(1820 – 1896)
Rachel Jane Carson was one of the youngest members of Stephen F. Austin’s “Old 300” Anglo settlers in Texas, is one of five prominent women in local history.
She was born in Catahoula Parish, Louisiana, on February 4, 1820, the middle child of William Clark Carson and Catherine Jane Patterson Carson. As a small child of only four, Rachel and her family – which included her older brother John Patterson Carson and baby brother William – made the long trek across untamed territory in a covered wagon from Louisiana to Texas in 1824.
Her father was born in New Castle County, Delaware, in 1790 and was a private in the Indiana military in the War of 1812, which was fought between the United States and Great Britain for three years, primarily over disagreements over trade, western expansion and Native American policy. Rachel’s parents had wed in Posey County, Indiana, on December 17, 1815, after the conclusion of the War of 1812.
William Carson had been struggling with ill health living in swampy Louisiana and his wife Catherine thought the Texas climate might improve her husband’s health. She was wrong. William died after being in Stephen F. Austin’s Texas colony only a few months. As new Anglo settlers in Mexico, the Carson family was given 3,706 acres in what is today known as Brazoria County, and another 722 acres in neighboring Matagorda County. William and “Caty” Carson’s grant of fertile land was between the San Bernard River and Bay Prairie.
William Clark Carson appears in Stephen F. Austin’s Register of Families known as “The Old 300” in an entry in the Father of Texas’s ledger dated July 1, 1826.
Catherine Jane Patterson Carson, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John Patterson, moved her small family into the town of Columbia following her husband’s death. She ran a boarding house that catered primarily to students at the Thomas J. Pilgrim school that operated in Columbia between 1831 and 1836.
Rachel’s older brother, John Patterson Carson, born around 1816, was a soldier in Texas’s fight for independence from Mexican rule. He died on Christmas Eve in 1856 while Rachel and John’s younger brother, William J. Carson, passed away in his early twenties on May 20, 1847.
Rachel’s mother entered into a business partnership with Ammon Underwood in 1838. They operated a boarding house in Marion (present day East Columbia). According to his diary, Ammon Underwood came to Texas in 1834 “to gratify a wild and rambling notion,” according to the book, Historic East Columbia on the Brazos, a 2009 publication of the First Capitol Historic Foundation, Inc.
Rachel was only 18 when her mother went into business at Bell’s Landing with Ammon Underwood. And even though her mother’s business partner was 10 years older than Rachel, they became romantically involved and married on January 7, 1839, in the house on the banks of the Brazos River that Ammon had bought from Thomas W. Nibbs the year before. The Underwoods enlarged Nibbs’ hand-hewn cedar structure, practically doubling the size and adding a second story with the original intent to use the enlarged home as a boarding house. But instead, it became the home of the newlyweds.
The historic Ammon Underwood House in East Columbia was built in 1835 and has been relocated several times
The following year, Rachel’s widowed mother Catherine married Gail Borden, a widower himself, and by 1840 the Underwood house, which is today listed on the National Register of Historic Places and remains the oldest of the six houses included in the East Columbia Historic District, was home not only to Ammon and Rachel Underwood but also to Catherine and Gail Borden (the father of the man with the same name who later invented the canned milk process).
Ammon and Rachel Underwood were the parents of seven children, only four of which were lucky enough to live into adulthood. Rachel’s children who died young, included William, born in 1841, Mary Catherine, born in 1843, and Lendol, born in 1855. Lendol Underwood died at eight years old in 1863.
Sometime after Ammon’s death in 1887, Rachel moved from East Columbia to Galveston where she lived out her life with her daughter, Ella Borden, who was also a widow.
The Galveston Daily News informed its readers that the body of Rachel Underwood would be “taken to Columbia this morning for interment. There survive her four children and twelve grandchildren, most of whom were with her in her dying moments. A lifelong Christian and for more than half a century a zealous member of the Presbyterian church, she was fully prepared for the final summons. She was loved by all who knew her and always obtained a host of friends wherever she might be.”
Rachel was laid to rest at historic Columbia Cemetery beside the grave of her husband. The children that survived Rachel and Ammon were Joseph Patterson Underwood (1845-1925), Laura Jane Underwood Diggs (1850-1938), Ella Harriet Underwood Borden (1852-1912) and John Carson Underwood (1863-1926).
Gupton, Robert Tracy (October 25, 2023) “Rachel Jane Carson Underwood” Facebook – Columbia Historical Museum
Rachel Jane Carson Underwood is buried to the right of husband, Ammon Underwood’s, historical marker.