Glen Eden and Sophia Suttenfield, the Unexpected Confederate
Glen Eden and an Unexpected Confederate in the Family: Sophia Suttenfield
Glen Eden was a storied place. It was considered a mansion, imposing and grand, reached down a long avenue lined with catalpa trees, at one time the finest home in Grayson County, Texas.(1) Wide two-story porches with gingerbread trim ran the length of the house front and back. Massive twin chimneys built of native stone and twined with English ivy bookended the house.
There was a luxuriant flower garden out front lined with interesting rocks the mistress of the house collected, and that friends brought her. There were palms and rare plants and cacti. Peacocks strolled and let out their peculiar screech in the mornings and evenings. A massive magnolia said to be planted by none other than Sam Houston himself shaded a part of the yard.
Behind the house were the slave quarters - three cabins. In 1860, the census showed there were 24 slaves on what was by then a cotton plantation. Of course, as was policy, they were not named on the federal census. There were eight males of working age, ranging from a 45-year old to two “mulatto” 15-year olds. There were three women, two 30-year-olds and a 36-year old; and a girl of 15. Their backbreaking work built the wealth of the plantation. Then there were the children. Ten of them, plus two six-month old baby girls.
By that time, there was also a brick mausoleum in which the first owner of Glen Eden, Holland Coffee, was laid to rest. The bricks were made by the enslaved men from a kiln on the property.
At one time, Glen Eden was the center of trade and entertainment in Grayson County. The mistress of the house loved to entertain and dance and dress in the latest fashions from New Orleans. She was said to be a wonderful hostess.
The Mistress of the Mansion
Since at least 1960, Sophia Suttenfield has fascinated people. Local history writers and authors of Wild West lore love to write about her. There’s the behind-her-back tittering about all her husbands. They love to emphasize her four marriages, usually listing her name as Sophia Suttenfield Aughinbaugh Coffee Butt Porter. Then there’s the slave owning, the supposed duel over her honor, her Paul Revere moment during the Civil War and her come-to-Jesus conversion late in life. They repeat the same falsehoods and errors. They like to call her “notorious.” They like to imply or state outright that she supported herself at one time as a prostitute.
One thing is clear even from a blurred copy of a copy-of-a-copy of a photo of her: she was a beauty in her youth. By many accounts she was a lively extrovert. It certainly seems she was resourceful, resilient, a survivor. She liked to put on airs, to exaggerate and stretch the truth a bit, to make her background more refined, her father more prestigious.
So here are most of the parts of her life that keep being repeated, most of which are false:
Her father was a high-ranking officer in the army, the commanding officer at Fort Wayne, and her mother was from a “very refined” Boston family.
There is no record of her marrying her first husband, Jesse Augustine Aughinbaugh.
Jesse was a high ranking German officer.
Jesse was the headmaster at her school; she was his student.
She ran away, or eloped to Texas with him.
She supported herself as a prostitute in Texas after Jesse abandoned her.
She obtained a divorce from the courts in Houston, or she was denied a divorce in the courts of Houston and obtained a divorce through the Republic of Texas Legislature.
She rode 600 miles horseback to her new home in Grayson County near what would become Preston.(2)
A couple of writers note that “little is known about her childhood.” One said anything about her childhood would be speculation. Yes and no.
Sophia was born in 1815 inside the U.S. Army fort, Fort Wayne, then considered an “outpost in the wilderness.” She was the second child of William Suttenfield, a Virginian, and Laura Taylor Suttenfield, from Massachusetts. If dates are accurate, her two-year old brother was buried days after she was born, so in effect, she became the oldest. Seven children would follow her, the last born when Sophia was 17.
She may have told people her father was commander of Fort Wayne, but he was actually a low-level soldier who later worked as a sutler when he got out of the military, and ran a tavern that was not considered the best in town.(3) He was called "Colonel" Suttenfield. As for Sophia’s mother Laura, she was the daughter of Israel Taylor and Mary Blair, and there wasn’t anything genteel or refined in their background. Israel seemed to have been constantly searching, moving west and then farther west in pursuit of a living.
Fort Wayne: The Pioneer Childhood
In addition to his work as a sutler, Sophia’s father carried mail and Indian annuity payments, traveling often on foot and pirogue to places like Piqua, Ohio; Vincennes, Indiana and the little village of Chicago. He was originally a squatter on land outside the fort, building the first log cabin in town. He bought the land when it opened for sale, though, and his cabin was eventually a two-story tavern, the upstairs a “ballroom” where dances were given.(4)
Throughout Sophia’s childhood, Fort Wayne was isolated and difficult to get to. Home of the Pottawatomie and Myamia, it was densely wooded, swampy in parts, and promisingly located at the confluence of three rivers, the St. Mary’s, the Maumee and the Saint Joseph. The fort was built in the late 1700s as part of a campaign against the Myamias - the Miami - and their allies. Sophia’s father William was stationed there in some of its final years.
