Thomas Byers Huling (October 19, 1804 – November 2, 1865) merchant and politician, son of Thomas and Rebecca (Berryhill) Huling, was born in

Perry County, Pennsylvania Perry County is a county in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. As of the 2020 census, the population was 45,842. The county seat is New Bloomfield. The county was created on March 22, 1820, and was named for Oliver Hazard Perry, a hero of the ...

, on October 19, 1804. After operating a steamboat business on the

Mississippi River The Mississippi River is the second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson Bay drainage system. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it f ...

, he moved to Texas in 1834 and obtained a land grant on the south bank of the

Angelina River The Angelina River is formed by the junction of Barnhardt and Shawnee creeks northwest of Laneville in southwest central Rusk County, Texas. The river flows southeast for and forms the boundaries between Cherokee and Nacogdoches, Angelina and ...

in what later became Jasper County. A merchant and land speculator, Huling sold and transported provisions to Capt. James Chesser's locally raised unit during the Texas Revolution. He served as judge and postmaster after the war and owned the land on which Zavala was founded. Along with Henry Millard and Joseph Pulsifer, Thomas B. Huling helped lay out the original plans for

Beaumont, Texas Beaumont is a coastal city in the U.S. state of Texas. It is the county seat, seat of government of Jefferson County, Texas, Jefferson County, within the Beaumont–Port Arthur, Texas, Port Arthur Beaumont–Port Arthur metropolitan area, metropo ...

. Huling's first wife, known only as Sarah, apparently never came to Texas; she died in 1838, leaving him with one child. He was remarried in May 1839 to Elizabeth Bullock; this couple had eleven children. Huling represented Jasper County in the Fifth Congress of the republic, 1840–41. Seeking to stimulate the growth of the county, and especially his project at Zavala, he attempted unsuccessfully to persuade some sixty English families to colonize the area in 1847. Nonetheless, many of Huling's economic ventures paid high dividends; by 1850 he owned seventeen slaves and estimated the worth of his real property at $100,000. In 1855 he moved to the Sulphur Fork of the Lampasas River. He died on November 2, 1865 and was buried in the Old Huling-Anderson Cemetery in the Lampasas cemetery. Huling also owned the land upon which the former town of

Zavala, Texas Zavala was a town in Jasper County, Texas (United States) founded in 1834. Named for empresario Lorenzo de Zavala, the town was founded on land owned by Thomas Huling and situated along the Angelina River. The approximately 40 families wh ...

, was founded.

References

People from Beaumont, Texas 1804 births 1865 deaths 19th-century American businesspeople {{US-business-bio-1800s-stub