Born in Ross County, Ohio, physician Richard Rogers Peebles (1810-1893) settled in Texas in 1835 where he established a medical practice and later founded Hempstead, Texas with James W. McDade. He married Mary Ann Calvit in 1843, and the couple lived on her plantation with their nine children. His many entrepreneurial pursuits, including a partnership in the brokerage and cotton-factoring firm J. Shackelford and Company, and participation with the development of the Washington County Railroad and Houston and Central Texas Railway, led him to become one of the wealthiest men in Texas.
Due to his opposition to secession, Peebles was arrested for treason by General John Bankhead Magruder in 1863 for trying to handout pamphlets that advocated the end of the Civil War. In 1864, he was deported to Mexico and later traveled to other parts of the United States before returning to Texas after the war to take a position as a customs collector in Galveston. However, his deteriorating health forced him to resign and return to his plantation, where he was too ill to continue his medical practice.
Source: Christian, Carole E. "Peebles, Richard Rodgers," Handbook of Texas Online.
Accessed July 29, 2011.
The Richard Rogers Peebles Papers, 1841-1845, 1883, are comprised of an account book documenting Peebles’ medical treatments, and a scrapbook containing a collection of newspaper clippings of poems, speeches, and advice columns concerning business affairs and domesticity.
This collection is open for research use.
Richard Rogers Peebles Papers, 1841-1845, 1883, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
Basic processing and cataloging of this collection was supported with funds from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) for the Briscoe Center’s “History Revealed: Bringing Collections to Light project,” 2009-2011.