Submitted by:
Frank Butcher on Mon,
26 Oct 1998 (updated Sept. 26, 2007)
Surnames: Thomason
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From page 2197 of the book, A History of Texas and Texans by Frank W.
Johnson: "Colonel Zachariah Thomason was a Tennessean by birth, a farmer and trader, whose birth occurred near Woodbury, in Wilson County. He was trained to the life of a farmer, and married Miss Matilda Hancock, daughter of Lewis Hancock, a slaveholding planter of Wilson County. Before the Indians were moved from Alabama beyond the Mississippi, Zachariah and Matilda Thomason settled near Valley Head in DeKalb County, where he became a justice of the peace and during the war against Mexico was commissioned a captain of infantry in Col Coffey's regiment, and was in the army of General Scott. Subsequently, Captain Thomason became a prominent figure in the Confederacy. As lieutenant-colonel in the Seventh Alabama Cavalry, he was in the command of General Joe Wheeler, was captured at Duck River in Tennessee, and was confined with other Confederate officers at Johnson's Island until the end of the war. From the beginning of the great struggle between the states he had been a strong secessionist, and was never reconciled to the reunion of the states. Following the war he resumed his residence in Limestone county and remained there until shortly before his death. His property interests in Tennessee and in Pontotoc County, Mississippi, caused him to return to those states for the purpose of converting his lands into cash, and he died while away and is buried near Coffeytown, Mississippi. As an unreconstructed Confederate, Colonel Thomason never voted after the war. He belonged to no church, had secured little education, was a man of firmness and obstinacy, and his practical business sense made him more than ordinarily successful. While in the Yankee prison at Johnson's Island he practiced penmanship and became something of an artist for a farmer with the pen. His wife died in Limestone county near Oletha during the 1890s. Their children were: Martha Ann, now deceased, who married T. J. Slayton, a business man at Jacksonville, Texas; Daniel B., who was killed near Groesbeck and left a family; Charles M., who was a captain in the army of Stonewall Jackson, was on the scene in the memorable evening when the great Confederate general was shot by his own men and heard the volley which took that leader's life, returned to Texas after the war, became a farmer and merchant, and died at Guy's Store; John C., of Provineall, Louisiana, who served in the Nineteenth Texas Cavalry and spent his life as a farmer; Newton B., and Wallace of Oletha." The same article reveals that Zachariah headed the small family party that left Alabama and by wagon crossed the intervening country to the Mississippi River at Helena, and finally stopped near Mexia, where their relatives, the Hancocks, lived. According to notes left by Zachariahs great-great grandaughter, Mary Beth Lenamon Fife, Zachariah was a RARE horseman, and traveled all over the United States. |