William Friend McMahon
William Friend McMahon, who went by Friend, was born on 25 October 1776 in Ohio County, Virginia, in the upper Ohio valley near what is now Wellsburg, West Virginia. His parents were William McMahon and Ann Cox, who had married in Hampshire County in 1774. His father, by then a major, was killed defending Fort Recovery in the Ohio country in 1794, when Friend was seventeen. In the Brooke County court Friend led his brothers and sisters in a suit as "Friend McMahan et al., heirs at law of William McMahan, deceased."
He went down the Ohio to Kentucky, where his mother's family had founded Cox's Station on Cox's Creek near Bardstown. In January 1798, in Nelson County, he married his cousin Peggy, Margaret Leona Cox, born there on 20 August 1781. In 1803 he was a lieutenant in the 27th Regiment of the Nelson County militia, and he was in the Breckinridge County courts about 1804 and 1805.
From Kentucky the family moved to Smith County, Tennessee, and then down the rivers to the Southwest frontier. Their daughter Margaret was born in 1815 in what became Claiborne Parish, Louisiana, by her marker, and Hester Ann was born in 1820 in Hempstead County, then part of Arkansas Territory, on the Red River. In Arkansas Friend was ordained an exhorter, a lay preacher, in the Methodist church by the Rev. William Stevenson, the circuit rider who carried Methodism into Arkansas and north Louisiana. By the 1830s the family was settled in Claiborne Parish, Louisiana. In 1837 the federal land office at Ouachita issued patents to Friend McMahon of Claiborne and to his son Friend McMahon Junior.
From there the McMahons crossed into Texas, which was then a republic. Land was surveyed for the McMahons in Newton County and in Kaufman County. His sons William, Isaac and James are said to have served in the Texas Revolution and to have received grants for it. Daughters married into the Scott, Stewart and Irvine families of Newton County.
In November 1850 the census taker found him in Newton County, 74 years old, a clergyman of the Methodist Episcopal church, born in Virginia, with Margaret, 69, born in Kentucky. His son James McMahon, 32, lived next door with a family that included a Friend Wilson and a Margarett Leona. Four houses on lived his daughter Hester Ann with her husband James M. Scott and their children.
Margaret died on 24 August 1858. Friend died in October 1862, in his eighty-sixth year, near Jamestown in Newton County. They are buried in the Farrs Chapel Cemetery. A later granite marker reads "William Friend McMahon, born Ohio Co., Va., Oct. 25, 1776, died Oct. 11, 1862. Wife Margaret Cox McMahon, born Nelson Co., Ky., Aug. 20, 1781, died Aug. 24, 1858."
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Cite: Heirology, "William Friend McMahon (1776-1862)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/william-friend-mcmahon-1776-1862-f186cf.