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(This article was the first of four Panola County Sesquicentennial articles provided by the Historical Commission of Panola County in 1996. Each of the four highlighted a pioneer Panola County woman. Clarissa Kyser Bailey was about a woman who settled in this county in 1872 with eleven of her children. The information was provided by Auvie Bailey and edited by Ann Morris. The photo was provided by Bailey Family historian, Mary Fallwell McCoy.)
Pointing to a picture of his mother on the wall of his home in the Buncombe Community in 1925, Charlie B. Bailey stated that his mother, Clarissa Kyser Bailey, was born in Holland. Her well-defined cheek bones and strong jaw line are facial features still evident in her descendants today.
Clarissa was of "Black Dutch" descent, as her ancestors were a mix of the blonde, blue-eyed, fair complexioned people of the Netherlands and the olive-skinned, brown-eyed, dark-haired Romans who conquered the Netherlands centuries ago. The "Black Dutch" were those whose looks resembled the Roman. In Holland, they were outcasts, married one another, and became a subculture in the area.
Clarissa was only five in 1826 when her father, John Kyser, brought his family to the United States and settled in Orangeburg County, South Carolina. About 1834, the Kysers moved to Franklin County, Georgia, where Clarissa met Green Berry W. Bailey. They married in 1839, moved to Bibb County, Alabama, and lived beside Green Berry's father, Wyatt Bailey. By 1841, Green Berry and Clarissa were living on a 602-acre farm on the Pea river in New Hope Community in Coffee County, Alabama, near her kinfolk.
Being of true sturdy pioneer stock, Clarissa bore eight children the first ten years of her marriage, and she delivered five more in the 1850s, and two more after the Civil War, bring the total to fifteen children.
Despite the size of their brood, the family fared well for themselves, probably due to good health and hard work. Their land and personal possessions were valued at $7,000. Unfortunately, the Civil War and its aftermath will erase all that they had worked to acquire. However, the loss of material goods go hardly noticed by Clarissa, compared to the loss of a son.
When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Clarissa's oldest son, James Ernest, wasted no time in answering President Jefferson Davis' call for volunteers. Perhaps Clarissa sought solace from a friend and neighbor, Mrs. Terry (Gilly) Presswood, who had four sons in the Confederacy. The Presswood family was also of Black Dutch descent.
In 1863, Clarissa watched as another son, William, seventeen, joined his brother James' company. That same year, James E. Bailey died in the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia.
With General Robert E. Lee calling for every able-bodied man to come serve in the Confederate Army, in July 1863 Clarissa stood by as both her husband and yet another son, John, hardly sixteen, signed up in the Alabama infantry. By January 1865, Green Berry had returned to Coffee County. John and William were back home by fall 1865.
The war was over, but difficult times lay ahead. Military Reconstruction (1865-1877) under the Radical Republicans after Abraham Lincoln's assassination was profoundly difficult. Taxes tripled creating an impossible hardship on the ex-Confederates, whose lives were already devastated from the loss of the War. Like thousands of others, Clarissa and Green Berry decided to leave South Carolina and sold their farm in September 1871.
Two months later, Green Berry and son William rode horse back to Panola County, Texas, and paid for a 172-acre farm in the Buncombe Community, where Herbert Koonce lives today. Three days after they returned to get the family, Green Berry, 52, died of pneumonia. At age 51, Clarissa was a widow in Alabama, could not read or write, had eleven dependent children, a farm in Texas many hundreds of miles away, and very little money. However, she knew what had to be done.
Clarissa buried her husband in the Kyser family cemetery, marked the top of the grave with a layer of carefully placed brick and a proper headstone and then prepared to go to Texas with money given her by Pea River Lodge. Clarissa would never know that nearly a century later, the graves of the Kyser cemetery would be bull-dozed off into a nearby gully by a landowner.
Christopher Kyser accompanied his sister and eleven of her children, the youngest barely a toddler, to Texas. Seab Presswood, with eyes for Clarissa's daughter Lucida, also went. They traveled mostly by water until they reached Jefferson, Texas, where they came on to Panola County in their wagon pulled by Oxen.
Christopher helped his sister get settled before returning to Alabama. Clarissa and her children provided for themselves by farming and operating a tannery in the Indian Creek bottom. Hides were sold at a leather shop in the Snap Community west of Carthage.
Life's difficulties that year were compounded when death struck again and stole daughter Surmantha, only 24 years old. The remaining Bailey children grew into adulthood and most settler in Panola and Shelby counties.
"I don't guess it will ever be known how much Clarissa Bailey did to relieve her family of the sufferings and hardships, but she will be held in the highest esteem by all of her Bailey and Kyser kin for the courage she must have had," writes Auvie Bailey, great-grandson of Clarissa and avid researcher of Bailey family history.
(More information about the Bailey families in Panola County can be found in the Panola County history book sold at the LaGrone Family History Center in Carthage, Texas.)
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03/21/2005