THOMAS GRANVIL LASITER. The business of the farm has known Mr. Lasiter during the twenty-one years of his independent career and Wise county witnessed his first efforts in the full flush of man’s estate. He came hither in the year 1883 and, having limited means, purchased forty acres of land, the nucleus of his present home, and at once took up the task of grubbing out a farm and laying the foundation for his future comfortable home. Continuous and unremitting toil have surmounted difficulties and accomplished for him the chief aim in every rural life, the acquirement of a retreat where one can “recline under his own vine and fig tree.”
Cannon county, Tennessee, was the native place of Thomas G. Lasiter, and he was born September 22, 1864. His father William Mc. Lasiter, died a young man of twenty-eight, in the year 1866, just after having passed through the Civil war as a Confederate soldier. The latter was also a Tennessean, and a son of Brinkley Lasiter, who settled in Smith county, Texas, in an early day, and died there. Grandfather Lasiter was of Irish origin. His wife died while the family yet lived in Tennessee, and their five children were: Angelina, wife of William Good; Susan, who married Jacob Good; William Mc., our subject’s father; John, of Smith county, Texas; and Maria, who married Dock York, and resides in the same county.
William Mc. Lasiter married Mary E. Witherspoon, who was born in Tennessee, in 1841, and she lived a widow while her children were growing up and then married, in Wise county, Stephen Tunnell. A daughter and a son, by her first husband, were her only children and they were Susie, who died unmarried, and Thomas G., of this review.
Thomas G. Lasiter was eleven years of age when he came to Texas and the first seven years the family lived in Ellis county. His life has ever been rural and the country school contributed limitedly toward his education. He and his mother remained companions until after his own marriage, and the establishment for them of a permanent home. As his circumstances warranted he added a forty acres to his first purchase of land until three of them had found their way into the square forming the quarter of a section he now owns, and the combined labors of the family have been attended with pleasing and happy results.
Mr. Lasiter married Rosa Gore, a daughter of Allen Gore, one of the early settlers of the Chico neighborhood, where he cleared up a splendid farm and still resides. Mrs. Lasiter was born in Moore county, Tennessee, in 1872, and is the mother of Maud, Allen, Ross, Lela, Thomas and Earnest. While Mr. Lasiter has busied himself with the raising of cotton and the cereals and storing up slowly that which will cheer and comfort his household in after life he has permitted nothing to deter or dissuade him. He keeps faith with Democracy at election time, has taken three degrees in Masonry and Methodism prevails in his household.
Source: B. B. Paddock, History and Biographical Record of North and West Texas (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1906), Vol. II, pp. 499-500.