Roxana Price
Roxana Price was born on 8 March 1802, by the stone over her grave in the Texas State Cemetery. The census of 1850 gives her birthplace as North Carolina. On 20 December 1820, in South Carolina, she married Benjamin Franklin Bryant, a young man from Wilkes County, Georgia. Their eldest son, Jesse, was born in Georgia on 10 September 1821, nine months after the wedding. Accounts of the family name her other children as Mary Frances, Barnett Strickland, called Bud, Jane Elizabeth, Susan Evelyn and Louisa Melvina.
Her marriage was not a quiet one. In 1829 her husband petitioned the State of Georgia to legitimize William Parker, his son by a woman named Rebecca Parker, and in 1831 he and Rebecca were charged with adultery. When he left Georgia for Texas in 1834 he took both households with him. They settled first on Palo Gaucho Bayou in Sabine County, near the Louisiana line. In the spring of 1836 her husband raised a company of volunteers and led it at San Jacinto. Afterward the family went west to the Little River, where he built the fort called Bryant Station in 1838 and a house near it in 1845. Roxana lived in that house for the rest of her life.
The census taker reached the house on 1 November 1850. Benjamin was 50, a farmer with land worth $10,000. Roxana was 48. Living with them were Napoleon L., 19, born in Georgia, and Susan A., 12, Eliza A., 10, Louisa M., 8, Samuel H., 8, and Rebecca, 5, all born in Texas. Other accounts name several of those children as the children of Rebecca Parker. The married children lived a few doors away: Jesse with his wife Mary and three small children, Barney with his young wife Jemima, and Jane with her husband Daniel McKay.
Benjamin died in March 1857 and Roxana kept the land. On 28 January 1861 she deeded part of his headright on the north side of Little River to "my son in law, M G Rainey and my daughter Mary F Rainey," out of "the love and affection I have" for them. She kept the use and the rents of it for her lifetime, so the gift would take effect only at her death.
She died in November 1874, a widow of seventeen years. The Belton Journal reported that she died on the tenth, and her stone gives the nineteenth. She was buried the next day near Little River, beside her husband in the rose garden by their home. On the way home from the burial the horses ran away and overturned the wagon, and all nine people in it were hurt. Her son-in-law John McKay broke his leg. In 1931 the State of Texas moved Roxana and Benjamin to the State Cemetery in Austin. Her stone there reads "Wife of B. Bryant," and the back carries a verse: "Rest mother, rest in quiet sleep, while friends in sorrow o'er thee weep. The sweet remembrances of the just shall flourish when they sleep in dust."
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Cite: Heirology, "Roxana Price (1802-1874)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/roxana-price-1802-1874-4679ba.