Joseph Perkins Pulsifer

Happy birthday Joseph Pulsifer, July 8, 1805!

As mentioned in my blog back on Dec 26, 2013, I have an interesting quote of a story about Joseph P. Pulsifer, (1805-1861)  I remember hearing how my grandmother did go to Beaumont for a court case having to do with the city of Beaumont Texas, and her relationship to the Pulsifer brothers.  (Her great-grandmother Lucy Pulsifer Granger was sister to Joseph and Ebenezer Pulsifer, surveyors and founders of Beaumont, TX)  She was listed on the court documents as being a living descendent of them.

First Courthouse in Beaumont, TX, completed in 1854. Built by John A. Beaumont

PULSIFER, JOSEPH PERKINS (1805–1861). 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 . 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 . 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 . 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, 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 , 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 . 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).

This exact publication is copied into Texas History Online HERE. 

It also gives me the details of where Grigsby Bluff and Tevis Bluff are...which were sites of letters from my grandmother's great grandfather, George Granger, and her grandmother, Mary Granger Phillips.  I've transcribed some of those letters
letters,
grigsby-bluff-letter-dec-9-1861
before-war-started-1856-texas
old-letters-transcribed

 More on Beaumont TX history will be coming soon.

The family tree branches

Finding Uncle Marion:

The data on my site didn't have his death date or place.
I had his birth date and the state of Georgia, but no details.

Uncle Marion had lots of background material.  He was the elder brother of my grandmother's grandfather, William Phillips, who died as a Confederate soldier.  (I don't know why Marion Phillips didn't fight in that conflict).  Uncle Marion was old enough that when his mother remarried to Samuel Gainer, he might not have continued to be part of the household.  That is unknown.  But he did stay close to them as they moved into Texas.

I also was looking for details of George Granger's life.  The Grangers were  from Newburyport, MA.  One transcriber had given his mother's maiden name some real twists, which used to be why people weren't connected up with their real life events.  Lucy Pulsifer was changed into Lucy Ressiler.  It's easy for me to read her correct name in the handwritten document.  But if you've never heard of the Pulsifers who surveyed the land originally for Beaumont Texas, I guess anything is possible.  They donated land for the city center, and probably some of their descendents received some profits somehow.  Not my family, however.  I think my grandfather and grandmother went from Houston to Beaumont during some property settlement, but came home empty handed. In case you don't know, Beaumont is the site of oil.

Anyway, Marion Phillips never married. And since he was my grandmother's great uncle, I didn't spent much time looking for information on him.  It's hard enough to find out who's parents are whose...and when they lived, and did they marry the same person according to the various census records they appeared in.  Seriously, I'm in the midst of trying to get George Granger's wife (or wives) birthday straightened out.

But, (you know that was coming, didn't you) Uncle Marion was the recipient of many letters, as well as wrote many, between himself and his sisters and parents and brothers and their children from around the Civil War till afterward.  Uncle George, not so much.

The Phillips/Gainer family moved to Texas, sometime around the beginning of the Civil War.   Uncle Marion lived in Galveston as well as Tyler Texas, and I finally found his grave in Woodville, Texas.

I actually have a picture of the grave marker, so now I know when he died, and where.

I've transcribed many of the Uncle Marion letters that were part of the Rogers family genealogy records.  I'm adding them to his site on Ancestry.com. 

And when I get a minute (more like an hour) I'll tell you more details about the letters, the family, and poor Uncle George Granger.  (The Granger family raised my grandmother's mother and sister when Mary Granger Phillips and her husband William died early.  Remember William was Marion Phillips' brother. And Mary was George Granger's sister.)

OK, confusing, I know, and I look at the family tree all the time.

I'll try to be more coherent next time.






What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the Sunset - Crowfoot, a leader of the Blackfoot nation