By Mary Belle Ingram
From the Matagorda County History & Genealogy page
John Matthews came to Texas in 1856 from Loudoun County, Virginia. He was born six miles south of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, on February 23, 1834, the son of Susan Fritz and Simon Matthews.
John’s father was a successful farmer, but died at the age of thirty-five.
John was their oldest child and spent his school days in the academy of Hillsboro, Virginia.
As a boy of sixteen, John Matthews moved to Baltimore and worked for a few years as a salesman in a dry goods store. In 1856 he came to Texas; lived in San Antonio for one year, and then came to Caney where he bought a store from P. C. Evans, also a native of Virginia.
Evans had operated the store at Caney since 1852, which was also the location of one of the earliest post offices in Texas.
The Caney store and Post Office was located at the site where the roads connecting the towns of Matagorda and Wharton and Columbus and Brazoria crossed; and Matthew soon had an extensive trade.
The Caney area was thriving and was noted for its rich farm lands which produced cotton and sugarcane in abundance.
However, John Matthews lost most of his trade during the Civil War.
He had many outstanding debts, and many thousand dollars in Confederate money was still in his possession at the time of his death.
On December 26, 1861, John Matthews married Isabelle VanDorn, daughter of Isaac VanDorn and Amanda Reader VanDorn. The Matthews had seven children:
Susan Amanda
Jesse
John
Rodney
Sylvan Thompson
Mary
William Arthur
Jesse, born in 1864, became a well-known Judge of Matagorda County.
John Matthews was a deeply religion man, and was instrumental in establishing the Caney Methodist Church and Cemetery.
Today, the small Caney Cemetery, known by some as the Matthews Cemetery has a “Daughters of American Colonist” marker and is in the shadow of the Bay City Airport.
John Matthews worked for the government during the Civil War and while he was away, his wife tended the store and post office.
He did not fight in the war, but collected the government’s ten percent from all the farmers in the area.
He took cotton by wagon to Brownsville and Mexico markets and smuggled the payment back across the river and eventually to Matagorda County.
He placed the money in trenches in his hack and in average size jugs.
He smuggled the gold little by little in his money belt and transferred it across the river in wagons at night.
One trip which should have taken two months, took six months.
Everyone thought that he had been killed, but he finally came home.
The government had given him $3,000 for making this trip and he loaned the money back to them at 25 percent interest.
On one occasion, the area farmers hired him to make a trip to Goliad to return stranded Negro slaves.
When he arrived at Goliad, the slaves were so glad to see him they picked him up and carried him on their shoulders.
However, John had to feed the slaves and nurse them back to health before they could make the trip back by horseback.
While he was operating the store and Post Office, John kept accurate records of the temperature, his accounts, and important events during his lifetime.
His records told of the yellow fever outbreak in 1862; the observation of a battalion of soldiers being moved to Peyton Creek on September 8, 1862; the account of an extremely cold norther blowing in during the month of October, 1862; and also the records of the birth of pigs and livestock.
John Matthews died on December 10, 1913, and was buried in the Caney Cemetery.