Rice Dunbar – The Family’s Black Sheep Part 1 of 3

A Surprise Find
Having a little extra time, I type in “Rice Dunbar” into ancestry.com. To my surprise, I find a new entry for a Rice Dunbar, a prisoner, in Huntsville, Texas prison in 1875!  I know of three Rice Dunbars.  The Huntsville record shows age and birthplace.  This Rice Dunbar is my 3x gr-uncle.  Born in 1848, Hennipen, Putnam, Illinois, served for the Union in the Civil War. Why was he in Texas?  And in PRISON?  The short answer is robbery.  Are there more details?  I hunt for Rice’s story.

Up until this revelation, I knew that Rice was the ninth of ten children born in Putnam County, Illinois to Hiram and Jamima (Wolf) Dunbar. His parents were religious and progressive, involved in a church which supported the underground railroad, helping black families come north.   Rice’s father was a wheel maker and farmer.   The family’s fortunes considerable improved when Hiram went to California in 1850, during the gold rush. He came back wealthy. (The family was listed as being the town’s millionaires.)  Clearly, Rice’s childhood was rather easy.

As three of his older brothers did, Rice volunteered to serve in the Civil War.  While his muster papers list him as 18 years old, he was actually only 14 when he enlisted in the company B of Illinois 77^th Infantry in August 1862, and served as a musician.  This position, usually held by younger men, were drummers, buglers, and fifers who regulated every event in camp and served as major source of communication on the battlefield. Between battles, these men also boosted spirits by playing music for the soldiers.  Many popular Civil War songs such as "Dixie" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" are still popular today. Rice served mostly in the south, including New Orleans, the Battle of Vicksburg and was in July 1865, discharged from Mobile, Alabama.   In 1866, he was living in Earlville, LaSalle, Illinois.  In 1868, Henry County, Illinois, he married Rachel Griner, and they had two sons, John (1869) and Luther (1872).  This all seems rather normal.  In the 1870 census, Rice, Rachel and their oldest son, John live in with Rice’s brother in Henry County. In the 1880 census, Rachel, a widow, is living with her sons back in Putnam County, Illinois. 

In digging deeper, there may have been early signs of a darker side to Rice. In 1865, Rice was ordered to pay back $18 ($275 in 2015) after he was court martialed in New Orleans.  Probably for stealing. There is a daughter, Mary Alice born in 1866, mother unknown.  All of these acts were ascribed to his young age, until now.

I ordered the files from this court case from Fannin County, Texas.  The writing on the wrappers is serious and reads:

Case Number 1705 – 6^th Judicial District Court of Fannin County

                 The State of Texas VS Rice Dunbar, Scott Vanvickle, M G Bobbitt
                Offense: False personations of officer & robbery from the person of
                                                        Amos Gibson, April 1875
                                 Held at Savoy, Fannin County of May 3, 1875

Savoy, Texas? Why was Rice living so far from his Illinois family?  Savoy is a tiny town established about 1863 by Colonel William Savoy, a pioneer settler and landowner.  The settlement grew slowly until after the Civil War, when hundreds of settlers began arriving in the area. In 1873 a post office opened. About the same year, the Texas and Pacific Railway extended its tracks through the community. With opportunities made possible by the railroad, Savoy became an agricultural shipping center for area farmers, who produced cotton, corn, grain, and numerous other products.  Still, at the time, the town had less than 300 inhabitants.

For as far as the eye can see, there are rolling hills, with grasses up to four feet high.  Most months, the weather was warm. In the winter however, there were intense rain storms with high winds and tornados.  Savoy is located ten miles west of Bonham in extreme west central Texas, in Fannin County, near the boarder of Grayson County to the west, and just eight miles north is the Oklahoma state line.

Why would a Union soldier go to the Confederate south after the war?  Perhaps Rice saw an opportunity to work for the railroad.  Perhaps he liked living or the weather in the south.  We do know that he went there alone, Rachel and the boys were home in Illinois.