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John B. Floyd

From the forthcoming book, RICHARDSON: A History of One of the Biggest Small Cities in Texas

John B. Floyd, an early Richardson-area pioneer settler, was born on April 29, 1808 in either Trimble or Lincoln County, Kentucky. On October 14, 1833, at Gallatin County, Kentucky, he married Julia Ann Lindsey, who was slightly younger. Together, they had seven children: six boys and one girl.

Before coming to Texas, Floyd was a farmer in Trimble County, Kentucky, which is located in the northern part of the state, on the Ohio River. The federal census of 1850 not only lists the names of everyone in his family, but also shows that he owned a little over $6,000 worth of real estate. Floyd also owned slaves. Although the value is not shown, the 1850 federal slave schedule for Trimble County identifies him as the master of four enslaved human beings-a 75-year-old black woman, a 20-year-old black male, an 18-year-old black female, and an 18-year-old male.

Floyd was also active in state and local politics. In 1847 and 1848, he served in the Kentucky General Assembly, as the elected representative from Trimble County, In 1851, he was appointed Sheriff of Trimble County. He also served as a Justice of the Peace in Trimble County.

Unfortunately, Floyd's prosperity and standing in the community could not protect him from a personal loss that was reported by newspapers all over the country, one rightly calling it "an awful and heart-rending" tragedy. It happened on Monday, March 14, 1853, at the Floyd family home, which was in or near the Trimble County town of Milton. About 10 o'clock that night, Floyd's fourteen-year-old daughter, Mary, had gone to her room to read in bed, "a common but very silly and dangerous practice," opined one paper. "About half past eleven," said another, "she found herself enveloped in flames, in which condition she burst into her brother's room and threw herself upon his bed." Unfortunately, before the boy (whose name was not given in the report) "succeeded in extinguishing the flames" the unfortunate girl "was burned into a crisp." Her brother was "so badly burned that amputation of both hands…is feared." No doubt to the heartbreak of the entire Floyd family, young Mary died the next day.

The following year, a complicated, emotionally-charged, and controversial legal case in which Floyd had a prominent role likewise caught the attention of newspapers all over the nation. In 1844, an abolitionist teacher from Vermont named Delia A. Webster, was arrested and brought to trial in Kentucky for helping slaves to escape on what was euphemistically called "the Underground Railroad." Her partner in this endeavor was a Methodist minister named Calvin Fairbank, who was likewise arrested and tried, albeit separately. Although Webster, who had previously taught school in Lexington, Kentucky, admitted no guilt, she was convicted and sentenced to two years at hard labor in the state penitentiary, where she was the only female inmate. Apparently, the prison's warden, Newton B. Craig, became infatuated with her, and it was upon his recommendation that Kentucky Governor Crittenden pardoned her after she had served only five weeks of her sentence. Afterward, she left the state and went back to Vermont, where she taught school. Later, she moved to New York, supporting herself by operating a daguerreotype (an early type of photograph) salon and manufacturing window shades.

After she had been gone three years, Craig reportedly enticed her to move to Madison, Indiana-directly across the Ohio River from Kentucky-where she rented a house and he helped her to start a window shade manufactory. After the business failed, Webster moved in with Craig and his family, where she was tutor to his children. However, after a year, as one paper put it, Craig and Webster had an unspecified "difficulty and all friendly relations terminated."

Following her falling out with Craig, Webster moved back across the river to Kentucky, where on February 10, 1854, with funds reportedly provided by northern abolitionists), she paid $3,056 for a 573-acre farm "on the brow of a hill opposite the city of Madison, Indiana," from a man named Norris Day and his wife, Eliza. From this farm, which she reportedly called Mount Orison, she resumed her place as a "conductor" on the "Underground Railroad."

In a letter that was published in December 1855, in which Webster apparently confused the dates when certain events occurred, she wrote that she lived peacefully on her farm until February 7, 1854, when a committee of fifty Trimble County men presented her with a resolution that read as follows:

Whereas, it is known that Miss Delia A. Webster has recently run off numerous slaves from Trimble County; therefore resolved, that it is the will and determination of the citizens of said county that Miss Delia A. Webster leave the State.

