Ancestors

Samuel Gibbs Leatherman

Samuel Gibbs Leatherman was born on 18 April 1799 in Shelby County, Kentucky. His memorial names his parents as John L. Leatherman and Elizabeth Graves, called Betsy.

He married three times. The name of his first wife is not known; she was the mother of his eldest daughter, Themira Tabitha, born in 1827. In 1829 he married Hellen Lois Koonce, a Tennessee woman born at Lebanon in 1810. By 1830 they were living in Claiborne Parish, in the hill country of north Louisiana, where their daughter Adeline Amanda was born that year.

Samuel and Hellen raised a large family. Their children were Adeline Amanda, 1830, who married William Jasper Johnson; Sarah Ann, 1832, and Elizabeth Caroline, 1834, who both married Pruetts; Francis Marion, called Frank, 1836; Martha Ann, who married a Wilson; Eunice Ann, 1841, who married first a McDaniel and then a Raney; Charlotte Jane, called Lottie, 1844, who married a Wallace; Jasper Newton, born and buried in 1847; Jasper Gibbs, 1849; and Andrew Jackson, called Jack, 1853.

In 1854 the family moved west to Texas and settled on Donahoe Creek in Bell County, north of where Bartlett now stands. Settlers had been on the creek since the late 1840s. Samuel opened the first store there, a mercantile that sold the dry goods, tools and groceries a farming settlement could not make for itself. He gave the land for the community cemetery. In 1880 he gave land for a schoolhouse, and the schoolhouse doubled as the church until 1911. He also brought the first doctor to Donahoe.

Hellen died on 16 January 1879. That same year Samuel, then about eighty, married Sidney Priscilla Irvin, a widow born in 1843 whose earlier husbands had been a Parker and a Strickland.

Samuel Gibbs Leatherman died on 3 March 1888, aged 88, and was buried in the Donahoe Cemetery on the land he had given. His stone is carved with an open Bible and reads "Our Father, S. G. Leatherman, born Apr. 18, 1799, died Mar. 3, 1888." A state historical marker for the Donahoe community stands near the cemetery and names him as the man who opened its first store.

If Samuel Gibbs Leatherman is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Samuel Gibbs Leatherman (1799-1888)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/samuel-gibbs-leatherman-1799-1888-869f5b.