William and his wife Laura Taylor Suttenfield would not have liked the way Fort Wayne residents were described by those passing through in the days of Sophia’s childhood. Major Benjamin Stickney, an Indian agent until 1819, described the place as “a resort for discharged soldiers and other refuse of the human race.” Others said the same thing. It was a motley crowd of Indians, French fur traders, “half-breeds,” in the language of the times, and a few largely unsavory whites. “A mixed and apparently very worthless population,” wrote Major Steven H. Long, a topographical engineer who visited in 1823.(5)
Others wrote of how disturbing it was to see the Indians reduced to desperation and drunkenness, blaming the whites for their exploitation. A missionary, Isaac McCoy, came to Fort Wayne in 1820 to proselytize to the Indians, but he withdrew two years later, discouraged by the drinking problems of the Indians and unscrupulous whites who kept taking advantage of them. (6) For the two years he was there, McCoy and his wife operated a school which Sophia probably attended. McCoy’s successors operated subscription schools in which parents paid for as much as they wanted their children to learn. Sophia perhaps received the equivalent of about a third grade education, adequate for the times.
It was essential that she also learn the art and craft of running a home. Since the first stove didn’t reach Fort Wayne until the 1830s; Sophia’s childhood was spent helping her mother cook over an enormous open fire place.(6) They ground corn, made soap and candles, and sewed and quilted.
At 17, she married a former schoolteacher and apothecary, Jesse Augustine Auginbaugh. Unfortunately, little is known about him, though she told others he was a German officer. An officer of what? The German army? There was no Germany, per se. There was the Kingdom of Prussia, the Kingdom of Bavaria, the Kingdom of Saxony, the Kingdom of Hanover. Why would an officer in any military come to teach at a subscription school in Fort Wayne, Indiana? Answer: He wouldn’t. Teaching was regarded as something for a young man to do for a year or two before he left to study law or clerk in a store, something more lucrative and respected.
As far as Jesse being the headmaster of her school, call him headmaster if you wish. Headmaster, teacher, owner - he was the only teacher in a small subscription school, and it is highly unlikely Sophia’s parents were still paying for her to attend school when she was 17 or even the year before. The endless work at home, which included running an inn for travelers, almost certainly occupied all her time. As far as them “running off” and eloping, Allen County records show they married 20 July 1833 in Fort Wayne, Allen County, Indiana. A year after their marriage Jesse ran an ad in the Fort Wayne newspaper for “J.A. Aughinbaugh and Company, Druggists.” He also ran for Fort Wayne library trustee in 1834. (7) Two years would pass before Jesse applied for land in Texas.
Gone To Texas
It is indisputable that sometime after their marriage, Sophia and Jesse left Fort Wayne, Texas-bound. When? It seems they spent the first two years of marriage in Fort Wayne. Moving was probably Jesse’s idea. But why Texas? Midwestern land was rapidly opening, and there were many opportunities for him much closer to home. Going to Texas from Indiana was unusual. A full 87 percent of immigrants to East Texas came from seven southern states, plus Missouri. The remaining one-eighth of newcomers mostly came from Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana and the Carolinas, with Indiana supplying a negligible amount.(8)
But Jesse could acquire a much larger tract of land in Texas than anywhere else. To some, leaving the United States for a wild, unsettled country was precisely the point.
Yet, to move to Texas in the early 1830s under one of Mexico’s colonization acts took a bit of doing. Jesse had to apply to the official at the area he proposed to settle, and he needed to bring two credentials from Fort Wayne, or two witnesses to testify to his good character. He had to renounce his American citizenship and swear to uphold the Mexican constitution and support the Catholic Church.(9)
After Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, the newly independent country was anxious to have European settlers on its frontier. They were more “controllable” than the predominant population of Indians. The Mexican government created a system in which an empressario, acting as a land agent, would develop Texas for Mexico. In exchange, settlers would gain huge tracts of land. Many of the settlers in the 1820s came from cotton-growing southern states and brought their slaves or were sympathetic to slavery. Mexico abolished slavery but granted a temporary exception to Texans.(10)
However, by the 1830s when Sophia and Jesse moved to Texas, Mexico was attempting to end immigration from the United States and to end slavery. Tensions between American settlers and Mexicans were high.
