John Wesley Webb was probably a Copperhead. The Copperheads were not snakes. They were people who lived in the north during the Civil War but were sympathetic to the Confederacy. There were quite a lot of them in the southern portions of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Clement Laird Vallandigham of Ohio was the most prominent of the Copperheads. During the war, he was arrested, tried and sentenced to prison, but there was such an outcry among Northern sympathizers that Lincoln commuted his sentenced and exiled him to the confederate states for the duration of the war. It has been said that they were called Copperheads because they would cut the Liberty head out of a penny and attached it to their lapels to indicate their sympathies. They were so public about it that many of them ended up leaving the North, made their way to various places in the South and joined up with confederate armies. I’m not totally sure if my great grandfather left Illinois at the breakout of hostilities or if he moved to Georgia after the war started. I do know that he joined the Confederate army in Georgia at the age of 16.
According to one story, he married, ran away from home and crossed a river. I’m not sure where the river was. Assuming that he may have done all this in Illinois, it is quite possible that the Ohio River is the river he crossed. I have no information about how long he served the Confederacy or which campaigns he participated in. He apparently survived a war in which starvation, dysentery and other diseases took about as many lives as Yankee minnie balls.
There is some discrepancy about his wife’s name. I think the Lora Anglin story is probably the one that most people subscribe to, although there are some people who think his wife’s surname was Cobb. Melba thought that Cobb was his mother’s maiden name. With the name, John Wesley, it’s probably safe to assume that he had Methodist roots. Ironically, his son-in-law would also be named John Wesley. I knew my mother attended the Methodist church in her youth. I asked Loretta if Methodist roots were in the family background. She really didn’t know. She said that none of them went to church until my mother started attending the Methodist church and encouraged other family members to go with her.
The Webb children were Naith, John, Ed, Ray, Sam, Minnie, Palace, Ada, Florence and Bobbie (Roberta). I remember meeting Uncle Ed sometime in the forties. He lived in Oregon. I also remember seeing Aunt Palace, when she visited. According to Loretta, she was from Duncan, Oklahoma. Loretta sent me a picture of Aunt Bob when she came for a visit. She spent most of her life in Chicago. Aunt Palace came for a visit in the forties. I have a strange memory of her. She wore a ladies dress hat. It had a lace net attached to it that covered a part of her face. I remember thinking it looked funny. My cousin, Jean, reminded me that she walked with a crutch and used only one crutch. I had forgotten that but she is right. Aunt Minnie is buried somewhere near Comanche, Texas.
The Webb family moved from Georgia to Texas in about 1892. They moved to a place called X-Ray and then Thurber. Thurber is now almost a ghost town. It is located on I-20, about 30 miles west of Weatherford. If you’ve traveled that road, you’ll remember seeing the tall smoke stack.
Right after we married, I preached in Strawn, Texas, which is very near Thurber. Thurber and Strawn were coal-mining towns. For a few years the coal mining industry flourished around Thurber. The old timers told me that Strawn once had a population of 30,000. Today it probably has 300. Thurber still has the old smoke stack, but not much else. I’m assuming my great grandfather probably went there to work in the mines. Mining was abandoned at Thurber and Strawn because the coal was inferior in quality to the eastern coal.
Sometime about 1903 or 1904, they moved to Big Eye between Hico and Iredell. I don’t know the exact location of Big Eye. I do know that I was born very close to it. There was a school building there and my father conducted church services there in the thirties. It is somewhere near Langston’s Cross on the Bosque River a few miles south of present day State Highway 6. I was amazed when I visited a Sunday morning church service in Hico about ten years ago. A lady came up to me and said, “Your parents used to live near Langston’s Crossing didn’t they?” I was amazed that anybody would remember that. That was 75 years ago.
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