When Webster protested, she was told to draft a reply and send it to the county court, which she did. "Soon after," she wrote, "another committee, including the Judge himself, was appointed to wait upon me, and add another clause to the resolution."

The following day, "being the 7th of March," Webster recalled, "I was again suddenly surprised by the arrival of the committee, who had come to deliver the riotous message in substances as follows: 'Unless you consent forthwith to sell us your plantation, and speedily leave the State, no more to return, you will be mobbed at a dead hour of the night, and the threats of the mass executed.'" Although these threats were not on this occasion specified, she recalled that she had "previously been informed of their character, namely, 'Your fences will all be torn down, your fine orchard ruined, your valuable timber destroyed, your cattle and horses slain before your eyes, your barns and out-houses burned, your dwelling-house blown up, and yourself assassinated at the midnight hour.'" In response, Webster voiced defiance, saying she would stand her ground if anyone showed up to carry the threats into effect.

A few days later, while Webster was on a short visit to Cincinnati, Ohio, her property was searched by what she called "a gang of ruffians armed with pistols, clubs, &c." Shortly after she returned home, the Trimble County Sheriff served her with a warrant in which she was accused of attempting to entice slaves to run away. Although he assured her that "this move was only to appease the excitement of a few individuals" and that "after an examination before the Judge" she would "be discharged and return home," that's not what happened. Instead, as she recalled it, she was subjected to a "mock trail" and then locked up in the county jail, "a log hut of rude construction, foul and filthy." When one of the jailors saw her standing by "the rude hole that served for a window endeavoring to write," he nailed a board over it, shutting out all light. Being wintertime, it was also cold in the jail and Webster had no blanket or a fire to keep warm. Twenty-five days later, she was brought to trial again, found not guilty and released.

After returning to her Trimble County farm, where she planted some crops, Webster decided, apparently for safety's sake, to reside across the river in Madison, Indiana.

On June 16, 1854, the feisty abolitionist made what she though was going to be a short visit to her Kentucky property. Unfortunately, while there she was taken ill. Three days later, while still unwell, two Trimble County constables-one named Floyd, the other Yeager-rode out to the farm to place her under arrest for the very same offense for which she had been tried and convicted in 1844. Because she was too ill to be moved to Lexington, where the alleged crime had occurred, an armed guard was placed around her house, to prevent her escape.

According to Webster, being re-arrested on a charge for which she already been convicted ten years earlier was due largely to "the malice of Newton Craig, the warden of the penitentiary at Frankfort," his motive being that "he experienced a decided repulse and totally foiled to have his ungentlemanly and uncivilized desires accommodated" and that Webster refused to allow him to visit her house. "After finding," she wrote, "that his entreaties and letters he had written to me availed nothing, he in his rough Kentucky manner swore with an oath, that if I would not agree to marry him in case his wife should die, which he expected would take place before long, as she was then sick, he would get somebody to swear to enough on that old indictment to send me to the Penitentiary, where his will should be my law, and where resistance would be vain!"

On the morning of March 20, when Webster learned that Yeager had left to bring Craig to her farm, despite her illness she managed to escape by hiding in some nearby woods and then somehow making her way back to Indiana. It is uncertain whether the Constable Floyd to which Webster referred in her recollection of events was John B. Floyd, who had been appointed Sheriff of Trimble County in 1851, or one of his brothers. In either event, it is at this point in the story that the John B. Floyd who would later emigrate to Dallas County, Texas was about to be pulled into the effort to put a stop to Delia A. Webster's "Underground Railroad" activism.

On June 26, 1854, Kentucky Governor Lazarus W. Powell issued a declaration, addressed to the Governor of Indiana, Joseph A. Wright, calling on him to have Webster apprehended and "delivered to John B. Floyd or John Coleman, who are by said Lazarus W. Powell authorized and appointed as agents on the part of the State of Kentucky to receive and convey said Delia A. Webster to said State of Kentucky, there to be dealt with according to law." On July 5, in compliance with the order, Governor Wright issued an executive order commanding "any sheriff of any County of said State" to comply with the Kentucky Governor's request, which the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, part of the so-called "Compromise of 1850," required.

