Charles Lege

Confederate veteran

Interment source:
Marie Blucher, Librarian, La Retama Public Library, ca. 1940
As cited in:
Marrow, Mary, Bay View Cemetery. Corpus Christi: La Retama Public Library, 1962.

Charles Lege Headstone

Photo Credit: Rosa G. Gonzales

1. News Item

“Two Pioneers Citizens Pass Awayâ€

The Caller chronicles the death of Charles L. Lege, a native of Germany, the pioneer dying of pneumonia in this city on November 10, 1890, age 59 years.  Deceased came to Nueces County from New Braunfels in 1878 was elected county judge.  At the time of his demise he held a position with the mercantile and banking house of N. Gussett.  The other death reported was that of Mrs. Clymer in her eighty-fifth year, at the home of Judge J. C. Russell, her son-in-law, on Water street.

Corpus Christi Caller-Times, Section 2, Nov. 16, 1930 p. 4 col. 2-5.  This selection is from col. 4 and is part of an abstract of articles taking from old Callers.   This one claims to quote from the Caller of Nov. 15, 1890 (40 Years Ago).

Research and transcription: Michael A. Howell

 

2. Biography

Charles Lege, as he was known in Texas, was the first family member by the name of Lege to live in Texas and was my great, great grandfather. He started life in Germany as Johann Carl Ludwig Lege. Much of what we know about him—and certainly most of the feeling that we have for his personality, education, ambitions, values, and his relationships with friends and family—comes from a group of letters, all written in an exquisite hand. Five letters that he wrote to his wife (of which two were written to her as his fiancĂ©e), between 1853 and 1865 are now in the possession of our family. Twelve letters that Charles Lege wrote between 1853 and 1869 to a fellow German-Texan named John Zirvas Leyendecker are now in the Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. There is, as well, in the Leyendecker archive at the Center for American History, a rough draft of a fascinating letter written in 1854 to Charles Lege from his friend John Z. Leyendecker, which tells more, perhaps, about life on the Texas frontier at the time than it does about either of the two men.

Further information about Charles Lege and his descendants comes from photographs, from Confederate records, from family tradition and recollection, from genealogical information gathered by my mother and by others in the family (especially E. E. “Gene†Bartlett of San Antonio) as well as by professional genealogists Eva Schubert of Germany, Florence Holman of Corsicana and Elsie K. White of Dallas.

In the “family recollections†department, perhaps the most valuable is a brief chronology of Charles Lege’s life in Texas that was dictated around 1920 by Charles’ widow, Ellen Hill Lege, to their daughter Ida Lege Foster in Waco. Interestingly enough, Ellen failed to mention the period of time from July 1864 to the end of May 1865 that Charles spent along the Rio Grande merchandizing cotton and other items. She probably detested this long time that he spent away from her and their children in San Antonio. His letters to her and to John Z. Leyendecker from Rio Grande City fill us in, to some degree, on this part of Charles’ life.

Charles Lege was born on January 26, 1831, in Bierbergen, Germany, a village about twenty miles south-east of the city of Hanover. His father, Johann Melchior Conrad Lege, was a medical doctor and Lanchirugus (area surgeon). His mother's maiden name was Johanne Friedericke Christiane BrĂĽhl. (Some BrĂĽhl cousins also came to Texas and settled in Llano and Rockport.) Charles was his parents' second child and first son. His sisters, Louisa (Luise) Lege (Hograver) and Wilhelmine Lege (Hartung), remained in Germany (in Hildesheim and Bremen respectively) but continued to correspond with Charles in Texas.

In 1848, when revolutions and civil uprisings broke out in France, Italy, Austria, and Germany, many people left Europe to escape the extreme political unrest. Charles Lege, then seventeen, immigrated that year to the United States to avoid compulsory conscription into the armed services in Hanover. He left from the port of Bremen in September 1848 with his friend Carl Herbst of Hildesheim (Herbst was later a founder of Comfort, Texas). They traveled for six weeks on a three-masted sailing vessel named “Schiller†and docked at New Orleans. From there they took a smaller vessel, a steamer, into Powderhorn Bay to Indianola (Carlshaven), Texas and from there, they went by ox-drawn wagon to New Braunfels.

From November 1848 to January 1849, Carl or “Charles†Lege lived in New Braunfels with Hermann Frederich Seele (a prominent educator, district clerk, writer, and cultural leader there; see The New Handbook of Texas, vol. 5, p. 963) and worked at farming. He then took a job as a clerk in New Braunfels with a merchant named Moses Campbell.

The 1850 Federal census (p. 228, # 301), which was taken on September 30, shows Charles L Lege, age 19, living in the house of Andrew J Leslie, a thirty-four year-old barkeeper. (See “Andrew J. Leslie,†The New Handbook of Texas, vol. 4, p. 170.) Three other young men were boarding at Leslie’s house at the time. In March of 1850, Charles Lege had returned to Indianola to take another clerkship, but in July of the same year, he went back to San Antonio to clerk for James R. Sweet and Company, General Merchandise (see “Sweet, James R.,†The New Handbook of Texas, vol. 6, p.172), remaining with Mr. Sweet until the end of 1850.

Early in 1851, he went into the San Antonio Recorder's Office with Mr. Ed Miles. At night, he studied Law with Judge Weeks and was admitted to the Texas Bar in March of 1853. He made application for naturalization as a citizen of the United States on April 4, 1851 in Bexar County and became a citizen on November 15, 1852. By 1856 Charles Lege was acting as a Justice of the Peace in Bexar County, according to Bexar County Marriage Records.

