08/15/2026
We have amazing historical homes here in San Augustine, Texas. Pictured is the old Chinaberry House which was built about 1830.
This old house which is still standing and which is a Texas Historical Site has a unique story to it.
It starts not with a house, but with a piece of ground.
In 1831, a young Georgia man named Samuel S. Davis came to Texas with his widowed mother, Nancy Davis, and his brothers and sisters. He was 21. Texas was still Mexico.
He fought at the Battle of Nacogdoches in 1832, he served as a private in Captain John M. Bradley's company in the Texas Revolution in 1836, and when the fighting was over he did what a lot of those young veterans did - he went to San Augustine County and claimed land because San Augustine was the gateway to Texas. Remember, the Alamo was attacked in 1836.
This tract - just east of town, on the high ground above the old road - became Samuel's. And on it, about 1830-1831, someone planted chinaberry trees. Fast-growing, shade-giving, Southern. You plant chinaberries when you intend to stay.
But Samuel didn't stay in the house at first. He was busy becoming San Augustine. He was elected to the House of Representatives of the Fourth Congress of the Republic of Texas, representing San Augustine from November 1839 to February 1840. In 1843 he was elected sheriff - the second and last sheriff under the Republic - and kept being reelected.
So who lived in the little house under the chinaberry trees?
His younger brother, Alexander M. Davis, worked the place. And from 1835 to 1847, it was occupied by Sam's sister, Mary R. Davis Willson and her family.
Think about those dates for a minute. 1835 to 1847. The Willsons were in that house when the Texas Revolution broke out. When the Runaway Scrape happened. When San Augustine was the political heart of East Texas. When men met at Washington-on-the-Brazos and declared independence. Mary was raising a family in a dog-trot or double-pen cabin with chinaberry shade, while her brother was in Congress and her other brother was clearing that same farm.
This was a family compound. Across the road is what we now call the Davis-Sexton Cemetery. That was their family burial ground. The living on one side of the road, the dead on the other. That's how East Texas was settled.
In 1845, the younger brother Alexander died. In his will, he bequeathed his interest in the place to Sam. Sam was now the patriarch. He had married Mary T. Price in San Augustine on February 21, 1845, and he was starting his own family. That same year, when President Anson Jones' vice-president Kenneth L. Anderson died suddenly, Sam bought the Anderson estate on the southeast border of the county and moved there for good.
So the chinaberry place became surplus.
In 1847, Mary Willson and her husband decided to go west - to Tyler County, where new land was opening up. And Samuel sold the old homeplace.
The buyer was Dr. B.F. Sharp.
Sharp was a physician, a planter, a man of standing. He and his descendants would hold that land for generations. The Sharps married into the Garretts, the Shindlers - East Texas families who stayed. One of those Sharp children was Lafayette Sharp, who married in San Augustine in 1873. Lafayette's son was Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Sharp, born 1877. Frank's daughter was Kathryn Ella Sharp.
Kathryn Ella Sharp married Allan Abner Bailey.
Their daughter, born in Galveston on July 22, 1943, was Kathryn Ann Bailey - who the world would know as Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison.
So when you stand at the Chinaberry House, you are standing at a hinge point:
A house built about 1830 on a Mexican land grant, shaded by trees planted to claim permanence.
A house that sheltered a family through the entire life of the Republic of Texas.
A house that went from soldier-legislator Samuel S. Davis - who died in November 1859 and is believed to be buried right across the road in Davis-Sexton - to his sister Mary Willson, to Dr. Sharp, to a family that would eventually produce a United States Senator.
It is now a Texas State Antiquities Landmark, but it never stopped being what it was - a family home, with a cemetery across the road, keeping the family close.
If the chinaberries could talk, they would tell you everyone who left and everyone who came back.