Issuing an order is one thing. Enforcing it is another. As it happened, Webster had plenty of friends in Indiana, who as she later recalled, were "indignant at such an outrage" and "hid me from my pursuers." "Sometimes," she said, "they secreted me in the city and sometimes in the country-in a hay-mow, in the woods, under brush-heaps, in the rye-fields, in the clefs of rock," until she "was too feeble to move about." Finally, she later recalled, after searching for nearly two weeks, "the [Indiana] officers got track of me, took me off from the bed, put me in an open buggy and drove me some fifteen miles under a scorching July sun, and after dark made a daring attempt to smuggle me across the river." But when Floyd and Coleman failed to turn up, she was taken instead to the Madison jail to await their arrival.

Undeterred, Webster "petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus, which was granted by Judge Walker." On Wednesday, July 19, while "a large troop of volunteers stationed themselves around the jail" to keep anyone from taking her back to Kentucky, Neville Craig, at the direction of Governor Powell, arrived in Madison, to testify the next day as "to the identity of Delia Webster." "During the whole trial," Craig later said, "I did not make a single harsh remark, nor use a disrespectful word."

On Friday, July 21, the trial concluded when Judge Walker declared that neither the order issued by Kentucky Governor Powell nor the one issued by Indiana Governor Wright were valid and he ordered Webster released.

That same day, while Floyd, Coleman, Craig and other no doubt frustrated and resentful Kentucky officials waited on a Madison dock at for a steamer to take them back across the Ohio River to Kentucky, an angry mob of Indianans attacked them "with rocks and other missiles," and a man named Randall, said by one paper to be an assassin hired by Webster, used a pistol to shoot Craig, who survived the attempt. Later that year, Randall, who was a resident of Kentucky, was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to three years imprisonment and fined a dollar. During the same fracas, Trimble County Constable Joseph Yeager was allegedly beaten and "maimed" by an alleged Indiana abolitionist named John Row, against whom Yeager afterward took out a $5,000 lawsuit.

According to one paper, the Kentuckians brought the wrath of the Indianans upon themselves by "wearing concealed weapons, in flourishing them before the eyes of quiet, order loving citizens, with slight or no provocation, their boastings of Kentucky power, their expressed contempt for Hoosiers, and their charges of abolitionism and negro stealing upon the people of the city and State." Another paper said that Craig was shot "about an hour after he attempted to draw a weapon on a citizen," and also because he and his Kentucky comrades with "bowie knife and revolvers in hand" conducted themselves in a "gross, unmannerly" fashion.

During or shortly after Webster's three-week-long incarceration at Madison, Indiana, angry Trimble County slave-holders ransacked her farm, confiscating or destroying property amounting in value, to her estimation, $9,000. With the financial help of friends in the North, however, she was able to restore her farm, where despite all the trouble she continued to endure until she moved to Indiana in 1869, Webster not only resided but also used as a "station" on the "Underground Railroad" until the Civil War brought about the end of slavery in the United States.

Ironically, considering the hostility to which Webster's Trimble County neighbors subjected her in her lifetime, she is today honored by a historical marker on the county courthouse lawn and a portrait in the Kentucky state capitol in Frankfort. She died in Iowa in 1904.

In light of John B. Floyd's role in the attempted apprehension of Delia A. Webster, one might be tempted say that the escape of three of his own slaves, "a man, a woman, and a child," who fled in June 1855, reportedly to Canada, was poetic justice. Interestingly, the escape occurred at about the same time that Floyd and his family were preparing to move to Texas. In all likelihood, the slaves who ran away realized that if they were ever going to make a break for freedom, this was the time to do it. From Kentucky, it wasn't far to free territory\, which lay on the north side of the Ohio River. From Texas, the hundreds of miles to freedom would have been an insurmountable barrier.

