Captain Martin McHenry Kenney
The last ‘Sandbar’ column told of Lydia McHenry’s early Texas experiences. This week’s ‘Sandbar’ is about Lydia’s nephew, captain Martin McHenry Kenney. The captain was the son of itinerant Methodist minister John Wesley Kenney and Maria McHenry Kenney with whom Lydia came to Texas with in 1833. The captain’s mother, Maria, was Lydia’s sister.
Captain Kenney was born in December 1831 alongside the Mississippi River above Rock Island, Illinois. After the family home was destroyed in the Black Hawk War, the Kenneys relocated into Kentucky until October 1833 when they fled a cholera epidemic locating in Texas at Washington-on-the-Brazos.
The captain had a much-varied career that included the Civil War, foreign travel, business and published historian.
As a toddler, short of school age, he remembered his Aunt Lydia and mother Maria, along with the wife of David Ayers, another prominent early settler in the Washington County area, as teaching different schools before 1836’s Republic of Texas years and afterward.
Captain Kenney vividly recalled his first school years in “Recollections of Early Schools” a 12-page article he wrote for the April 1898 Southwest Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association.
“I do not know when I learned to read. Mother attended to that in the very early morning of life, but I could already spell and read very well for a child of seven, when I first went to school. It was taught in an unfinished new schoolhouse about 2 miles from home, to which my brother and I walked every day,” he wrote.
He recalled male teachers who, without much cause, laid down a sharp law of discipline. In 1838 and 1839, an “old Irish gentleman” was the teacher. “The session was three or four months and the studies miscellaneous, but the discipline was exact. He had an assortment of switches set in grim array over the great opening where the chimney was to be when the schoolhouse should be completed. On one side was the row (of switches) for little boys, small, straight and elastic, from a kind of tree which furnished Indians with arrows and the schoolmaster with switches.
“My terror was a little red switch in that rank which I caught too often, usually for the offense of laughing in school. The larger switches were graded, partly by the size of the boys and partly by the gravity of the offense, the gravest of which was an imperfect lesson. The third size of rods was of hickory; tough sticks, which he did not use on the little boys. The fourth size of switches was of oak and would have been better called clubs. I do not remember that he ever whipped any of the girls.
By 1875, captain Kenney returned to Texas from his world travels to marry Annie Matthews of Chappell Hill. They lived in Bellville and had three children. He was elected to the state Legislature in 1892 for two terms. He was an early member of the Texas State Historical Association that published several of his historical articles.
Captain Kenney died in February 1907 at the age of
76. More can be read about the captain in the “Handbook of Texas” found on the internet.
Written by Betty Dunn, Two Rivers Heritage Foundation. Visit www.tworiversheritagefoundation.org for more information or to become a member.