Maybe that was unimportant to Jesse. On July 8, 1835, an entree was made in the General Land Office of Texas in Nacogdoches. It was a character certificate. It certified that Jesse was a man of good character, “married with family.” He signed an oath of allegiance to the Mexican government and promised to obey its laws.(11)
Upheaval
What happened next is open to question, open to interpretation, open perhaps to a grain of salt. Sophia said Jesse simply abandoned her; certainly he seems to disappear from all records. She said she was a participant in the Runaway Scrape, an evacuation of American settlers from Santa Anna’s attempted conquest of Texas in 1836. And, she said she arrived at the Battle of San Jacinto, the last in the push for Texan independence. In the fray, Houston’s ankle was shattered by a musket ball - and Sophia said she tended to him as a nurse until he left for medical care in New Orleans.(12)
Here is the point at which other authors have speculated that Sophia was supporting herself as a prostitute. It’s been repeated over and over that she had a dubious reputation and, as a prostitute, followed the Republic of Texas army from camp to camp. This probably originated from Graham Landrum’s 1960 history of Grayson County, Texas, in which he says. “The conclusion is almost inescapable that Sophia resorted to prostitution soon after her arrival” and subsequent abandonment by Jesse. The worst example is in a book called Texas Bad Girls: Hussies, Harlots and Horse Thieves, in which almost every sentence is inaccurate or exaggerated and written in an annoying tone that seems to say gleefully, “Tee hee! Isn’t this scandalous?”
It’s indisputable that it was very hard for a woman to support herself in the nineteenth century. But it also doesn’t mean, absent any proof, that sex work was what she resorted to. Where is any form of proof? The only “evidence” that Landrum offered was that Sam Houston did not mention her in his memoirs, an omission “amply explained by her reputation at that time.” Why would Houston mention her? It would have been surprising if he had mentioned a woman who cared for him briefly.
But if she did indeed help nurse Houston, that in itself opened her up to possible gossip.
Nurses, even three decades later in the Civil War, faced questions of the propriety of what they were doing. By its very nature, nursing involves intimate contact with a patient’s body, and these were patients of the opposite sex who were neither husband nor son. Women, too, were expected to stay home, not to be out in the public sphere. The very fact that she chose to be out on a battlefield or hospital working with men was a threat to her respectability. These beliefs lasted long after Sophia’s youth. Even years after the Civil War, Confederate nurse Kate Cummings said, “There is scarcely a day passes that I do not hear some derogatory remarks about the ladies who are in the hospitals.”(13)
Another factor working against Sophia could have been her youth and attractiveness. In the Civil War, Dorothea Dix deliberately drew up guidelines for women hired as nurses. They were to be 35 to 50, plain, and with two references attesting to their morality. Once hired, their dress was completely lacking in ornamentation. In other words, they were to be as devoid of sexual attraction to hospitalized men as possible.
Regardless, there is no hard evidence that Sophia was a sex worker. Short of any evidence, I consider it innuendo from modern-day writers. But where was she living and what was she doing? Her whereabouts after Jesse Aughinbaugh center on Holland Coffee and family. Holland Coffee was an Indian trader and would soon be an elected representative in the Republic of Texas. Reportedly, Holland’s nephew Aaron said she lived with Holland’s sister, America Coffee Lusk.(14)
Is it too far-fetched to think that a sympathetic family took a destitute, abandoned 19- or 20-year old young woman in? Around the time Jesse took off, America had seven young children. An extra set of hands could always be useful.
Landrum claims that rather than living with one of Holland’s sisters, she actually lived with Holland before they married. She could have done both – started out in America’s home and moved in with Holland. Landrum’s proof of this is a bill of sale to “Sophia Coffee” for the purchase of Lewis, an enslaved man, in February 1838 in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Husband-and-wife historians the Middlebrooks have a suggestion that is very fair to Sophia.
“In those days of fluid or nonexistent marriage laws she and Coffee probably went through some kind of ceremony which they felt met the demands of society but was found later to have no legal standing,” they wrote. A bit more than five months after buying a slave, she was in Houston where she appeared before Judge James W. Robinson in the District Court of the Republic of Texas to petition for divorce. The same day, Holland appeared before the Board of Land Commissioners in Fannin County where it was noted that he was a single man.(15)
What is certain about Sophia is that her fortunes took a dramatic change for the better. And, it might be noted, living together before marriage has certainly lost the connotations it once had, in which women were judged extremely harshly.
Holland Coffee
Sophia probably met her second husband, Holland Coffee, through Sam Houston. Holland and Sam were well-acquainted. Holland was a Kentucky or Tennessee native who, with partner Silas Colville, first established a trading post in Arkansas in 1829. The two opened another along the Red River about eleven miles from present-day Denison in the 1830s. Supposedly he could speak several Indian dialects, helping him trade horses with the Comanche and other tribes - usually for liquor and guns - and at least twice, negotiate ransom with the Indians to release white captives.
After Fannin County was created in the new Republic of Texas, Holland was elected as its first representative in the Texas legislature’s 1838 to 1839 session. Here was a successful man who was single.
A woman’s best bet in terms of financial support was marriage. But of course Sophia had a problem - she was already married, and divorce was not easy to get.
