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Andrew Farney Smyth, soldier
and riverman, son of Andrew and Susannah Smyth of North
Carolina, was born "on the road going through Tennessee" in 1817
and reared at his father's mill near Moulton, Alabama. He lived
most of his life in Jasper County, Texas, where he was a
planter, lumberman, and riverman. He left home in the autumn of
1835 with a party of other youths who journeyed overland to
Texas with the intention of joining the celebrated Red Rovers,qv
a volunteer company from Courtland, Alabama, formed to fight in
the Texas Revolution.qv The
runaways were delayed in Nacogdoches and later learned that most
of the Red Rovers had been massacred at Goliad. Smyth went south
to join his elder brother George Washington Smythqv
in Jasper County. He enlisted with the Jasper Volunteers, was
made first lieutenant, and with the company marched out to join
the revolutionary army,qv but
arrived after the battle of San Jacinto.qv
As a member of the Jasper Volunteers, Smyth rode from San
Jacinto in the escort that took the Mexican army back to the Rio
Grande. With the war over, and a land grant in hand, he returned
to Jasper County, where he moved in with his brother, whom he
assisted in the operation of a cotton plantation on Walnut Run.
Andrew, a trained surveyor like his brother, also assisted
George in that capacity. In years to come, when the elder
Smyth's public career took him elsewhere, Andrew managed
George's farms and other interests in Jasper County.
As early as 1838 he
began his career as a riverman by building flatboats, which he
would load with Jasper cotton and float on the Angelina and
Neches rivers to the Gulf of Mexico at Sabine Pass. On the coast
he would sell cotton for his various Jasper clients and then
sell the boat for lumber, before heading home on horseback to
Jasper. By the mid-1840s he had seen the advantage of upriver
commerce and had built the keelboat
Jasper, on which, with a flotilla of
flatboats, he would descend the river with cotton, corn, and
tobacco. From his clients' cotton money he would make purchases
as they requested, fill the Jasper
with them, and then have the boat towed home. In this middleman
role he made valuable business contacts in Galveston, New
Orleans, and St. Louis. At the outset his crew worked on shares;
later he found it more advantageous to pay wages. In 1844 Smyth
journeyed to Kentucky, where he married Emily Allen, daughter of
Benjamin and Nancy Allen of Owensboro, and niece of Francis M.
Grigsby (Mrs. George W. Smyth). To this union were born five
children. First the Smyths occupied a log house on high bluffs
where Indian Creek pours into the Angelina. In 1845 a friend
purchased for Smyth 1,060 acres of land on the Angelina River at
Indian Creek, two miles upriver from Bevilport. In 1849 Smyth
acquired the title to this land. In about 1850 the Smyths moved
to a new frame house toward the center of their property and
away from the river. A T-shaped structure with an open central
hall they called the entry still stands much as it was when they
knew it. The house was apparently built in part from timbers
from the keelboat Jasper.
Captain Smyth-as he was by then universally called-developed a
variety of business endeavors through the 1850s. He built two
water-powered mills on Indian Creek, one a gristmill and the
other a sawmill. Each had a great turbine wheel. His business
accounts show that by 1855 he employed some eighty people
full-time at Smyth Mills. The several slaves he owned were
domestic workers. In 1856 he entered a partnership with William
A. Ferguson to establish a general merchandise store in
Bevilport. The partnership was not successful, and Smyth,
finding himself near bankruptcy, turned to friends among the
commission merchants in Galveston for assistance in buying
Ferguson out. He saved the store, which, as Smyth's Mercantile,
he kept in operation for many years after.
Smyth joined the Jasper
Volunteers in February 1862 but left the company within a month
and returned home. His activities during the Civil Warqv
remain something of a mystery; he served part of the time as
county judge, even though it is clear from his papers that he
was actually away from Jasper County much of the time. After the
Civil War he purchased the first of his two steamboats, the
Camargo.
Though it was highly profitable, the boat had mechanical
difficulties and was replaced in the early seventies by the
Laura, a new boat, which Smyth
bought in Evansville, Indiana. This sternwheeler was the premier
vessel on the Neches for a quarter century, a familiar sight at
Sabine Pass and, on occasion, at Galveston. Used both for
freight and passenger service, she made the journey from
Bevilport to the coast and back (thirty-five days each way) on a
regular basis, stopping at many now-vanished villages. She
provided the first dependable, scheduled transportation in lower
East Texas. In Beaumont, Texas, on a stop of the
Laura, on October 22, 1879, Smyth
died suddenly of unknown causes. He is buried in Magnolia
Cemetery in Beaumont, where a Texas state marker honors his
service in the Texas Revolution.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: William
Seale,
Texas Riverman: The Life and Times
of Captain Andrew Farney Smyth
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966).
William Seale
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