History Across Generations

Considering Family and the State

It was the winter of 2021, and my family was clearing out my grandfather’s home. It was a nice ranch house, built on a hill overlooking the over 800 acres of his cattle ranch. Ken Briggs Sr., or “grandaddy”, had passed away in a terrible coda to the year of COVID. He did not die of COVID but of a stubborn refusal to continue a life dictated by a dialysis machine. You are not a man of the Briggs family without this stubborn streak that sometimes leans into the irrational or self-destructive.

Considering his family, and the circumstances that brought them to Texas, this personality trait makes more sense. We discovered this from a gently used binder casually resting on a built-in bookcase. Inset on the inside front cover were three pictures.

One of these was a picture of Elias Briggs, the first member of my clan with the Briggs surname to arrive in Texas, surrounded by his five sons. Elias’ birth year is given as 1839, so we estimated it was taken sometime in the 1890s. It was taken in the town of Coleman, TX, within an hour’s drive of the geographical center of Texas.

Coleman is surrounded by rough country. It is 100 miles west of the Balcones fault line where the rolling, rich prairies of the gulf plain of central Texas give way to rugged hills, to the high plains…