Marriage in the nineteenth century was seen as what held society together. Divorce destabilized society. Therefore, it was in the state’s interest to discourage divorce. Each state had its own standards, but up until 1969 when Governor Ronald Reagan signed a “no-fault” divorce bill in California, there was no such thing as a “no fault” divorce. Someone was to blame – and the plaintiff had to prove it in court, often exposing herself to considerable embarrassment and disapproval. Adultery was the only grounds for divorce in some states; others allowed divorce for cruelty or desertion. Then too, some states issued only partial divorces. The marriage was dissolved but the parties could never remarry.(16)
In the new Republic of Texas, the only way for Sophia to obtain a divorce was to petition the legislature. In fact, after her appearance before Judge James W. Robinson, a divorce was not granted and in November 1838 she petitioned the Third Congress of the Republic of Texas. The committee to whom the plea was referred supported her. However, on the first reading a member of the legislature opposed the request and a vote went 16 to 14 against her. The personal influence of Congressman Coffee, however, swayed his fellow legislatures and the divorce was granted January 19, 1839. It was a complete divorce, which meant she could remarry.(17)
She was still only 24. She exercised her right to remarry in February. It was Holland’s first marriage. They were married in Independence, an unincorporated community in the Stephen F. Austin colony that was briefly important in the Republic of Texas. Afterwards, they departed on a journey to a new home at Holland’s trading post, known as Coffee’s Station, in Grayson County on the Red River. In later years Sophia reportedly told others it was 600 miles by horseback. Writers continue to repeat this as fact. But the distance from Independence to what became Preston Bend is considerably less at 278 miles.(18) No doubt it was still a memorable and challenging journey. Her life was interesting enough without embellishment.
The Creation of Glen Eden
Their new home was strategically located a mile from the Red River near Little Mineral Creek on Preston Bend Road leading to Dallas. Their first home was a ten-foot square clapboard house with a puncheon floor, surrounded by a high stockade, one hundred feet square. Furnishing consisted of a packing box with legs on it for a table, and another packing box nailed to the wall for a dresser. Sophia made a rag rug and a quilt stuffed with cotton grown on the property and declared herself, “the happiest woman in Texas.”(19)
Glen Eden was built in stages, originally a two-story log house of dogtrot design. Dogtrot houses are characterized by a large, open breezeway running through the middle of the house, with two separate living areas under one roof. They were usually one-story. The design allowed for cross breezes in a pre-air conditioned age and understandably is predominantly found in the South.
A brick dining room-kitchen addition with a wine cellar was added, built with bricks from a kiln on site. On the first floor the dog trot was enclosed, forming a wide hall separating parlor and dining room. It was originally open on the second floor, with a blue guest bedroom on one side and the master bedroom on the other. Over the years Sophia had fine furniture and china brought in by ox wagon, and supervised the planting of her exceptional garden. The logs were covered with planking and the grand porches were added in the 1860s.
In 1842 Fort Washita was built in Indian Territory in what is now Durant, Oklahoma, 47 miles from Sherman. Although that was more than a day’s journey away, the Coffees entertained officers from the fort, and from other frontier forts: Fort Gibson, Fort Smith, and Fort Arbuckle. Naturally because of distances, these were multi-day parties. Guests would arrive with a change of clothes in their saddlebags. Dancers whirled to the tunes of violin, banjo and flute.(20)
Holland turned from Indian trading to farming on his estate of some 3,000 acres. Yet the Coffees went into debt to Holland’s brother Thomas. Holland promised to pay half of what he could collect on the sale of twenty-one slaves in Nacogdoches to a man named William McDaniel, and he owed his brother for the purchase of three slaves, Abram, Isaac and Dicy. After Holland’s death in October 1846, Sophia signed two notes, each of $1,058, assuming Holland’s debts. This would indicate he paid off the bulk before his death.(21)
With no children of their own, the Coffees took in one of Holland’s nieces, Mary Elizabeth Jewell. She was the daughter of his sister Elizabeth, who died in 1843 when Mary Elizabeth was only four. She became a daughter to Sophia and stayed with her until her marriage in 1859.(22)
Passages
Holland and Sophia had invited another of Holland’s nieces, 14-year old Eugenia, to visit them from her home in Mississippi. She arrived in March and two months later married Charles Ashton Galloway, 28. Soon after, Holland Coffee was killed in a fight with Charles, who stabbed him with a bowie knife.
Reports at the time shed no light on their dispute. Charles was charged with murder but was acquitted on the basis of self-defense. The Clarksville, Texas Northern Standard reported, “We are told that Mr. Galloway is universally considered blameless for his conduct throughout the difficulty, and in the final act which terminated so fatally and unfortunately.” There were several witnesses.
