Augustus "Gus" LeGory

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm just the one passing it along. Augustus LeGory. Gus, to the people who knew him.

Born October 10, 1840. And if you want to know how long a man can leave a mark on a place, consider this: Gus LeGory lived until December 4, 1930. That is a span of life that crosses from before the Civil War to a world with automobiles and electric lights.

The marker doesn't belabor the arithmetic, and neither will I. What it does tell us is plenty. In 1855, young Gus came to Texas from Mississippi.

He was comin' to a state that was still finding itself, and he would spend the rest of his days helping to shape one corner of it, right there in Houston County. Then the Civil War came, as it came for so many men of his generation, and Gus served. When it was over, he returned to the area.

A lot of men came back from that war and sat down. Gus LeGory did not sit down. He went to work with a Trinity River steamboat company.

Now the Trinity River, if you've never seen it wind through the piney woods of East Texas, is a serious piece of water, and moving freight on it was serious business. Gus learned that business. Then he went further.

He developed his own enterprise, overland and river both, freight hauling across the land and along the water. He was building something, layer by layer. And then, in 1870, he opened a saloon in Crockett.

Of course he did. A man who hauls freight knows where the freight needs to go, and in 1870, some of it needed to go toward a good establishment where people could gather. Gus was a community promoter, the marker says, and that phrase does a lot of work.

Banking. Coal production. Agriculture.

The man had his hands in the soil, in the ledgers, and in the earth beneath the earth all at once. In 1875, Gus LeGory married Eliza Wortham. Together they had six children.

Six. You plant a family like that in a county, and the roots go deep. The marker was recorded in 1980, fifty years after Gus drew his last breath.

But standing out there in Houston County, it's a reminder that one man, arriving from Mississippi in 1855 with whatever he carried in his hands and his head, could weave himself so completely into a place that the land itself remembers his name.

What the marker says

(Oct. 10, 1840 -- Dec. 4, 1930) In 1855 Augustus "Gus" LeGory came to Texas from Mississippi. After serving in the Civil War, he returned to the area and worked with a Trinity River steamboat company. He later developed his own overland and river freight hauling enterprise and in 1870 opened a Crockett saloon. A community promoter, LeGory engaged in banking, coal production, and agriculture. He married Eliza Wortham in 1875 and they had six children. Recorded - 1980