Parson's Brigade - 12th Texas Cavalry CSA Texas Division Reunion   Texas Division, United Confederate Veterans [Abstract from The Confederate Veteran, Vol. XXV, No. 1, Nov. 1917,] (contributed by Ruth Walsh) The Confederate veterans of the Texas Division met at Waxahachie in their twenty-sixth annual reunion on October 5 and 6  [1917] and had royal entertainment in that city of some ten thousand people.  About six hundred veterans were in attendance. Quoting from part of a report given by of Judge C. C. Cummings, Historian. "We are assembled here on the historic ground, recalling the early struggles of the Lone Star Republic of Texas.  Ellis County is named for Richard Ellis, the presiding officer of that illustrious body of fifty-six delegates - Texas patriots all - who met on the 1st of March 1836, and the next day dared in the name of a few gallant and intrepid spirits to proclaim Texas as an independent republic free from the despotic tyranny of eight millions of Mexican nondescript.... "In the name of your beautiful county seat [Waxahachie] for the stream hard by the red man embalmed the memory of his inseparable companion, the buffalo, which gave him meat, and pounded into pemmican bread all the year round, and in winter its soft, fleecy robes shielded him from the rude northers that swept down from the Rockies.  Here these wild men and unwieldy beasts on the banks of this stream did congregate to slake their thirst and lave in its grateful waters, kept bank full b perennial..\....At the date of this convention the white population was scant in Eastern Texas, while all the areas north and west of it, was given over to these wild red children of the forest and plain....except a strip on our northeastern border, where the alluvial soil of the Red River lowlands, by its product of the long staple variety of cotton, attracted the attention of cotton planters from the States with their slaves as far back as 1818...."   Copyright © 2002-2016, Ellis County TXGenWeb. All Rights Reserved. This page was last modified: Thursday, 01-Jul-2021 13:18:29 MDT