Writers in western magazines and internet articles repeat the tale that Holland died in a duel defending Sophia’s honor, that Charles made some derogatory comments about her. A few others claim that she was having an affair with Charles, or that she played “fast and loose” with soldiers at Fort Washita and that somehow led to Charles challenging Holland to a duel.
All of this is from one source, repeated by Landrum in his history of Grayson County. In a footnote he quotes from an interview with a Mrs. John Young in 1918, found in the “Lucas Papers.” In the interview Mrs. Young incorrectly said that Sophia brought her sister from Indiana to marry Charles. This is not true, of course, as it was Holland’s niece who married him. One person telling tales about something that happened 72 years earlier is a rather dubious source.
The details of Holland’s dispute with Charles are lost. Sophia remarried to Major George N. Butt, a Virginian, around 1848. (Records are imprecise.) Little is known about him and most accounts say simply that he helped her run the Glen Eden plantation. The first record of him in Texas, Landrum said, is in 1848 when he bought an eight-year old boy, Harry, from Hiram Coffee (not related to Holland) for $300.
During the Civil War - and surely before, George handled the sale of the plantation’s cotton and the purchase of slaves. Those named during their marriage were Lewis, Mary, Ann, Harry, Rose, Pats, Sarah, Albert, Hester, and Hercules, according to Landrum.
It was around this time that Sophia took in her little sister, Mary Frances, the baby born around the time Sophia married. Mary Frances and their brother George Walker Suttenfield, known as Walker, somehow made the journey from Indiana together. They were with Sophia by at least 1848. In February 1849 at age 16, Mary Frances married Major Thomas G. Murphy, 35. Not much is known about him. Was his title from the fight for Texan independence? In October their son George was born. Then there was the gold rush, and Thomas, Mary Frances and Walker were rushing off to California. They went separately and by different routes. It was likely the last time Sophia saw her brother, sister and little nephew.(23)
On the 1850 census, Sophia's real estate is valued at over $18,000 - a very considerable sum. Contrast that with their nearest neighbors, whose real estate was valued at $3,120; $640 and $320. Mary Jewell, age 12, lived with them. An unusual feature, a mistake on the enumerator’s part, was that their slaves were listed with them. The 1850 census was the first to have a separate slave census called the slave schedule, and that was where the people in bondage should have been listed. As always, only their ages, gender and racial category was included. The Butts had eight slaves, six of them male and all of them young, with none over the age of 32. Only one other neighbor owned slaves. He was the one with the real estate value of $3,120 and had a total of four enslaved people.
In 1863 George Butt was returning from selling cotton in Sherman, so it is said, when he was ambushed, allegedly by a member of Quantrill’s gang. William Quantrill was a guerilla fighter who was commissioned a captain in the Confederate army. In October 1863 he and his men crossed the Red River and set up a winter camp at Mineral Springs Creek fifteen miles from Sherman. He was credited with ending a near-riot with “war widows” who were convinced that the Confederate commissary in Sherman was withholding stores from them.(24)
One of Quantrill’s lieutenants left him, taking several men as his followers. Grayson and Fannin Counties became the target of raids and violence to such a degree that regular Confederate forces were assigned to protect residents from these irregular forces.(25) Maybe George was a victim of this. Then again, maybe there was no connection to Quantrill at all. Landrum said George was returning home with the cash from the cotton sale. That could have made him an enticing target for many an unscrupulous person.
The Confederate Lady Paul Revere
How can we tell now what is true and what is not? In 1965, the Texas State Historical Survey Committee erected a metal sign in Pottsboro, Texas honoring Sophia. Under the title, “Confederate Lady Paul Revere,” and her birth and death date - with her death incorrectly listed - it reads as follows:
Settled 1839 at Glen Eden, a site now under Lake Texoma (N of here). Her husband, early trader Holland Coffee, built fine home. Guests included Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, other army officers, 1845-1860. During Civil War, wined and dined passing federal scouts found out they were seeking Col. Jas. Bourland, Confederate Defender of Texas Frontier, while guests were busy, she slipped out and swam her horse across the icy Red River, warned Col. Bourland, helped prevent federal invasion of North Texas. (1965)
Where does this story come from? Landrum said in her later days Sophia enjoyed attending Old Settler’s meetings and enjoyed telling about the grand parties in her early days, and this story of heroism. Of course, just as everything about Sophia gets twisted, exaggerated and just plain made up, some internet accounts have the 57-year-old swimming across the river in nothing but her underwear, whistling at soldiers on the other side, a truly absurd account. Many stories say she either got her “guests” drunk, or that she locked them in her wine cellar.
When precisely did this story allegedly happen? It's hard to pinpoint. Colonel James G. Bourland’s Cavalry Regiment was organized in the spring of 1863, serving in the Trans-Mississippi Department. It was called the Border Regiment as its purpose was to guard the northern border of Texas, with Bourland placing his men up and down the Red River. He served in this capacity until February 1865 when he was promoted. This would mean, in order for Sophia to swim her horse across an icy Red River, that the spring of 1863 was a very unusually cold one, or that the river iced in the winter of 1864 or ‘65. The Red River very seldom develops icy conditions - but a cold river on a winter's night could be described as icy.
