SAMUEL B. CANTEY, member of the firm Capps and Cantey, lawyers, of Fort Worth, is easily one of the Fort Worth bar. He studied law in this city, was admitted to the bar here, and his career has been one of unprecedented success. He is not only a good lawyer, but a brilliant speaker and splendid manager of his cases at the bar, and socially a most lovable character. During the course of the last twenty years the history of Fort Worth will show that Mr. Cantey has been identified with practically every important enterprise undertaken for the welfare of the city and its institutions.
He is a member of one of the old and prominent families of the south, one that devoted all it possessed to the lost cause of the Confederacy. He was born in Russell county, Alabama, July 31, 1861, being a son of General James and Martha E. (Benton) Cantey. His father was a native South Carolinian, while his mother was of the well known family of Colonel Benton of North Carolina. James Cantey joined the famous “Palmetto Regiment” for service in the Mexican war, and became adjutant of that regiment. He afterward became a wealthy planter and slave owner in Russell county, Alabama, where he had a large estate, but he sacrificed his entire fortune to the maintenance of the Confederate cause, and was a poor man when he came out of the army. At the beginning of the war he raised and organized the Fifteenth Alabama Regiment, of which he became colonel in command. For awhile he was in the division commanded by Stonewall Jackson, and he served throughout the civil conflict with distinguished ability and bravery, and before its close was promoted to the rank of brigadier general.
Mr. Samuel B. Cantey was reared to manhood in Russell county, Alabama. He received some of his early education in the Annia-ana Classical Academy in northern Georgia, and then finished at the Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College, where he graduated in 1880. He had also in the meantime been preparing for the legal profession. He came to Texas in 1880, and to Fort Worth in 1881, and continued his legal studies in the office of Mabry and Carter, being admitted to the bar in Fort Worth on September 19, 1881, the day of Garfield’s death. He has enjoyed a large and successful practice ever since, and has a reputation as both a pleader and counsel.
Mr. Cantey was married in Fort Worth on November 8, 1885, to Miss Italia Brooks, a daughter of W. C. Brooks. They have four children: Craig, Marguerite, Martha and Samuel B., Jr., all at school at present.
Source: B. B. Paddock, History and Biographical Record of North and West Texas (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1906), Vol. II, p. 267.