Robert Bonner Halley

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Robert Bonner Halley. A name that doesn't get hollered about as much as it ought to, but Bell County remembers.

Halley was a Georgia man, born and raised, and sometime around 1853 he packed up his family and pointed them toward Texas. This stretch of the Lampasas River country is where they landed, and he didn't waste a single minute getting to work. He teamed up with a partner by the name of T.J.

Eubanks, and together those two ran a liquor distillery and a flour and grist mill right there on the Lampasas River. Grain in, whiskey out, flour in between. That's a man who understood range of opportunity.

By 1859 he was serving as Bell County Commissioner, and the following year he was off to the State Democratic Party Convention as a delegate. The man was climbing, steady and sure. Then the Civil War came calling.

Halley didn't wait to be asked twice. He recruited a volunteer cavalry unit and served as its captain. Led the men he'd gathered himself.

That takes a particular kind of nerve. He came through it, came home, and Bell County hadn't forgotten him. In 1874 they elected him sheriff.

The top lawman in the county. And here's where the story catches in your throat a little. He died while in office, in 1875.

Never got to see what came next. His wife Lydia, born in 1831, lived all the way to 1928. They had eight children together.

Eight. Lydia outlasted him by decades, carrying the name and the line forward long after the sheriff was gone. The Lampasas still runs where that mill once turned.

Bell County still holds the record. And Robert Bonner Halley, Georgian by birth and Texan by choice, left a mark on both.

What the marker says

A native of Georgia, Robert B. Halley brought his family to this area about 1853. With partner T.J. Eubanks, he operated a liquor distillery and a flour and grist mill on the Lampasas River. Halley served as Bell County Commissioner in 1859 and as a delegate to the State Democratic Party Convention the following year. He recruited and served as captain of a volunteer cavalry unit during the Civil War. Elected Bell County Sheriff in 1874, he died while in office in 1875. Halley and his wife Lydia (1831-1928) were the parents of eight children. (1991)