Capt. Robert Calvin Hendry
Robert Calvin Hendry, known as Cab, was born on 23 February 1849 near Jasper, in Hamilton County, Florida. His parents were Robert Hendry and Zilla Ann Moody, who had moved there from Georgia the year before. His older brothers and sisters were John Wright, born in 1836; William Francis, who drowned in the Alapaha River as a boy; James Madison, called Boss, born in 1839; Ellen Catherine, later Mrs. Whidden, born in 1842; Amanda, who died young; and Charles F., born in 1846.
In December 1861 the family sold out at Jasper for $2,100 and moved south to Fort Green, in Manatee County. Both his parents died there in a smallpox epidemic early in 1863, his mother on 16 January and his father on 3 February. Cab was thirteen.
He joined the Union army before he was sixteen. On 14 January 1865 he enlisted at Fort Myers as a private in Company B of the 2nd Florida Cavalry, a United States regiment raised from Florida Unionists and men who had left the Confederacy. His brothers Boss and Charles had joined the same company the summer before. He was discharged at Tallahassee on 29 November 1865.
On 19 January 1868, near present-day Wauchula, the Rev. Cross married him to Nancy Virginia McEwen, a daughter of the Methodist preacher William Penn McEwen. In the early 1870s they moved from Fort Green to the Joshua Creek settlement, also called Davidson, south of the later town of Arcadia. Cab raised cattle. He registered two marks and brands in Manatee County in October 1871, and in 1873 he was taxed on one horse and 120 cattle. In later years he bred fine cattle and was said to own about 2,000 acres.
He was postmaster of Davidson in 1880, and he sponsored the opening of a post office at Arcadia in 1883. In October 1880 he was one of the three trustees of Mt. Moriah Baptist Church who bought the ground for Joshua Creek Cemetery. His father-in-law died at his house in July 1883. In 1887 Arcadia became the seat of the new DeSoto County, and by 1900 Cab was one of its county commissioners.
He and Nancy had thirteen children over twenty-one years, from William Judson, called Judd, in 1868 to Newton Calvin in 1889. Two sons died as infants and a third, Francis A., at sixteen.
In 1890 he applied for a federal pension for his Union service, saying rheumatism left him partly unable to earn a living by manual labor. He was awarded eight dollars a month. A cabinet photograph of him survives from a studio in Arcadia, marked "A. B. Cross, Artist, Arcadia, Florida." It shows a grey-haired man with a heavy moustache, in a dark coat and a bow tie.
He had been in bad health for months. In late March 1904 he travelled to Atlanta for an operation for appendicitis. He died five days after it, on 3 April 1904, aged fifty-five. His body was brought home to Arcadia on the Monday and buried on the Tuesday at Joshua Creek Cemetery, under a tall marble obelisk. Seven weeks later his daughter Rhoda married Terrell Elmer Fielder, the sheriff of DeSoto County. In 1906 his son John P. Hendry, as guardian of the two youngest boys, Harry and Calvin, asked the county judge for leave to sell their share of two town lots in Arcadia. His widow Nancy drew a widow's pension from 1911 and died in March 1914.
Cab was a second cousin of Capt. Francis Asbury Hendry, the cattleman for whom Hendry County is named. Their grandfathers, John Hendry Sr. and William Hendry, were brothers from New Hanover County, North Carolina. Cab named one of his sons Francis A. Hendry.
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Cite: Heirology, "Capt. Robert Calvin Hendry (1849-1904)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/capt-robert-calvin-hendry-1849-1904-15bb4a.