the said attorney Harris, "prays judgment if the court will or ought to have further cognizance of the cause" . . . " furthermore, he said that the plaintiffs have no legal claim against the government for premium lands and he avers that the precedent conditions to the contract were not performed by the plaintiffs. He further said that the contract with the Government of Coahuila and Texas was a conditional one, and not to be binding on the said government until a formal renunciation of said contract was signed by Benjamin D. Lovell and John G. Purnell and such renunciation filed in the office of the secretary of State which was not done, and consequently no contract existed or now exists between the plaintiffs and the Government aforesaid, or the present state of Texas." He prays, "the judgment of the Court whether the plaintiffs ought to have or maintain their aforesaid action." John A. Green, D.A. Among the conditions under which McMullen and McGloin received the contract, which was first issued to Lovell and Purnell in 1825 for 200 hundred leagues of land to be settled by 200 families, was that McMullen and McGloin present a formal document to the Secretary of State's office signed by Benjamin Drake Lovell in which he desists from his contract, and put $500 in the treasury to bind themselves in case Lovell's communication should appear that he had not given up the undertaking. Among the papers that pertain to this case is a copy of Lovell's renouncement of his contract with the Mexican Government translated in 1845. The original document is dated September 1828. There is no document among these papers to indicate that it was filed in the office of Secretary of State or that the $500 was put up. Nevertheless, the attorney of Governor Henderson demanded the impossible; that is, that Lovell and Purnell sign the document of renouncement when Purnell had drowned on his way to inspect his empresa in 1825. It is evident that the Court did not agree with the attorney general's arguments in behalf of Governor Henderson, for the case was maintained. It evidently had some legal merit. The result of the suit was that McMullen and McGloin were adjudged to have and recover from the State of Texas five leagues (22,040 acres) and eight labors (1416 acres) as the balance of their premium lands as empresarios to be taken from any public lands in Texas. Thus ended Travis County's Case #1. [Gammel's Laws of Texas, Vol. IV, pt. 1, p. 152] It was not until 1854 that the Land Office of Texas issued patents for the premium lands acquired by the suit. McMullen had been dead a year, and McGloin was back in San Patricio. Besides McGloin's involvement in the lawsuit against the Republic of Texas, which lasted from 1837 to 1850, he was mixed up in some of the land deals with McMullen in Medina County that pertained to the McMullen Grant on the Medina. [Deed Records, Book IT, p. 246, Medina County Courthouse] This also was in litigation for a number of years. In the San Antonio records there is no mention of McGloin after 1844, the year that his wife, Eliza Cummings, died. The exact date of his return to San Patricio is not recorded. It is easy to assume that in his grief, and left with the responsibility of five children, he found reason to withdraw from the business and political life of San Antonio. True, most of the land he owned was in San Patricio County, and for that reason he would want to return to the place where his holdings were; however, aside from that, he had an attachment for his former colony town and its people and even a feeling of obligation to those who were to come into it after the annexation. McMullen did not have that same feeling for San Patricio nor did the people for him. Although James McGloin could write, as we have seen by some of his pre-war letters, he did not keep up with his family in the townland of Castlegal. This is established in a letter received by the late Kate D. Bluntzer from the late Hugh McGloin in 1936. It reads:
There are no family letters from Ireland in the keeping of any of the McGloin descendants in Texas, and the mystery which surrounds his coming to America still remains. But that he returned to San Patricio by 1846 is almost a certainty. By 1848 many of the colonists had come back, and some new settlers had entered. In that year the District Court of San Patricio County was being held
From the above quoted from the Minutes of the District Court it can be seen how the post-war period had disrupted the town and the county. People were slow to come back until after the Mexican War. In reading the Minutes of the District Court one comes to the conclusion that everyone had to have his day in court, either as the plaintiff or as the defendant, for there is hardly anyone whose name does not appear from 1848 to 1856. By 1853 James McGloin had long since restored and enlarged his cabin facing Constitution Square. In this year he decided to end his single days. It had been nine years that he had lived without the companionship of a wife. Soon after J.B. Murphy and his wife, Margaret Mary Healy, came to San Patricio in 1850 and brought with them her two aunts, Johanna and Mary Murphy of County Kerry, Ireland, James McGloin began his courtship of Mary and he married her in that year. It was in this same year that a ghost was said to have appeared in the house of James McGloin. The ghost of John McMullen, stabbed and bleeding, in the doorway; James McGloin mounted his horse and rode to San Antonio without stopping until he reached the house of his former partner and there found that he had been murdered. In 1855 lumber for building frame houses was becoming available. McGloin had long dreamed of having a dwelling house on Round Lake a mile west of San Patricio where the overflow of the Nueces River empties into the lake at flood time. In a single night and day a cavernous round hole thirty feet deep would be filled by a roaring stream from the river bottoms. Here in 1855 he built his house, a story and a half, with two dormer windows overlooking Round Lake. His eldest son, John J., had grown to manhood; his daughter, Mary Ann, had married James M. Grover; son Gilbert, tall and handsome like his father, was of marriageable age; Elizabeth was in the convent in Galveston; and Edward F., the twelve-year-old, was the only care that fell to Mary Murphy McGloin. In June of 1855 James and Mary McGloin moved into the house, the first frame house to be built in San Patricio, according to oral tradition. A lane led to the house which they lived in one short year. They planted trees around it---anaquas, mulberry, and oak. The native mesquites were already there. They also planted trees on either side of the lane which in later years arched above it making a tunnel of green, a sight which is reminiscent of Ireland. And now, one year later, June 19, 1856, he lay in death. The San Patricians felt their loss and came to his wake as he had come to many others. They knew him to be a good man, brave, responsible, patient, and kind, a credit to his native Ireland. SONS
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