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The Drury and Matilda Wilson Family
According to Census records Drury Wilson and most of his children were born in Tennessee. Matilda and her oldest child, Julia, were born in Illinois. At least two other children were born in Texas.
According to the death cerificate for one of Matilda´s daughters (Nancy Catherine), Matilda´s maiden name was Reding.
Drury Wilson was living in Robertson county, Tennessee when he traveled to Montgomery county, Texas in Dec. of 1849 and bought a one-acre town lot in Danville, Texas for the price of $1.00 as recorded in the "Notarial Memorandum" Book B. and notarized by John S. Besser.
Drury is listed back in Tenn. in 1850 according to the 1850 Robertson Co., Tennessee census with his wife Matilda Wilson and their children Julia A., John M., Nancy, Thomas J., Mary, Robert, Huldah, and George.
According to verbal history passed down from Nancy Catherine, in December of 1850 Drury and the family boarded a boat at Memphis and started for Texas. On the trip down the Mississippi some cotton bales on the boat caught fire and they had to put ashore to fight the fire.
On August 29, 1854 Drury and Matilda´s oldest daughter Julia Ann married Thomas J. Horton, son of William Horton and Jane H. Crawford in Montgomery county. Julia and Thomas had two children, Matilda C. and Sam Houston Horton.
On August 9, 1860 the second oldest Wilson daughter, Nancy Catherine, married William Edward Martin in Montgomery county. They had their first child, William R. May 31, 1861. In 1862 William joined the 31st Texas Cavalry Regiment, CSA under Col. Hawpe. By the end of the Civil War William was in the hospital in Austin. William Edward was paroled by the U. S. government on July 27, 1865. The family settled in Old Bagdad, Williamson county, Texas after the war.
In March 1862, Thomas J. Wilson, second son of Drury and Matilda joined the 24th Texas Cavalry Regiment, CSA under Capt. S. D. Wooldridge. This regiment was made up almost exclusively of Danville, Montgomery Co., Texas residents. Thomas died November 19, 1862 of pneumonia while stationed in southeast Arkansas at "Arkansas Post."
Sometime before 1865 Drury and Matilda moved to the Austin, Texas area, probably to Montopolis. Most of the family after that is found in the Bastrop, Travis, Llano, Burnet and Erath counties of Texas.
There is a very nice, tall cemetery marker for Drury Wilson in the old section of Oakwood Cemetery in Austin showing that he was born February 14,1809 and died on February 8, 1865.
Matilda Reding Wilson was a strong frontier woman. We know from the 1850 Robertson Co., Tn. and the 1860 Montgomery Co., Tx. censuses that she raised at least ten children. We know from her grandson Paul J. Wilson that she lived until the early 1890´s. In her later years she divided time between her children´s households. She had a large "wen" (cyst) on the right side of her head and usually wore a cap or bonnet. After each meal she would retire to her rocker in the corner by the fireplace, tamp a small amount of tobacco in her small clay pipe and the children vied with one another to bring her a small coal of fire from the fireplace. She is a mystery to her descendants. We know that she was a Reding, but she was born in Illinois and none of the Redings from Danville have a history in Illinois. Her Martin, Wilson and Horton descendants all have stories in their families that she was Cherokee, but no one can prove or disprove it. She was born in 1814, but as yet we do not know when she died or where she was buried.