After the War
After the death of George, Sophia moved to Waco. Some sources say she left her slaves to work the plantation, others say she took them with her. Economically it would seem to make sense to leave them working at the plantation. In 1865 she married Judge James Porter, a Kentucky native and widower. His title was due to serving one year as a judge in Jackson County, Missouri in the 1850s. According to his obituary, in 1858 he and a partner, with the firm Hall & Porter, had a contract to carry mail from Independence, Missouri to Santa Fe, New Mexico. He did this until the outbreak of the Civil War. The obituary said he “promptly joined the Southern Confederacy,” but did not give any information about what regiment, rank or anything else, adding that at the end of the war he “found himself in Texas.”
The two moved to Glen Eden, Sophia’s net worth reduced with the freeing of the slaves. Her obituary said, “These faithful servants were then hers [after George Butt’s death] by the acknowledged right of possession and most of them remained to the end of their days in a service that had brought them all the benefits of emancipation except actual freedom.”
First of all, she owned slaves before marrying George, but secondly, this shows the fantasy that white people wanted to believe – that she was a kind mistress and beloved by the slaves. The phrase “all the benefits of emancipation except actual freedom” speaks volumes. Landrum said she “worked her slaves hard.” Few did otherwise.
She and James continued to raise cotton and cattle. A Sherman Democrat story, in a bicentennial edition, said that she made a high profit on her cotton in the 1865-66 season.(26) Because of this, the story said, she went back to Fort Wayne for the first time to visit her mother. Her obituary says this visit took place in 1869. Unfortunately this was not noted in the Fort Wayne newspapers.
Also in 1869, Sophia “got religion.” She joined the Methodist church - and of course there is yet another story casting aspiration on her reputation. Supposedly, when she tried to get baptized at a camp meeting, the minister said he needed to see twelve years of sincere conversion for such a wicked soul before he would allow a baptism. So she went to the Methodist minister in Sherman who was glad to welcome her into the fold. She gave five acres of land for a permanent site for camp meetings and a plot to build Coffee Chapel in Sherman.(27)
On the 1870 census the “value of real estate” line was left blank, and personal worth of the household was given as $1,500, quite a comedown from antebellum days. The 1880 census provides some interesting clues to their lifestyle. They had five boarders living with them, plus a visitor named Owen Aker, a hired hand, and two black servants, 11-year-old Maria Sanders and Martha Slaughter, 24, a cook. Sophia may have been cash poor, but she was still land rich.
In spite of any financial hardships they continued to entertain, though the dances were reportedly a thing of the past. When James died in 1886 his death was noted in Fort Wayne. “Judge Porter will be remembered by some of our oldest citizens as a son-in-law of the venerable Laura Suttenfield, of our city.” Would he be remembered because of their visit in the late 1860s?
Widowhood and Philanthropy
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Sophia, in dignified old age
It was Sophia’s third time as a widow, and she remained one until her death in 1897. She hired J.W. Williams as manager; according to the Texas State Historical Association he was a nephew (from which of her husbands is uncertain). His wife Belle was a companion and confidant in her old age. She continued to raise and sell cotton, which was occasionally noted in the newspaper, as in 1887, when she delivered 82 bales. “J.H. Porter received 9 ½ cents for it,” the Denison newspaper reported, presumably 9 ½ cents per pound. (There are 500 pounds in a bale of cotton. She raised 41,000 pounds that year.) The J.H. Porter referred to J.H. Porter & Co., which is the entity under which she sold her cotton. In 1894 the Ardmore, Oklahoma newspaper recorded her sale of sixty bales, the largest individual sale, through J.H. Porter & Co.
There were also a few notices in newspapers on the social pages, as when she visited a friend in Fort Worth, Mrs. H.O. Head, the wife of a judge. Her nephews, Lucius Taylor Barbour and Myron Cassius Barbour visited her from their homes in Kansas. They were the sons of her sister Jane; their father was an abolitionist and Lucius was a Union soldier in the Civil War.
In 1896 Sophia gave 350 acres of land valued then at $10,000 to Southwestern University, a Methodist college in Georgetown, Texas just thirty miles north of Austin.
She died at age 81, and her obituary said she was surrounded by relatives, neighbors and “servants who had been born into the household as slaves but had considered it the highest freedom to remain with their mistress.” This is a dubious claim.
She left everything to Mary Jewell, the girl she had raised as a daughter, now Mary Jewell Mosely.
