Corpus Christi History by Murphy Givens

A medley of mysteries

We dabblers in history take pleasure in solving puzzles of the past, even when the information may seem transient in value. But, after all, it is the accretion of details, even trivial details, that comprise our history, that tell us who we are and where we came from.
   Some trails are easy to follow. Facts we find in archival information usually concern great men and women, those who held some degree of power at critical times. Their stories were told and details of their lives passed on. You don't have to work hard to find information about Richard King or Henry L. Kinney. But it's vastly harder when you look for data on obscure individuals, those without great power or wealth. Unless they left a diary or packet of letters behind, details of their lives are very rare.
   For years I have jotted down names of individuals in local history who had stories worth pursuing. But these stories had more questions than answers and I was paralyzed by the ideal of trying to fill in the missing blanks, so I put off writing about them. But maybe we should accept the fact that there will always be unanswerable questions in our search for the past.
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  ???William Aubrey is one in our medley of mysteries. Henry L. Kinney, the principal founder of Corpus Christi, met Aubrey in about 1838, perhaps in New Orleans or Galveston. Aubrey, from Wales, was a British citizen who had been living in Mobile, Ala. He and Kinney became friends and partners, building a trading post at what is now Corpus Christi.
   Kinney was the flamboyant and dominant man in the business, forging ties with powerful people in Mexico City and Austin, while Aubrey was the quiet man who tended the store.
   In May, 1846, when the first U.S. post office was established at Corpus Christi, Aubrey was appointed the first postmaster. He probably handled the mail at Kinney's store. Two months later, the American Flag, a newspaper at what would become Brownsville, carried a notice stating that the partnership of Aubrey and Kinney had been dissolved by mutual consent.
   In 1847, Aubrey was in Vera Cruz in partnership with William Cazneau. Then Aubrey disappeared from the pages of history. Did he return to Texas? Or Mobile? I read somewhere that he did return to Texas and settled in San Antonio, but I can find nothing to confirm it. The story of William Aubrey, a co-founder of the city, is one of those missing gaps in Corpus Christi's history.
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   When Aubrey was still running the store for Kinney, Jose de Alba was editor of Corpus Christi's first newspaper, the Gazette, published during the Zachary Taylor boom. The Gazette closed down when Taylor's army moved to the Lower Rio Grande Valley in March, 1846.
   When the Nueces County government was organized on Jan. 11, 1847, the chief justice (the equivalent of county judge) was Jose de Alba, with William Mann, George Brundrett, and Richard Powers elected as commissioners. After that, the name of de Alba disappears. What happened to him? It's interesting that the first newspaper editor here was Hispanic. And we sometimes refer to Richard Borchard as Nueces County's first Hispanic county judge, but that distinction belongs to Jose de Alba. It's a shame we know almost nothing about the man.
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   On New Year's Day, 1849, John Baskin, his family and slaves arrived here from Mississippi. His sister Esther was married to Corpus Christi's wealthiest merchant, William Mann, who served as one of the county commissioners with Jose de Alba. Baskin, Mann and Forbes Britton became partners and operated three schooners that freighted cargo from Galveston to Corpus Christi.
   John Baskin had two daughters who did not marry - Eliza and Laura. In the 1850 census, Corpus Christi's first, 21-year-old Laura Baskin is listed as the captain of a schooner. This may have been one of the three ships owned by Baskin, Mann and Britton. Or maybe it was a family joke played on the census-taker.
   But I believe she was what the census said she was, the captain of a schooner. If that's true, the question is how did a young woman come to be a ship captain in Corpus Christi in 1850, at a time when society's expectations of women were so narrowly defined for them? We may never know the answer to that question, for Laura Baskin, who was probably a most remarkable woman for her time, disappeared from the historical records we have to go on.
   (This is the first of two columns. Part two will appear in this space next Wednesday.)
  
  

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