Abraham Hoss Yeager
Abraham Hoss Yeager
April 26, 1842-November
3, 1940
 |
Abraham Hoss Yeager served in Company
G of the 29th Regiment, Tennessee Infantry (Confederate). He
enlisted in 1861 and fought in the Battles of Corinth, Tupelo,
Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge and Kennesaw
Mountain, where he was captured in
June 1864. He was taken prisoner while on picket duty and sent
to Camp Douglas, Ill. He was exchanged in March 1865, a few days
before the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Following the war he taught school in
Washington County, Tennessee, studied law, and was admitted to
the Tennessee Bar. He practiced law two years before migrating
to Texas in 1872. He practiced in Fort Worth for two years before
moving to Johnson County to farm near Cleburne. In 1875 he purchased
half interest in the Cleburne Chronicle, for which he
directed the editorial operations for six years. He was later
owner of the Cleburne Telegram and editor of the Cleburne
Enterprise.
|
In 1890 he retired from his newspaper
work to devote full time to improving his farm east of Cleburne.
In 1899 he published an aubobiographical work, Jacob
Klodsloe, One of the Nobodies. How He Came Home from the War-How
He Grew Up and Into It . How and why he chose that pen name is not known.The
book includes an account of his early life on the frontier in
Eastern Tennessee.
He was a perceptive, literate man who
gives a good feel for life in rural Tennessee prior to the War.
He gives other insights into slavery, family and the War---how he and other boys
in an academy patriotically joined the Confederate cause. He describes
his life in a Union prison camp and
the long trip home. The homecoming is particularly poignant. His
viewpoint is that of a States Rights Confederate, for which he
makes no apologies. The book, 129 pages, was a privately printed,
limited edition.
Abraham Hoss Yeager married Mary Vincent
Hightower in Johnson County, Texas, on June 28, 1882. She was
born on September 13, 1862, in Austell, Georgia, just west of
Atlanta. Ironically, she was a toddler there when he was captured
at Kennesaw Mountain, just to the north.
They had six children: Frank Vincent;
Fred William; Abraham Hightower, my father; Mary, Ruth, and John
Hoss.
As a lifelong Democrat, Abraham Hoss
Yeager wrote spirited letters to the conservative-minded Dallas
Morning News. In 1938, accompamied by his son Fred, he attended
the joint reunion of Confederate and Union forces that marked
the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. He
died in 1940 at age 98, still alert and reading without eyeglasses.
Mary "Vincie" Hightower Yeager
died October 13, 1956, at age 94. Of their children, Frank died
of typhoid fever at age 20, and Mary died in middle age of peritonitis
from a ruptured appendix. The other four all lived into their
90s.
Marjorie Kathryn Yeager
Walraven
4609 Wilma
Corpus Christi, Texas 78412
Germanna Colony