DUANE
Duane's take
The official marker in Leon County tells it this way, and I'm just the one passin' it along. Now, there are names carved into Texas history that don't always get top billing — but every now and then you stop at a stone marker on a Leon County road and a story climbs right out of the ground at you. William B.
Middleton is one of those names. He was born in Illinois on August 4, 1819. By the time he was a young man, he had made his way to Texas — and Texas, being Texas, did not let him rest easy.
In 1842, Middleton took part in the Mier Expedition. That alone is a sentence worth sitting with for a moment. The Mier Expedition was no Sunday ride.
It was a hard, dangerous chapter in the story of this republic, and the men who signed up for it knew the stakes were real. Middleton came back. Not everyone did.
The marker remembers another name alongside his — Beoni Middleton. Beoni did not make it home. He died in prison in Mexico, a prisoner of that same Mier Expedition.
The marker offers no flourish about it, no dramatic words. Just the plain and heavy fact: died in prison in Mexico. Some truths need no decoration.
William Middleton carried on. He became the first sheriff of Leon County — the very first — which tells you something about how the people around him sized him up. A man who'd come through what he'd come through, and they handed him a badge and said, you're the one.
He married Mary J. Potts Middleton, born September 9, 1823. She died May 5, 1874.
William followed her on March 17, 1877. Two people, a shared life in a hard land, and somewhere in Mexico, a grave that belongs to the family too. The marker remembers all three of them.
That's the least Texas could do.
What the marker says
A participant of the Mier Expedition, 1842, first sheriff of Leon County. Born in Illinois August 4, 1819; died March 17, 1877. His first wife Mary J. Potts Middleton, born Sept. 9, 1823; died May 5, 1874. In memory of Beoni Middleton who died in prison in Mexico while a prisoner of the Mier Expedition.