On May 5, 1853 John Charles Louis Lege married Ellen (or Ellin) Hill in New Braunfels, at the home of George H. Judson, a lawyer, and his wife, the daughter of Moses Campbell, for whom Charles had earlier clerked. Ellen and Charles were married by Hermann Frederich Seele (with whom Charles had lived for two months some four years earlier), the Justice of the Peace of Comal County. Their official witnesses were G. H. Sherwood and John W. Judson. The bridal couple then made their home in San Antonio.

Ellen Hill Lege was born around 1835 and came to Texas even earlier than her future husband did. She was three or four years old in 1839, when her family left Madison County, Tennessee, for Texas, arriving in this state on August 30 of that year. Her father was Perry Marion Hill (whose ancestors had lived in Chowan County, North Carolina, at least as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century) and her mother was Mary D. Harrell. Perry M. Hill received a land grant (Certificate No.148-Class 3) in Harris County for a section of land (640 acres) from the Republic of Texas on January 7, 1840. The land granted was in two 320 acre tracts in Kerr County (now Kendall County), about ten and one half miles south east from Fredericksburg, on Sabinas Creek (a branch of the Guadalupe River). Both Perry M. and Mary D. Harrell Hill died of pneumonia on Spring Creek in the winter of 1842.

Ellen had two brothers. One, James, died as an infant, shortly after the death of the parents. The other, Richmond, died of a sunstroke at Round Rock on Bushy Creek, Williamson County, Texas July 23, 1855 (at age 17), near the family home of his late maternal uncle, Jacob M. Harrell. Jake Harrell is said to have been the first white settler in Austin (see The New Handbook of Texas, vol. 3, p.469). He hunted buffalo with Mirabeau B. Lamar in 1837, Lamar chose the site where Harrell was living at the time as the site of the new city. Harrell served Austin as mayor in 1847 and later moved to Round Rock, where he died in 1853.

After her parents' death, Ellen was adopted by Uriah B. and Elizabeth A. Wakeman of New Braunfels. The 1850 census of Comal County shows Uriah as a farmer, age 42 and his wife Elizabeth as 36. Both were natives of Connecticut. The Wakemans seem to have had no biological children, but four other individuals were living with them in New Braunfels in 1850. Among them were Louisa C. Andrews, 23 and her husband Walter, 35. The Andrews’ may have been Elizabeth A. Wakeman’s brother and sister-in-law, as they were born in Connecticut as well.

Gene Bartlett, a great grandson of Charles and Ellen (grandson of their third son, Herman [or Hermin] Conrad Lege) discovered a reference to a U. B. Wakeman who was fatally shot near Comanche Springs on December 8, 1850, while driving an ox herd with a group of soldiers. (See Robert V. Hine, Bartlett’s West, Drawing the Mexican Boundary, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968, p.19.) If this U. B. Wakeman was Ellen’s adoptive father, it explains why she apparently made reference only to her adoptive mother in the spring of 1853 when Charles asked for her hand in marriage (according to information in a letter from Charles to Ellen on April 10, 1853).

Ellen and Charles L. Lege eventually had ten children. By the time of the 1860 census (taken in San Antonio on June 18) there were already four children. Charles was then only 27 and Ellen 26. The first six children were born in San Antonio: George Henry John Lege (Feb. 2, 1854); Frederick Marion Lege (April 26, 1856); Hermin Conrad Lege (March 26, 1858); Alice Mary Ellen Lege (Jan. 24, 1860); Charles Richmond Lege (July 9, 1862); and Ida Louise Lege (April 20, 1866). Bernard Kenneth Lege was born April 24, 1869 in Corpus Christi. Perry Richmond Lege was born March 15, 1872 in ConcepciĂłn, Texas. John Henry Lege was born Nov. 5, 1877 in Corpus Christi, where Anna Ellen Lege was also born, on December 28, 1881. The tenth child, Anna Ellen, was born two month's after the birth of the couple's first grandchild, Frederick Marion Lege, Junior.

John Charles Louis Lege served three years in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. He held the rank of Captain and was an Assistant Quartermaster for the Department of Texas. From June through December of 1861, he acted as clerk to Major Sackfield Maclin, Chief Quartermaster at San Antonio, under the command of General Paul Octave HĂ©bert,. In January of 1862 he went to the post at Houston to clerk for I. S. Moise. He was under the command of General Xavier Blanchard DeBray from November 1862 to February 1863. He saw no military action but felt the threat of the Yellow Fever, which occasionally raged in Houston and Galveston in that period. In a letter home from Houston in 1862, he assured Ellen that the disease would probably not strike the area that year, but that if it did, he would be transferred to Columbus, TX, and, if he did catch the disease. he would be well nursed.

In 1865, Charles L. Lege seems to have spent a great deal of time merchandizing goods (mainly cotton, it seems) with the J. W. Jockusch Co. in Rio Grande City, because, the letters home to his wife Ellen (Ellin) in San Antonio and to his friend John Zirvas Leyendecker in Laredo mention such activities. A letter from Charles Lege to John Z. Leyendecker (dated April 22, 1869) shows that the Lege family moved in 1869 to Corpus Christi, where Charles Lege hoped to manufacture “cactus powder†for medicinal purposes.

The 1880 Census shows the Charles L. Lege family living in Corpus Christi and shows Charles' occupation as “Lawyer.†Volume D of the Bonds and Marriage Records for Nueces County shows him as “Justice of the Peace and Assessor of Taxes†in 1874, “County Judge†in 1878 and “Notary Public†in 1883, 1885, and 1887. He also worked at some point as a bookkeeper in Corpus in a store owned by a Mr. Gussett. John Charles Louis Lege died in 1890 of pneumonia, at the age of 59, and was buried in Corpus Christi in Old Bayview Cemetery.

Research and transcription: Natalie H. Lee