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James Alfred McFaddin,
rancher, was born on May 5, 1840, near the site of Beaumont,
Texas, the eldest son of Rachel (Williams) and William M.
McFaddin.qv
His grandparents, James and Elizabeth McFaddin, moved to Texas
in 1821 from Tennessee. William McFaddin established a ranch in
Liberty County, where he received a land grant from the Mexican
government in 1831, and the following year the family moved to
Jefferson County, where William established a ranch about a mile
from the site of present Beaumont. In 1858 James McFaddin
established his first ranch on Melon Creek in Refugio County,
using 130 cattle from his father's ranch in Jefferson County. He
married Margaret V. Coward in 1861, and their first child, Allen
M. McFaddin,qv was born while
McFaddin was in the Confederate service. In 1863 McFaddin joined
the Refugio Guards as a second corporal under Capt. Dan Doughty,
and he appears to have attained the rank of first lieutenant by
the end of the war. After the war he returned to Refugio County
and continued his interest in developing cattle ranching and
farming in the area. For years he served his neighbors as a
"one-man bank," keeping their money in his safe until a bank was
established. He commanded a company of militiamen for Refugio
County and in 1875 was involved in overseeing road construction
in the county.
McFaddin bought up land in
Victoria County in the fork between the Guadalupe and San
Antonio rivers in 1878 and moved his family there around 1881.
During these years he began to incorporate Brahman blood into
his herds; he was one of the earliest cattlemen to do so. By
1879 he had begun cross-breeding experiments which later
resulted in a recognized new breed under his grandson, Claude K.
McCan.qv
He continued to use the M6 brand, designed by his father in
1837, and added the N6 and Z brands. McFaddin was also one of
the first to fence pastures with barbed wire,qv
and he drained and reclaimed about 5,000 acres of swampland by
building a twelve-mile levee along the Guadalupe River. In
February 1884 he helped organize the Building and Loan
Association, and in 1897 he invested in the Guadalupe Valley
Railroad, which was abandoned in 1899. When the St. Louis,
Brownsville and Mexico Railway was established in 1903, one of
the stations was placed on the ranch and named after McFaddin.
To combat rustling, he became one of the founders of the Cattle
Raisers Association of Texas. With J. J. Welderqv
and Harry Rathbone, he helped organize the Guadalupe Navigation
Company, which extracted and transported sand and gravel to
clear the rivers for riverboat traffic. In 1883 McFaddin, Thomas
M. O'Connor, and others organized the Texas Continental Meat
Company, the first meat-packing plant in Texas, which employed
at its peak eighty-seven butchers. By 1885 McFaddin was one of
the wealthiest ranchers in the county, with land worth $95,800
in three ranches. He died on June 25, 1916, at his home in
Victoria and was buried in Victoria.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mary
Whatley Clarke, "Big Hearted `Mr. Al': Favorite Victoria Son,"
Cattleman,
February 1952. James Cox, Historical
and Biographical Record of the Cattle Industry
(2 vols., St. Louis: Woodward and Tiernan Printing, 1894, 1895;
rpt., with an introduction by J. Frank Dobie, New York:
Antiquarian, 1959). Roy Grimes, ed.,
300 Years in Victoria County
(Victoria, Texas: Victoria
Advocate,
1968; rpt., Austin: Nortex, 1985). Hobart Huson,
Refugio: A Comprehensive History of
Refugio County from Aboriginal Times to 1953
(2 vols., Woodsboro, Texas: Rooke Foundation, 1953, 1955).
Rosine McFaddin Wilson
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