Nesbitt Memorial Library Journal
Mrs. Fannie A. D. Darden, daughter of Mosely Baker, a poetess, writer and artist painter
of renown, lived here.
Fannie Amelia Dickson Darden was born September 13, 1829. Her
father, Moseley Baker, was, among other things, a captain in the Texan
army at San Jacinto. She married William John Darden in Houston on
January 26, 1847 (see transcribed records from Moseley Baker Bible in
Darden Family File, Archives of the Nesbitt Memorial Library, Columbus,
Texas). She and her husband apparently arrived in Colorado County in
the 1850s, for they are listed, with their ten year old son, as residents
of Columbus on the 1860 census (see Eighth Census of the United States
(1860) Colorado County, Texas). Their earliest known activity in the
county was the purchase of a lot in Columbus on July 25, 1853 (see
Deed Book H, page 601, Office of the County Clerk, Colorado County,
Texas). Her poetry appeared frequently in the Columbus newspaper, The
Colorado Citizen, in the 1880s. In early 1883, she joined the staff of the
American Sketch Book, a magazine published in Austin (see The
Colorado Citizen, March 8, 1883). She died on January 3, 1890 (see
Records of St. John's Episcopal Church, Archives of the Nesbitt
Memorial Library, Columbus, Texas). Her poetry was included in Sam
Houston Dixon's The Poets and Poetry of Texas (Austin: Sam H. Dixon
& Co., 1885) and in Ella Hutchins Steuart's Gems From a Texas Quarry
(New Orleans: J. S. Rivers, 1885). She was known to early twentieth
century Texas school children through her poem "Yokonah," which was
featured Davis Foute Eagleton's school book, Texas Literature Reader
(Dallas: The Southern Publishing Company, 1919).
Jesse H. Johnson, of Columbus, filled the post of United States consul at Swansea in
Wales, Coaticook in Canada, Matamoras in Mexico, Santos in Brazil and Saskatchewan
in Canada.
According to a brief biographical sketch in the October 22, 1889 special
edition of The Colorado Citizen, Jesse H. Johnson was born in what is
now West Virginia on September 6, 1843 and came to Texas in March
1868. He was appointed sheriff of Colorado County by Special Order
114, on May 14, 1869 (see RG 401, File 860-25, Texas State Archives,
Austin). He resigned on December 30, 1869 (see Special Order 306, RG
401, File 861-11, Texas State Archives, Austin). Whatever problems
he might have had adjusting to life in Columbus as a Yankee immigrant
were probably mitigated to a large degree by his marriage to Laura Glenn
Harbert on February 4, 1874. Her father was a respected attorney,
Edward Musgrove Glenn, and her first husband, John W. Harbert, a
member of a prominent plantation family (see Marriage Book D, page 124
and Marriage Book E, page 342, Office of the County Clerk, Colorado
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