It's been said that it was while serving in the Kentucky general assembly in the late 1840s that Floyd "heard wonderful accounts of Texas," and that prior to emigrating, he "made a trip to Texas via steamer, stagecoach, and on horseback," so as to see it for himself. A report that he purchased hundreds of acres of land in Dallas County in 1855, before bringing his family to live there, is erroneous.

If Floyd did make an exploratory trip to Texas, which is not implausible, apparently, he liked what he saw because on May 23, 1855, for $6,000, he and his wife, Julia, sold their land holdings, a little over two hundred acres, in Trimble County, Kentucky. Finally, on October 17, 1855, according to one account, they began their journey to Texas, which, as Floyd reported in his diary, "took two months and cost $607.05." According to one account, they arrived in Dallas County on Christmas Day, during a snowstorm.

On January 5, 1856, shortly after reaching the Lone Star state, John and Julia Floyd bought three tracts of land in the northern part of Dallas County, totaling 900 acres, from a man named William Hughes and his wife. The first was a 260-acre tract, on the east side of White Rock Creek, that lay within the William P. Wyche Survey. This tract of land was located about four miles south of present-day old downtown Richardson.

Two other tracts, for which Floyd and his wife paid $2,600, included the entire 320 acres of the Albert B. Danks Survey and the entire 320 acres of the adjoining Isaac Wiley Survey, for a total of 640 acres. This land, which Hughes had earlier purchased from the original claimants, today encompasses almost all of the Texas Instruments campus between U.S. Hwy. 75-Central and TI Blvd. (formerly Floyd Road), as well as most of Restland Memorial Park, as well as a small portion of the present-day city of Richardson south of Spring Valley Road and Centennial Boulevard. It also includes the site of the tiny crossroads community that Floyd founded and named in honor of a fellow Kentuckian, the then Vice-President of the United States, John C. Breckinridge (and a candidate for President in 1860).

On March 10, 1856, shortly after Floyd and his family moved to Texas, an act passed almost unanimously by the Kentucky General Assembly, called "An Act for the Benefit of John B. Floyd and the Widow of John Coleman, Deceased," was approved by the Governor of Kentucky. The act allowed for the payment of $125 each to Floyd, "formerly of Trimble County," and also the widow of John Coleman, "for apprehending one Delia A. Webster." This seems quite generous, especially in light of the fact that although Floyd and Coleman had been appointed to go to Indiana and take Webster into custody and bring her back to Kentucky to stand trial, they never actually did so.

The 1860 federal census reveals not only that John B. Floyd and his wife brought all six of their sons to Texas with them-David A. B., James L., William W., Robert H., John S., and Lindsey-but also that prior to the Civil War, Floyd owned five slaves-a 30-year-old black woman, a 26-year-old black man, and three boys, ages seven and three and one-month-old. Whether he brought these slaves with him to Texas or if he acquired them after arrival is unknown.

According to one account, when the Floyds first took possession of their Texas property, they found only "a pole shanty" and a mere eight acres of plowed ground. Needing a more substantial shelter, in April 1856 they reportedly traveled all the way to Jefferson, in East Texas, to obtain planed lumber, which they hauled back to Dallas County in wagons and then used to build the large, two-story house that served not only as their home, but also a stagecoach inn.

According to this same source, the Floyd's oldest son, David, who was nineteen when they came to Texas, returned to Kentucky, where in 1861 he married a girl named Martha Cooper. This story is almost true. The marriage did take place, in Trimble County, but on March 29, 1860, not 1861. It has also been said that John B. Floyd brought either eleven or eight mares with him to Texas (sources vary as to the number), "with the idea of raising and selling mules to break this wonderful prairie," but despite being sheltered in a thicket at the present-day corner of Walnut Street (formerly Valley View) and T I Boulevard (formerly Floyd Road), all but one of them died from exposure to cold weather "between Christmas day and spring." This is not difficult to believe, since winters in North Central Texas were typically more severe in the nineteenth century than they are today.

