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XI

WILLIAM GORDON BACHMAN

11. William Gordon Bachman was born in Georgia (according to the 1850 Census of Jackson County, Alabama) on September 20, 1822, to John Bachman/Baughman and his first wife, Mary Catharine Barbara Benecke. William Gordon was the youngest of eleven children; he had four brothers and six sisters (according to the Baughman Family Bible) Copyright 1814, owned by Mrs. Raymond Swofford of Lubbock). Mrs. Swofford has since passed away having published this biography of the Bachmans in 1979.

Before he was twenty, William Gordon came to the Republic of Texas. In the spring of 1842, General Rafael Vasquez with Mexican troops invaded the Republic and captured San Antonio. William Gordon decided to join the Texians in the fight against the Mexican Army and went as far west as the Guadalupe River.

It was eleven years before William Gordon was paid for his part in that campaign; by that time he had acquired a wife, Caroline Green, and at least two children (according to the 1850 Census)--Ann, born in 1848, and "Lorenzo" Bachman, born on March 27, 1850, in Jackson County, Alabama. In July 1853, William Gordon Bachman bought 320 acres of land in Austin County, Texas, from N.W.Bush; the next year he and his wife sold this property.

In 1861 William Gordon became a Master Mason at Beaukiss, Texas, Post Oak Island Lodge No. 181, in which lodge he held offices in 1879 and 1880. (At that time Beaukiss was in Bastrop County; then in 1874, when Lee County was formed, Beaukiss became a part of that county.)

On December 5, 1882, William Gordon Bachman died and was buried in the Rideway Cemetery, about three miles west of Paige Texas. His wife, Caroline Bachman, died in Williamson County, Texas, where she was living with her daughter, Nancy Miranda Stephens, and she is buried at the side of her husband. (According to the Probate Records of Bastrop County on the 2nd of October, Mrs. C. Bachman died about the 12th day of March, 1900.)

William spent his last two (2) days in Breckenridge Hospital in Austin.

– Submitted by Clark Wright adapted from “OUR BACHMAN ANCESTORS AND OUR KIN” by Minnie Ray Swofford, copyrighted 1979