The End of Glen Eden
Randolph Bryant was the last owner of Glen Eden. He was a Sherman native and federal judge on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas from 1931 till his death in 1951. One newspaper story said he had happy memories of playing at the house as a child. He grew up on an adjacent farm.
In 1930 East Texas leaders advocated for Red River flood control and the construction of a dam. It came to be known as the Denison dam - a project initially projected to cost between $35 and $55 million dollars, stretching 11,000 feet in width and 170 feet high. It would employ an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 men just as they were grappling with the Great Depression. The federal government bought 283 acres from Judge Bryant, which included Glen Eden.
Bryant paid a considerable sum to have the house dismantled with each log and beam numbered so it could be reconstructed as a county historic site about twelve miles away. In 1945 as Grayson County officials prepared to celebrate the county’s centennial in 1946, a newspaper article said, “It is expected that by that time Glen Eden, home of Col. Holland Coffee.....shall have been reconstructed in the county park area on Lake Texoma.”
But it was not to be. Somehow the project never succeeded. Many stories say the logs were accidentally burned, but the Texas State Historical Association does not include this information on their site. Some logs and timber from the home are at the Frontier Village of Grayson County, where they were used to build a modest log cabin.
Holland’s and Sophia’s graves were moved to the Preston Bend Cemetery. What of all the graves of the enslaved people? A 1942 newspaper article said thousands of other graves were moved to make way for the dam, but it’s doubtful if they were included.
Where is Sophia in my family tree? Sophia is the sister of Jane Suttenfield, my third great-grandmother. I call her the unexpected Confederate because when I started my family history research I did not think there were any Confederates in the family. But back then, I knew so little I thought my ancestors arrived in America after the Civil War.
Notes:
Oddly, every single story mentioning the catalpa trees says they were grown from seeds brought from California. But catalpa trees are not native to California. There are species native to Asia and the West Indies, but in the U.S. they are indigenous to eastern North America and are well-known in the south.
There are other errors printed in various on-line articles. For example, Graham Landrum records her first husband’s name as Myron Berbour. This is repeated in such articles as, “The Story of Holland Coffee and Sophia” on a Lake Texoma website. In fact, Myron Barbour - my third great-grandfather - was Sophia’s brother-in-law. Myron married Jane Suttenfield. The Texoma story also says that Holland signed a will leaving everything to Sophia as he lay dying of his stab wounds. Actually, the will was written in May 1841. He signed a codicil to the will in May 1846. (Middlebrooks)
Griswold.
Griswold; Receipt, William Suttenfield.
Poinsette.
Griswold.
Middlebrooks. Library trustee: Sentinel, 1874.
Barnes.
Gifford White.
Katie Whitehurst.
Gifford White.
Landrum.
Hunter Vermeer.
Landrum.
Middlebrooks.
Naomi Cahn.
Ibid.
Magazine and internet articles repeat that Sophia told people the horseback ride was a distance of 600 miles. As with all the other quotes from Sophia, it is not known where they came from. Did her niece Mary Jewell tell a reporter this? Did her manager’s wife and companion late in life repeat her words? Whomever said that she said this added that they stopped at friends’ homes along their journey and had balls and celebrations in honor of the wedding. Even accounting for some serious meandering, it’s unlikely they clocked 600 miles.
Again, this is like all the quotes and so much of the information and innuendo about Sophia. Where did it come from? I have not found any primary source, just one writer after another repeating the same thing.
“Sophia’s Cabin,” Grayson County TxGenWeb, Sherman Democrat Bicentennial Edition, https://usgenwebsites.org/TXGrayson/ANewLand/Places/FrontierVillage/Sophia_cabin/SophiaCabin_Replica.html.
See, for example, Robin Cole-Jett, who claims without any citation that Sophia had an affair with Charles, and prior to that “may have “entertained” soldiers from Fort Washita with the women she owned.”
Middlebrooks.
Landrum mentions both Mary Frances and G.W. Suttenfield, who he incorrectly guessed was a nephew of Sophia, at Glen Eden. Marriage records for Mary Frances and Thomas Murphy are in the Texas Marriage Collection, 1814-1909, Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2005.Original data - Dodd, Jordan R, et. al. Early American Marriages: Texas to 1850. Bountiful, UT: Precision Indexing Publishers, 19xx.Hunting For Bears, comp. Texas marriage information
David Paul Smith.
Ibid.
Preston Bend Cemetery, https://pca1944.wixsite.com/prestonbend/sophia-porter-history
Landrum.
Sources:
Adkins-Rochette. Bourland in North Texas and Indian Territory During the Civil War: Fort Cobb, Fort Arbuckle & the Wichita Mountains, 2008, https://bourlandcivilwar.com/IntroductionVolumeI.htm
Britton, Morris. “Preston, Texas (Grayson County),” Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Association, tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/preston-tx-grayson-county
Butts, Lee J. Texas Bad Girls: Hussies, Harlots and Horse Thieves, Lanham, Maryland: Lonestar Books, 2016.
