O Connor Ranch Texas

O'CONNOR, THOMAS (1819–1887). Thomas O'Connor, cattle rancher, was created in County Wexford, Ireland, in 1819 and sailed to Texas with his uncle James Power in 1834. On September 28, 1834, the Mexican government granted him 4, 428 acres as a settler into the Power and Hewetson colony. He aided the surveyors in platting Refugio in 1834. Another 12 months he joined the Tx cause against Mexico. After arriving in Goliad on October 10, 1835, he was among the first to bolster La Bahía by joining the volunteers commanded by Philip Dimmitt. With John O'Brien, another nephew of energy, he was in charge of the oxcart evacuation of San Patricio, Refugio, and Victoria purchased by Dimmitt. O'Connor ended up being among signers of the Goliad Declaration of Independence and was later a part of R. J. Calder's organization. At age seventeen, he had been the youngest guy to participate in the battle of San Jacinto.

After the war he gone back to Refugio County and resumed their trade of earning saddletrees; from sale of these he made sufficient cash to produce himself with ponies. In October 1838 he married Mary Fagan, whose dowry of some cattle and ponies, as well as land issued O'Connor as their colonial claim and their armed forces solution, became the nucleus for the vast land and cattle holdings he a short while later owned. O'Connor was one of the group of settlers who drove out of the Karankawa Indians after their particular attack at Kemper's Bluff regarding the reduced Guadalupe River in 1845. He won a contested election for commissioner of Refugio County in 1848. In 1873 he sold their herd for $140, 000 and purchased land, that has been then affordable. He had been the initial Refugio County rancher to fence with barbed wire. He ultimately obtained above 500, 000 fenced acres and 100, 000 cattle in Refugio, Aransas, Goliad, San Patricio, McMullen, and La Salle counties. Their estate, respected at $4.5 million at the time of his death, had been reportedly the greatest specific land and cattle holding in Texas. O'Connor has also been an incorporator of this Texas and Pacific Railroad Company.

He had been more esteemed in his life time, but for their private worth, sobriety, and integrity compared to their wide range. He'd no formal knowledge, but their keen head and great wisdom made him stick out as a leader. He aided settle the significant concern of assessment of cattle for taxes, including, in P.P. Courts v. Thomas O'Connor, where Tx Supreme Court held that the residence and head office of farm home fixed the jurisdiction for evaluation, therefore eliminating the two fold tests of cattle varying in 2 or more counties. O'Connor's spouse passed away in 1843, leaving him to increase three young sons, including Dennis M. O'Connorqv. A long time later he married Helen Shelly. O'Connor passed away at their farm near Refugio on October 16, 1887, and had been hidden in the family members burial ground nearby the head office ranch residence on San Antonio River.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

James Cox, Historical and Biographical Record associated with Cattle business (2 vols., St. Louis: Woodward and Tiernan Printing, 1894, 1895; rpt., with an introduction by J. Frank Dobie, New York: Antiquarian, 1959). Lewis E. Daniell, forms of effective Men in Tx (Austin: Von Boeckmann, 1890). Hobart Huson, Refugio: an extensive History of Refugio County from Aboriginal days to 1953 (2 vols., Woodsboro, Texas: Rooke Foundation, 1953, 1955). Kathryn Stoner O'Connor, The Presidio La Bahía del Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga, 1721 to 1846 (Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1966).