Lucretia
Barrett Major
Sherman Daily
Democrat
May 22, 1929
Mrs. Lucretia Major, born in
1835, Remembers Days of Covered Wagon
(Special to The Democrat)
Van
Alstyne - In August of this year Mrs.
Lucretia Major of this community will be 94
years old. Still active in faculty and
the possessor of a splendid memory, she
enjoys recounting experiences of her early
pioneer life in South Carolina, Civil War
times and the early history of Grayson
county as she has known it in Van Alstyne.
Mrs.
Major's knowledge of people and events of
other days goes back over almost incredibly
long periods. She clearly relates
incidents now belonging to history involving
friends who lived and struggled in the
covered wagon era, who settled the western
empire, took part in the gold rush of "49",
and built up a country for which the present
generation owes its gratitude.
BORN IN 1835
Mrs. Major, nee
Miss Lucretia Barrett was the descendant of
English people who came from Great Britain
during the early history of the American
nation and made homes for themselves near
the northern borders of South
Carolina. She was born in the
foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, in
Pickens county, August 4, 1835.
At the age of
nineteen she was married to John Wesley
Major also a native of her country.
His family, too, were pioneers who helped
make early history; his father fought in the
Revolutionary war.
Mr. Major
served through the four years of the Civil
war, and she tells how she was left during
this period to provide for herself and two
small children without help and without the
comfort of any news from her husband at the
battlefront for long months at a time, a
fate which she shared with other wives and
mothers of the time. She heard of his
being wounded and of his captures during the
battle Fredericksburg through friends, and
this information served better, she says,
than the uncertainty of none . . . without
further injury but he lived only until
1894. Following his death she moved
her family to Texas, making her home at Van
Alstyne in the residence in which she still
lives.
MOVES TO VAN
ALSTYNE
Mrs. Major
united with the Methodist church early in
childhood, and maintains an active interest
in its welfare and progress.
Other members
of her family, the Barretts, proved to be
almost as long lived as Mrs. Major.
She has a sister, Miss Margaret Barrett of
Easley, S.C., who is 92 years old, and other
relatives lived nearly to the century mark.
Mrs. Major is
the mother of three living children, who
are: Mrs. Julia Woods and J.R. Major both of
Van Alstyne, and the Rev. J.D. Major of
Lakeland, Fla. She has several
grandchildren and a great-granddaughter,
Miss Jessie Banks, a teacher in the
Methodist Orphan Home near Waco.
Biography Index
Susan Hawkins
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