Cahn, Naomi. “Faithless Wives and Lazy Husbands: Gender Norms in Nineteenth-Century Divorce Law,” 2002 U. Ill. L. Rev. 651 (2002).
Christ, Mark K. “Weather in the Civil War,” Encyclopedia of Arkansas,” encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/weather-in-the-civil-war-7752/
Cole-Jett, Robin. “Sophia Suttenfield Aughinbaugh Coffee Butts Porter,” Red River Historian, https://www.redriverhistorian.com/post/sophia-suttenfield-aughinbaugh-coffee-butt-porter
Gittinger, Eugene A. “The Colonization of Texas: 1820-1830,” (Master’s Thesis), p. 191, https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1190&context=luc_theses
Griswold, Bert. A Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Chicago: Robert O. Law Co., 1917.
Lancaster, Joseph. The British System of Education: Being a Complete Epitome of the Improvements and Inventions Practiced at the Royal Free Schools, Borough Road, Southwark,” London. 1810.
Landrum, Graham. An Illustrated History of Grayson County, Texas, Fort Worth, Texas: University Supply and Equipment Company, 1960.
Lathrop, Barnes F. “Migration Into East Texas, 1835-1860,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Oct 1948), pp. 184-208.
Marriage to Jesse: Marriage Registration Records, Ancestry.com, p. 80, FHL Film Number 002111101.
Mather, George R. Frontier Faith - The Story of the Pioneer Congregations of Fort Wayne, Indiana 1820-1860, Lima, Ohio: Fairway Press, 1992.
Middlebrooks, Audy J. and Glenna. “Holland Coffee of Red River,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 68 No. 2 (Oct. 1965), pp. 145-162.
Poinsatte, Charles. Outpost in the Wilderness: Fort Wayne, 1706-1828. Fort Wayne Historical Society, 1976.
Receipt, William Suttenfield, 1824-07-10, Indiana State Library Digital Collection, https://indianamemory.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p1819coll11/id/1866
Savage, Charlie. “When the Culture Wars Hit Fort Wayne,” Politico, 31 July 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/31/culture-wars-fort-wayne-373011
Smith, David Paul. “Quantrill, William Clarke (1837-1865),” Texas State Historical Association, shaonline.org/handbook/entries/quantrill-william-clarke
Vermeer, Hunter. “Propriety Meets Necessity: Female Nursing in the Civil War,” https://twu.edu/media/documents/history-government/Propriety-Meets-Necessity-Female-Nuring-in-the-Civil-War.pdf
White, Gifford, editor. Character Certificates in the General Land Office of Texas, Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1998.
William Suttenfield Military Records: U.S. Army, Register of Enlistments, 1798-1914, Ancestry.com, Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2007.Original data - Register of Enlistments in the U.S. Army, 1798-1914; (National Archives Microfilm Publication M233, 81 rolls); Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780’s-1917, Rec.
Whitehurst, Katie. “Mexican Rule 1821-1835,” Texas, Our Texas, PBS Texas, https://texasourtexas.texaspbs.org/
Newspapers:
Charles Galloway Acquittal: Northern Standard (Clarksville, Texas), 28 Nov 1846.
“Facts Gathered From The Sentinel of August 30, 1834,” The Fort Wayne Sentinel, 7 May 1874, p. 4.
“Cotton at Denison,” Fort Worth Daily Gazette, 16 Nov 1887, p. 5.
Myron C. Barbour visits: “Sandy Ridge,” Coffeyville Weekly Journal (Coffeyville, Kansas), 17 Feb 1893, p. 3.
Lucius Taylor Barbour visits: Coffeyville Weekly Journal, 19 May 1893, p. 5.
“Personal Mention,” Fort Worth Daily Gazette, 10 May 1894, p. 3.
Sells Cotton: The Daily Ardmoreite (Ardmore, Oklahoma), 17 Nov 1894, p. 1.
“Personal Mention,” Fort Worth Daily Gazette, 26 April 1895, p. 8.
“The Southwestern Endowed,” Austin Weekly Statesman, 14 May 1896, p. 5.
“Mrs. Porter’s Gift,” The Galveston Daily News, 16 May 1896, p. 4.
“Mrs. Sophia Porter. Noted Woman Passed Away at Preston, Texas,” The Houston Post, 30 Aug, 1897, p. 3.
“A Famous Widow,” Hartford Courant (Hartford, Connecticut), 31 Aug 1897, p. 8.
“Backward Glances. Historic House To Be Preserved,” The Paris News (Paris, Texas), 26 Jan 1941, p. 4.
Gideon, Samuel E. “The Campusanto,” Austin American-Statesman, 12 Dec 1943, p. 26.
Copyright by Andrea Auclair © 2024
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