Joseph P. Pulsifer, early
Texas apothecary and a founder of Beaumont, the son of Ebenezer
and Elizabeth (Dwelbee) Pulsifer, was born in Newburyport,
Massachusetts, on July 8, 1805. Little is known about Pulsifer's
education, except that his letters show him to have been an
extremely literate man. Probably through apprenticeship, he
became an apothecary, and sometime after 1827 he opened a
drugstore in partnership with his brother Eben in nearby
Charlestown, now a suburb of Boston. There Pulsifer became a
member of the Mechanics' Society and served as its secretary in
1831. Sometime during 1832 or 1833 he returned to Newburyport to
work in the drug firm of Thomas Davis and Company. In the fall
of 1833 Pulsifer moved to New Orleans in search of economic
opportunity and found employment in the store of druggist and
retail merchant Henry W. Millard.qv
By 1835, however, the firm developed financial troubles.
Pulsifer and Millard then entered into a partnership, J. P.
Pulsifer and Company, with Texas merchant Thomas B. Huling.qv
The men moved to Texas in July of that year. In a small
settlement named Santa Anna, on the Neches River, they opened a
store under Pulsifer's management. In the fall of 1835 the firm
purchased fifty acres on the Neches River and laid out the
boundaries of a new town, which they called Beaumont.
From Beaumont, Pulsifer
took an active, if nonmilitary, part in the Texas Revolution.qv
Citizens of the Neches River Settlement, as that area was
called, appointed him chairman of the Committee of
Correspondence, secretary of the Committee of Safety (see
COMMITTEES OF SAFETY AND CORRESPONDENCE), and a member of a
local committee to draft ideas for a constitution and bylaws for
Texas. He also served as Beaumont's first postmaster and as a
trustee of the first school. After the revolution Pulsifer,
Huling, and Millard added fifty acres to the original Beaumont
townsite. By entering into partnership with Nancy Tevis and
Joseph Grigsby,qv each of whom
donated an additional fifty acres, they increased the original
area of the town to a total of 200 acres. Beaumont ultimately
incorporated both Santa Anna and Tevis Bluff, an older
settlement about a mile upriver from Santa Anna. Pulsifer, who
never married, remained a citizen of Beaumont for the rest of
his life. In addition to practicing his professions of
storekeeper and apothecary, he served in various public offices:
collector of revenue for the port of Sabine, county clerk,
county commissioner, and clerk of the Jefferson County Board of
Land Commissioners. Before the first Jefferson County Courthouse
was built in 1854, the county commissioners periodically held
court on the second floor of his combination home and store in
Beaumont. He also served as an agent in Jefferson County for the
Austin State Gazette.qv
Pulsifer died in Beaumont in 1861. The one
extant volume of his correspondence remains unpublished. It
covers the period from 1833 to 1836 and describes his
immigration to Texas and his ordeal during the Texas Revolution.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Judith
Walker Linsley and Ellen Walker Rienstra,
Beaumont: A Chronicle of Promise
(Woodland Hills, California: Windsor, 1982).
Judith Linsley and Ellen
Rienstra
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