Huston Jackson Gray

The ancestry of Huston Jackson Gray is not known. He was born about 1828 in Tennessee, and on 10 July, 1850 he married Aurelia Panthea Guthrie, a native of Alabama, probably from Elyton, now in Birmingham, Jefferson County. She was born about 1830 and was a daughter of Rev. James Smith and Letha (Burns) Guthrie. The Rev. Guthrie was an important evangelizing preacher in the Cumberland Presbyterian church. In the Federal census taken after the marriage, in the “Rusk District,” Rusk Co., in east Texas, Huston and Aurelia were living in her parents’ household, likely in the Henderson area.

Later in the decade, Huston and Aurelia and their family, together with Aurelia’s brother, Robert B. Guthrie, removed to the northern part of Holford Prairie, in rural Garza, now Lake Dallas, .where in 1857 he and Guthrie (also of Holford Prairie) obtained title to 1680 ares in Dallas and Denton Counties from Perry Harmonson. Both brothers-in-law were farmers. It is very likely that he was raised in an East Texas Lodge, one might guess in Clinton Lodge #23, Henderson.

In addition to being one of the founders of Denton (now Lewisville) Lodge, Huston Gray was WM in 1858 and 1859, and Senior Deacon in 1860. He fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, in Co. G, Bourland’s Border Cavalry Regiment. He died 10 May, 1865, about three weeks before the surrender of the Regiment, 2 June, 1865; neither the circumstances of his death, nor his place of burial have been discovered.

Huston and Aurelia had four children, Virginia Josephine, Letha Aim, William Newton and Sam Houston. In later life, Aurelia lived near Seymour, Baylor County (southwest of Wichita Falls) with her son Sam Houston and his family. She applied for a Confederate widow’s pension in 1899, died in 1908, and is buried in Old Seymour cemetery, Seymour.

 

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