William Robert Freeman biography

WILLIAM ROBERT FREEMAN. A little more than a year subsequent to the founding of the Freeman family in Montague county the subject of this personal sketch was born. As told in the sketch of Richard Freeman, William Freeman, the father, was a pioneer of the earliest time and was for a third of a century a leading and active spirit in the industrial and pastoral affairs of the county. Robert Freeman was his second child and was born October 27, 1858, in the pioneer habitation pointed out in recent years as the spot where the career of the Freeman family was launched. Like many another son of pioneers Robert Freeman came to maturity with a very limited knowledge of books. The family circumstances were adverse to the acquirement of an education and if excelled, in anything it was as a youth in the saddle, for from his earliest years the back of a pony was his home and his father’s well-stocked ranch his playground.

When his father brought ranching to a close, by the sale of his stock, Robert Freeman was of that age to become most useful to his parents on the farm. At the age of seventeen he married and established his first home on the family homestead, and a most humble and unpretentious home it was. The young couple traveled the long and lonely road from dependence to independence without murmur or complaint, relying their combined industry to work out their destiny on the farm. From their primitive home of the early days they established themselves in their new home on the side of the mountain near Montague Springs, where their children are fast reaching their majorities and taking their stations in the affairs of real life.

Mr. Freeman owns some six hundred acres of land on the waters of Denton creek, nearly three hundred of which yielded abundantly to the touch of the industrious husbandman and the cotton, corn and other grain which constitute the annual crop of his farm add much to their already independent condition year by year.

In August, 1875, Robert Freeman was united in marriage with Miss Margaret Johnson, a daughter of Allen Johnson, who came to Texas prior to the war, from Mississippi, and fought the Indians on the western border of the state. Mr. Johnson settled in Young county, where his son Reuben was killed by the Indians and where he himself passed away. His widow, who was Miss Nancy Bragg, still survives and is a resident of Montague county. Mrs. Freeman was born in Young county, Texas, in 1858.

Mr. and Mrs. Freeman’s children are: Ella, Robert, Lon, Thomas, Eva, Sam, Bessie, Vi, and Vent, all of whom remain with the family circle and contribute of their industry toward the maintenance of the family prosperity and independence.

In the quiet performance of his every day affairs Robert Freeman has acquired his enviable reputation as a citizen. Content with his honorable lot as a tiller of the soil he has year by year added new successes to his achievement and he is now numbered among those who have helped in the internal development of the county, but who has reared an honorable posterity an clothe it with the material things of life. His ambition has led him only in the paths of agriculture and while he votes with the Democrats it is the result, largely, of custom rather than from a conviction that there is nothing good in any other political party.

Source: B. B. Paddock, History and Biographical Record of North and West Texas (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1906), Vol. II, pp. 402-403.

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