William Henry Stewart (1818-1903)

William Henry Stewart was born on May 8, 1818 to Joseph Fookes and Rachel Linthicum Stewart in Cambridge, Maryland. He attended Dickinson College preparatory grammar school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and went on to enter Dickinson College proper in 1837 with the class of 1841. He graduated four years later with his class, studied law and was admitted to the bar in his hometown of Cambridge in 1843.

In 1844, Stewart moved first to Iowa and then to Texas. He settled in Gonzales, Texas and seems to have adapted well to the new community; just four years after settling in, he was elected as town mayor. After one year as mayor, William Stewart's political career advanced as he was elected to a term in the Texas state legislature in 1849. He was to serve again in this position in 1860, when he voted in favor for the Ordinance of Secession of Texas in February 1861. When the Civil War broke out, Stewart joined the Confederate Army and served with the rank of major in the Quartermaster Corps attached to the Texas units serving with the Army of Northern Virginia. After the war, Stewart returned to Texas and moved from Gonzales to the port of Galveston on the Gulf Coast. Now a prominent Texas figure, he was a representative to the Texas Constitutional Convention of 1875 and was elected Judge of the District Court of the Tenth Judicial District of Texas in 1876. He sat on that bench until his death.

William Henry Stewart had four wives: Adeline Morrison, Adeline Tomlinson, Mamie Brown, and Mary Walker Minor respectfully. Records indicate that Stewart fathered six children. The 1860 Census shows that his second wife Adeline Tomlinson had two daughters then, named Mary and Cora. His fourth marriage to Mary Walker Stewart provided three boys -- Maco, Minor, and Clegg -- and a daughter, Wilamina (Willie). From his later family, his son, Maco, founded the successful Stewart Title Company in 1893 and his two other sons, Minor and Clegg, were crucial in the corporation's development. A survivor of the infamous hurricane that struck Galveston in 1900, William Henry Stewart died on March 26, 1903 in that city at the age of eighty-four.