History of Texas, Together with a Biographical History of Milam, Williamson, Bastrop, Travis, Lee and Burleson Counties. Page: 573

HISTORY OF TEXAS.

On his mother's side Mr. Jenkins' people
came from Virginia. His grandfather, Herndon
Green, was born in Virginia, and for
many years was a resident of Tennessee, being
a member of one of the largest and most
prominent families of that State. His brother,
Judge Nathan Green, was a distinguished
jurist and a legal educator, and in addition to
having served as Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court of that State, probably prepared more
young men for thle profession of the law than
any other man of his day and generation in
the Southwest. He was the father of th3 lamented
General Toni Green, who was long
prominent in Texas history. Herndon Green
was a soldier in the war of 1812, a planter of
wealth and a man of sterling character.
James N. Jenkins, the father of William
H. of this article was born in Winnsboro,
South Carolina, but was reared in middle
Tennessee, whither his parents moved during
his childhood. He married Susan A. Green
of Franklin county, Tennessee, about 1837,
and eleven years later in 1848, died at the
early age of thirty-six. His widow and three
sons, William H., Jesse T. and Alpheus G.,
were taken into the family of Mrs. Jenkins'
father, by whom they were brought at a later
date to Texas. It was in 1854 that the first
move was made by Herndon Green to establish
himself on Texas soil. -He came out
that year at the head of a party made up of
himself, his son Stephen T. and his three
grandsons, the Jenkins brothers, with about
thirty slaves, and he stopped for about one
year at LaGrange. In 1855 he moved to
Burleson county, where lie purchased land
and settled. The same year the remainder of
the family was brought out, and a plantation
opened where le located about two miles
north of Caldwell. There he spent the remainder
of his life, dying in 1878, at the age

of eighty-eight. Mrs. Jenkins died in this
county about ten years later, aged beventytwo.
Jesse T. Jenkins (lied here in 1881,
from the effects of disease contracted in the
Confederate army diriing the late war. William
H1. and Alpheus G. are still residents of
the county.
William H. Jenkins was born at Winchester,
Tennessee, March 31, 1838. He was
sixteen when lie was brought to Texas. After
three or four years spent in this county, he
was sent on account of ill health in 1859, to
southwest Texas, where he secured a position
I as clerk in the mercantile house of Ulrich &
Jones, of San Antonio. In 1860, he went in
the interest of his employers to Parras, Mexico,
where they had a branch establishment,
and was there in their employ when the late
war opened. He returned to Texas at the
opening of hostilities, and offered himself for
service in the Confederate army. iHe was accepted
and put on frontier duty under General
Henry McCulloch, and spent the first
eight months of the war in service against
the Corranche Indians along the Pecos,
Neuces, Rio Grande, and the head waters of
the Colorado river. He then returned to central
Texas, and in October, 1861, enlisted in
Company G, Eighth Texas Cavalry (Terry's
Rangers), with which he went at once to the
forces operating in Tennessee and Kentucky.
Beginning with the engagments at Woodsonville,
Kentucky, where General Terry fell, he
was in the service continuously until the surrender,
taking part in all the campaigns and
engagements in which his command participated,
the last being the fight on Haw river,
near Guilford Court House, North Carolina,
on April 14, 1865. He entered the service
as a private; was later made Comm nissary upon
petition of his regiment, and served as Commissary
during the greater part of the war,

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