Stewart

The Stewarts

Mara Berta Stewart Landry, Jack Landry's wife, died in Atlanta, Georgia at age 91 on September 20, 2002. Mara was born on 29 May 1911 in San Antonio, Texas. She later moved to Atlanta, GA, where she graduated in 1928 from Girls High School. She attended the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1930s but did not graduate. Mara had a fraternal twin sister named Madge Anna Stewart, who became Madge Keeton when she married Page Keeton, the longtime Dean of the University of Texas Law School. Mara had an older sister named Kathleen (Siddie) and an older brother named Norris (Bubba). Siddie was married several times, and she had a son named Clyde "Bobby" Cheek. Norris/Bubba Vancil Stewart (1899-1972) married Katherine Jane Bake (1903-1986). Norris and Katherine Jane (Bake) Stewart had a son named Donald Bake Stewart (1927-2006), Norris Merrill Stewart (1921-1996), and a daughter named Katherine Jane (Stewart) Perry (1929-2019).

Katherine Jane (Bake) Stewart had a sister named Frances Gertrude Bake (1907-97), who was living in a state institution for the mentally disabled when I met her with my mother and grandmother. I mention this only because the institution left a deep impression on me.

Mara's mother, my great-grandmother Mary Katherine (Mollie) Vancil Stewart (known as "Bam" to me), was born on 24 October 1875 and died on 27 March 1971. I remember seeing Bam twice--once at the home of her daughter Madge and later in an Austin nursing home, not long before her death at age 96. Mollie is buried in a family plot in Belton, Texas--a site my mother took me to visit in about 1975 or 76 and to which I have returned a few times.

Mara Stewart's father was named Daniel Norris Stewart, but he went by his middle name, his mother's maiden name. Norris Stewart (b. 29 April 1874) owned several hardware stores in South Texas (Harlingen) but had to give up all but one during the Great Depression. That stress, along with his being overweight, contributed to his death on 10 October 1933.

Daniel Norris Stewart and Mollie Vancil were married 6 March 1897. Daniel Norris Stewart quit school after the eighth grade, probably about 1886. Norris's father, John Aaron Stewart, had wanted his children to be well educated, and Daniel was no longer welcome at home after he dropped out after the eighth grade, and probably lived in a boarding house. He then took Norris as his first name. Norris Stewart invented a cotton harvester and some kind of planter and sold the designs for very little to his employer, John Deere Farm Implements. John Aaron Stewart may also have worked for John Deere, and he is said to have invented some kind of plow.

John Aaron Stewart was born 13 August 1843 in North Carolina? (,) and he fought for the losing side in the Civil War. He died 15 February 1905. (It's possible that John A. Stewart--son of George Stewart--was born in Kilbirnie, Ayrshire County, Scotland. John's eldest son was named George, which leads me to suspect that John's father may have been named George. But this is all conjecture. I am pretty certain that the Stewarts did immigrate from Scotland, however.)

John Aaron Stewart resided in Greene County County, Alabama in 1870 with his first wife, Anna, who died about 1871, and their two children, Mary and George. He later married Mary Tennessee Norris and had seven more children. They were married in Hunt, Texas. In the 1880 census, John A. Stewart, along with his wife Tennie and five children, is listed as residing in Sherman, Texas, and employed as a store clerk. After John Stewart's death in 1905, Mary Tennessee Norris Stewart took her unmarried daughters (Annie? and Isabelle) and moved to Magenta Plantation, Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, where the family had planned to retire. Tennie ran the sugar and rice plantation, which had its own train depot to transport the crop, and where Norris and Molly Stewart's family visited.

Magenta Plantation was once owned by the Alexandre E. DeClouet family. Alexandre Etienne DeClouet (1812-1890) was a sugar planter, Confederate Congressman and State Senator from St. Martin Parish, Louisiana. In the 1870s, Alexandre E. DeClouet was active in local politics, making speeches and writing resolutions for the White League, which was a semi-military body, organized to oppose the development of political and economic power of the black freedmen. The DeClouet family owned the Magenta, St. Claire, and Lizima Plantations. While these people are no relation, I find the facts interesting.