CONFEDERATE BIOGRAPHY: GEORGE W. HUMPHREY - Smith County, TX 

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Submitted by Doris Peirce - ginlu@home.com  
2 October 2001 
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TEXANS WHO WORE THE GRAY by Sid S. Johnson

GEORGE W. HUMPHREY.

When Col. Edward Clark’s regiment was mustered into the Confederate 
service in the spring of 1862, Geo. W. Humphrey came into it as a 
private in Co. -- --, from Harrison county.  He was a Pennsylvanian, 
but had been living for some time in Marshall, Texas, where he was 
employed in a sash and blind factory.   As he was afterwerd prominently 
connected with the industrial history of Tyler, it may be of interest 
to our present population, who are so rapidly drifting away from the 
men and incidents of our earlier years, to briefly sketch some of his 
characteristics and deeds.  Although a northern man by birth and 
rearing, he gave his allegiance to Texas, and made a most serviceable 
soldier in the Southern army.  His rustling qualities soon won him 
official recognition, and he was appointed commissary sergeant and 
assigned to duty under Major John M. Douglas of Tyler, who was 
regimental commissary.  Here he was in his element, and soon became 
famous in his regiment as a gatherer of provisions and for his prompt 
and fair distribution of rations among his men.  He followed the rapid 
promotion of his chief until they became respectively the commissary 
and the assistant commissary of Gen. Walker’s division.  As an evidence 
of his extraordinary diligence and sagacity in the discharge of his 
duties when the army was in winter quarters at Pine Bluff, Ark., 
having the proper help detailed to assist him, he secured the 
necessary timbers out of the woods, built a smokehouse, bought up and 
slaughtered hogs and cured a supply of bacon for the troops under his 
charge.  At the close of the war he came with Major Douglas to Tyler, 
and for the next few months was employed by the federal government to 
collect the 3 cent cotton tax, then recently levied.  The next winter, 
in association with Major Douglas, employing their very scant means, 
he established and began operating a small grist mill in the flat 
immediately west of North Broadway and north of the present track of 
the St. Louis Southwestern Railway.  Later in the year he added a gin 
plant, making as great a success of this as of the grist mill; and, 
in addition, he fattened and marketed beef cattle, using for that 
purpose the surplus products of his gin and mill.  His energy and 
business enterprise attracted the attention and admiration of Major 
Burrell Hambrick, who had lately settled in Tyler, moving from his 
fine plantation in Van Zandt county, and he became a partner in the 
enterprise and put a large amount of money into it.  The new company, 
after this accession of capital, decided to enter into the cotton 
spinning business.  Major Douglas, accompanied by Burrell Hambrick, Jr., 
went Philadelphia and purchased the necessary machinery and twelve 
hundred spindles as a starter, the Major carrying the money in twenty 
dollar gold pieces, belted around his person.  In due time the spindles 
were set in motion and Tyler had the promising beginning of a cotton 
factory.  George Humphrey was the soul of the enterprise, lived for 
the most part in the building, and was almost as tireless as his engines.  
At night he took “cat naps” by the music of his machinery, promptly 
waking up and ready for service at the least irregularity or stoppage 
in the movement.  Major Douglas, now of Corsicana, is authority for the 
statement that while in operation the factory yielded in the 
neighborhood of two percent per month on a total investment of twenty-
five or thirty thousand dollars.  In the midst of its prosperity, one 
fateful day in the winter of 1868, while Humphrey was in the country 
buying cotton and the manager was up town, a spark, struck out by some 
friction of the works, dropped into the lint cotton and in an hour the 
splendid monument to business daring and executive ability was a heap 
of ruins.  Owing to the exorbitant rate then demanded by the insurance 
companies, the owners had not insured the property, preferring to take 
the alternative risk, hence the loss was total, leaving the company 
only with the teams and wagons.

Mr. Humphrey afterwards engaged in a number of small enterprises with 
all of his old time energy, never, it is said, relinquishing his 
purpose of finally running a cotton mill in Tyler.  Later on he bought
a large plantation up near the Sabine river, and undertook to 
personally superintend it and his Tyler business.  One who knows 
relates that it was Mr. Humphrey’s habit two or three times a week, 
after a hard day’s work in Tyler, to mount his pony, gallop up to his 
plantation, size up the situation and give his orders, and then race 
back to Tyler for a new day’s work.  But human nature has it 
limitations, and while at his plantation August 22, 1883, after a
brief illness, he yielded up his devoted spirit, dying in his forty-
ninth year, a victim to the heroic struggle to achieve his purpose in 
life.  He was twice married, first to Miss Maria Kennedy, who died 
without issue, and afterwards to Miss Mary Evans, who, with their 
four children, survive him.