Stephen F. Austin

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF STEPHEN F. AUSTIN

Part 2: Going West…Again

by Bob Heinonen

Stephen F. Austin’s father, Moses Austin, began developing the mine in southwestern Virginia in 1789, but seven years later realized it was losing money. Rather than fall back to a conservative position he did like his father’s before him - Moses decided to add yet another business venture. In 1796, Moses went to Upper Louisiana (the Spanish owned territory of Missouri) where he had heard there was a huge lead deposit. Moses obtained the rights to the huge lead deposit, and in 1798, the family moved to Missouri.

Stephen was only five years old at the time, having been born at the lead mines in Virginia on November 3, 1793. Forty family members, servants and employees got on flatboats and went down the Ohio River and up the Mississippi River to Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. It was a three month trip, and, of the forty that began the trip, only seventeen survived. Of the seventeen, only two were well enough to walk ashore. Stephen’s cousin Henry drowned at the treacherous falls on the Ohio River near Louisville and his aunt Martha and cousin Parsons also “paid the debt of Nature.” Surprisingly, this level of attrition was not unusual for this type of journey in that day.

Moses Austin had taken possession of his new Mine a Breton on April 5, 1798, and on October 1 of the same year he and his family moved in. Missouri was a wilderness, but Stephen’s father built his mother a home she would have been proud of back in Virginia…a two-and-a-half story wood frame mansion. They moved into the mansion a year and one month from when they had boarded the boats back in Virginia. Moses called the house Durham Hall after the town of Durham, Connecticut, in which he grew up.

Moses also had a home built for the manager of the mine, and homes for the workers, and he had built a saw mill, a grist mill, a blacksmith shop and, of course, a distillery. There were already the ten homes of French miners that had preceded them into the area by some fifteen years.

It was during these years that Stephen began to understand and appreciate the more genteel customs of other cultures -- of the Spanish, the French, the Negroes and the Indians who had already settled in the area. And, as Gregg Cantrell states it so well in his biography of Stephen, “The house [Durham Hall] stands as an ideal metaphor for the complex influences that would shape Austin’s personality: a southern mansion, bearing a Yankee name, situated on a very western frontier.”

Under Spanish ownership of the territory, everything went quite well and the mines thrived. But then, five years after settling in, everything changed. In 1803, Missouri became a part of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase and the American era began….and Stephen Fuller Austin’s life changed forever.

Next Month – Part 3: A Change Of Ownership