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- "The son of an Alabama sharecropper, Thomas Jefferson Taylor had GTT [Gone To Texas] -- to Harrison County in East Texas, an area reminiscent, in the rutted red clay of its low hills, in its fetid swamps and stagnant, muddy bayous lined with the gnarled roots of giant, moss-draped cypresses, and in the servitude in which it kept its Negro sharecroppers (who made up half its population), of the Old South from which he had come. And Thomas Jefferson Taylor might have been type-cast as an Old South small-town furnishing merchant. He had opened a truly general store ('T. J. Taylor—Dealer in Everything'), and then another, and then a cotton gin, and then another. A tall (six-foot-two), fat, ham-handed man, loud and coarse, 'he never talked about anything but making money,' and he was tireless in its pursuit. He rose at four a.m. to open his stores, and, after a long day behind the counter, returned home at sundown to spend a long evening toting up accounts and checking the dates on IOU's. During harvest time, he never left his gins until the last wagonload of cotton had been baled, but even if the baler didn't stop until one or two a.m., when he went home, he went home to his ledgers. Tireless and ruthless: he loaned money to tenants and sharecroppers at 10 percent interest, and his tactics with those who fell behind on their payments led Gene Lassater, who grew up near his home, to say, 'The Negroes were kept in peonage by Mr. Taylor. He would furnish them with supplies and let them have land to work, then take their land if they didn't pay. When I first saw how he operated, I thought the days of slavery weren't over yet.' (His own son, Lady Bird's brother, says: 'He looked on Negroes pretty much as hewers of wood and drawers of water.' White men called him 'Cap'n Taylor'; Negroes called him 'Mister Boss.') He bought more land, and more—until by the time he married Minnie Lee Patillo of Alabama, he owned 18,000 acres, was 'Mister Boss' of the whole northern portion of Harrison County, and lived in the county's most imposing residence, the 'Brick House,' a two-story white antebellum structure, with columns in front, that sat on a red clay hill about a mile outside Karnack, a town with about one hundred residents that had been named (by someone who couldn't spell) after the temples of Egypt." [The Path to Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson I by Robert A. Caro. New York: Vintage, 1990.]
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Nielsen Hayden genealogy
1874 - 1960 (86 years)
[1, 2]