Floyd also lost one of his six sons soon after moving to Texas. According to one source, shortly after the family's arrival in the northern part of Dallas County, where there were then but a few trees, the old Kentuckian had each of his boys select "a cedar tree to be set out in a double row leading from the house to the road." As the story goes, only one of the trees, lived. and not only that, but it was still standing nearly a hundred years later. However, the young man who selected it soon died, and was afterward buried in McCree Cemetery. This must have been William W. Floyd, because he is the only one of Floyd's sons for who there is no further public record after 1860.

On February 15, 1858, Floyd increased his land holdings by purchasing, for $80, a land certificate (No. 366) issued in 1857 to one Benjamin F. Hall, redeemable for 160 acres of land. With this certificate, Floyd patented a thin, oddly-shaped strip of land that on the north lay squeezed in between the J. R. Reid and J. E. Jackson surveys, along present-day Walnut Street (and including part of the present-day campus of Richland College), then along present-day Abrams Road, between the J. D. Hamilton, J. E. Jackson, and Benjamin Prigmore grants, south to present-day Forest Lane, and then finally along the south between the J. D. Hamilton and J. M. Houx surveys, as far west as the current Forest Lane campus of Texas Instruments. It was surveyed on February 14, 1858 and patent issued on November 6, 1861. Curiously, among the papers on file in the state land office regarding this grant is a bill of sale, written and signed by Hall on September 20, 1861 in Collin County. It is nearly identical to the one he wrote and signed in 1858 in Dallas County. The reason for this additional bill of sale is unknown.

On January 28 1858, for $366, Floyd also bought ninety-one-and-a-half acres of land, part of the J. R. Reeder Survey, from M. L. Huffman and E. L. Huffman of Louisville, Kentucky. The eastern boundary of this tract was the "center of the Dallas and McKinney Road" (now Abrams Road). On the same day, the Huffmans also sold Floyd one-hundred acres of the adjoining J. D. Hamilton Survey, for $400.

It was on Floyd's land that the forerunner of present-day Richardson, the village of Breckenridge, was established. Named in honor of John C. Breckinridge, a fellow Kentuckian who was then Vice-President of the United States, the tiny village was officially born on September 27, 1858, when the United States government established a post office there with Charles G. Shane, Jr., as postmaster. Two years later, when the 1860 federal census was taken, there were 196 families, largely farmers, that lived in the vicinity of Breckinridge, although the population of the town, if it can be called that, was quite small. Today, the site of Breckenridge, which consisted of the Floyd house and inn, a blacksmith shop owned and operated by Joseph Broad, and a general store that may have also housed the post office, is marked only by a small stand of trees on the west side of Abrams Road, about a half-block north of the campus of present-day Richland College-an apt location in light of the fact that there was also, in the late 1860s, a Breckenridge Academy nearby.

In Texas, just as he had done in Kentucky, John B. Floyd became involved in state and local politics. He was particularly active in 1860 and 1861, when the United States was teetering on the brink of civil war and talk of secession was in the air.

On February 11, 1860, slightly less than a month after Sam Houston was inaugurated Governor of Texas, Floyd presided over a public meeting in Dallas, which was called to protest Houston's inaugural remarks, in which the aging "Hero of San Jacinto" denounced not only "misguided abolitionists," but also "fanatical disunionists," adding: "Texas will maintain the Constitution and stand by the Union. It is all that can save us as a nation. Destroy it, and anarchy awaits us."

At the Dallas meeting, Floyd admitted that he had voted for Houston, thinking him the best candidate, but now he [Floyd] was "dissatisfied with the opinions expressed in his inaugural and other documents published since his election, upon the position of the North and the South; and as that dissatisfaction seems to be the common expression of the of those place in like position with himself, he desired that, without distinction of party we might give a public demonstration of the sentiments of the citizens of Dallas County, and also upon the aspect of our affairs in Congress growing out of the slavery agitation."

Following this speech, Floyd was appointed to a six-man committee which quickly drafted a set of unanimously-adopted resolutions that repudiated Houston and also declared, among other things, "that Congress has no right to abolish slavery or render it less secure than other property; that it cannot delegate such a power to the territories; that its exercise by the latter should be resisted by the people of the South; that any one contending for the right of Congress or a territory to abolish or impair the right to slave property is an enemy to the South; that the Black Republican principles are unconstitutional and aggressive, and calculated to enslave the South and drive it to the alternative of dissolution."

