Ancestors

Dr. John William Kuykendall

John William Kuykendall was born in Kentucky on 26 December 1798, by the date his family kept; other accounts give 1797 or 1796. The 1850 and 1860 censuses both give Kentucky. A later memorial says Cookeville, Tennessee, a town not founded until the 1850s. His nephews, the sons of his brother James, named him as a son of Matthew Kuykendall and Nancy Johnson.

His father later lived in Franklin County, Tennessee. About 1824 he married Mary Key, called Polly, a Tennessee girl born about 1803. Their first children were born in Tennessee: Owen in December 1824, Nancy Ann on 22 November 1825, Rachel Jane about 1829, Martha Ann Elizabeth about 1832 and William Curtis about 1834.

He was a doctor of the Thomsonian system. It was a popular medicine of the day, built on Samuel Thomson's herbal remedies rather than bleeding and mineral drugs. His nephew W. J. Kuykendall remembered that "two of my uncles, John and Jacob, were doctors practicing the Thompsonian system."

In the mid-1830s the family moved to northwest Mississippi. Mary and Rebecca were born there about 1837 and 1839, and John P., called Jack, in 1845. His father Matthew died in DeSoto County in 1841, and John bought at the estate sale. His daughter Nancy married Hiram A. Grimes in DeSoto County on 20 November 1845.

About 1845 he took the family to Texas, to Rusk County in the east of the new state. His brother James came too. A niece's family wrote that they "came to Texas in the '40s, settled at Harmony Hill, Rusk county." In the census taken there in 1850 he was 52, born in Kentucky. His household held Mary, their children William, Mary, Rebecca and John, and a Nancy, 22, born in Tennessee, with a small George born in Texas. That was his daughter Nancy, already a widow, and her son George Grimes.

He held a Texas land certificate for 640 acres and built up a large place at Harmony Hill; a county history calls it a thousand-acre plantation. His gravestone says that he and Mary came to Texas in 1845, bought land, and on returning in 1852 gave land for the town site of Harmony Hill, where a street was named for him. He also gave the first two acres of the Harmony Hill Cemetery. His neighbors were the Dollahites, and the two families married into each other again and again. Four of Wiley Dollahite's children married Kuykendalls. In 1864 a Dollahite son's will asked that his motherless children be raised by "my Father Wiley Dollahite and the Father of my late wife John Kuykendall."

Nancy married her second husband, William Asbury Miles, at Harmony Hill in November 1851. Family tradition says Miles hired on with John as a hand so he could see more of her.

Mary died in 1879. John appears on the 1879 Rusk County tax roll and died about 1881. On 23 September 1882 his heirs sold land "from the estate of John Kuykendall, dec'd." The deed names J. P. Kuykendall and his wife Martha, Nancy Miles, Ann Calloway, John, W. H., D. D. and J. O. Dollahite, John W. Kuykendall and Jas. W. Kuykendall. He and Mary are buried in the Harmony Hill Cemetery, under a book-shaped stone that records their gift of the land.

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Cite: Heirology, "Dr. John William Kuykendall (1798-1881)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/dr-john-william-kuykendall-1798-1881-764934.