Later that same year, Floyd attended a meeting of both Collin and Dallas County citizens, held in Plano on May 31, 1860, where it was alleged that "the conduct, and certain language" purportedly used by two Collin County men, C. N. Drake and S. A. Winslow, "with and to a certain negro man, Dick, belonging to W. P. Martin of Collin County," tended "to mar the safety and peace of the neighborhood, and incite the slaves in our community to rebellion."

Following the testimony of several witnesses to the supposed offenses, Floyd was appointed to serve as secretary of a committee that drafted three unanimously-adopted resolutions. The first directed C.N. Drake to "leave Collin county on or before the 2d day of June next, and continue his journey until he shall have passed the boundary of Texas, and never return within its limits." The second commanded S. A. Winslow to "leave Collin County, on or before the 1st day of July next, and as soon as possible leave the State of Texas, and never return to said State." The third resolution called for a "committee of twelve to wait upon Mr. W. P. Martin, and request him to give his negro man Dick fifty lashes well laid on, for certain misdemeanor; and if he refuse to do the same, to perform said act themselves."

Unfortunately, there appears to be no follow-up to this report in any newspaper, but in light of the heated atmosphere then prevailing, it seems likely that Drake and Winslow took the opportunity to leave Texas before any further action was taken against them and that Martin either whipped his slave or had it done for him if he refused, as Floyd and the others had directed.

Following the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States in November 1860 and the subsequent secession of the state of South Carolina in December, several other slave states, including Texas, seemed certain to follow suit. On December 22, 1860, at a meeting held in the county courthouse, Floyd was one of four men nominated as candidates to represent Dallas County at the secession convention scheduled to meet at Austin in January 1861.

On Christmas Day, Floyd sat down in his house at Breckinridge and composed the following lines, which reveal that as insofar as secession was concerned, he was what was then termed a "fire-eater." Soon after, his fiery words were published in The Dallas Weekly Herald:

Fellow Citizens of Dallas County:
As a candidate to represent you in the State convention, to be held at Austin, on the Fourth Monday in January next, I will address you (nothing beyond my control preventing) at different points in the county as circumstances may seem to require; aiming as far as posible [sic], to meet the appointments of other gentlemen who are candidates, thereby saving time to the people.

Permit me fellow citizens, in the interim, to say, that in my judgement, forbearance by the South towards the North has ceased to be a virtue, and secession, in the present aspect of affairs, is inevitable, or else we are a downtrodden, disgraced people, I am not for waiting for further overt acts on the part of the North; there has been enough.

I will give you my views at length, when I meet you, as above indicated.

J. B. FLOYD

In keeping with this promise, Floyd addressed the citizens of Dallas on Thursday, January 3, 1861, but four days later, for some reason that seems to be lost to history, he withdrew from the race, which he announced in a rather cryptic statement that was published in The Dallas Weekly Herald:

BRECKINRIDGE, Dallas co., Jan. 7 '61
Fellow Citizens of Dallas County:
Holding the welfare and good of my country to be superior and paramount to my own aspirations, I beg leave to withdraw my name as a candidate for a seat in the convention to be held in Austin, on the 4th Monday of the present month, believing that this course will be for the good of the cause I have been advocating for the last two weeks, I hope my friends will heartily concur in the course I have taken.
Yours Respectfully,
JOHN B. FLOYD

When the news came that on February 23, 1861, that the three Dallas County representatives at the secession convention at Austin-E. P. Nicholson, Pleasant Taylor and W. S J. Adams-had voted in favor of leaving the Union, along with most of the delegates from other counties, there is no reason to believe, despite his sudden and mysterious withdrawal as a candidate, that John B. Floyd other than approved. In light of his Christmas Day statement, his history of opposing abolitionism in Kentucky, and his status as a slave-owner, although it's possible, it seems unlikely that he had a sudden change of heart.

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