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- He represented San Augustine Municipality at the Texas Constitutional Convention, was a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and was the first County Clerk in San Augustine, Texas.
BLOUNT, STEPHEN WILLIAM (1808-1890). Stephen William Blount, signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, soldier, and county official, son of Stephen William and Elizabeth (Winn) Blount, was born in Burke County, Georgia, on February 13, 1808. He was elected colonel of the Eighth Regiment of Georgia Militia in 1833, served as deputy sheriff and sheriff of Burke County for four years, and was an aide-de-camp to Brig. Gen. Robert Tootle and Maj. Gen. David Taylor from 1832 to 1834. He arrived in Texas in August 1835 and settled at San Augustine. He was one of the three representatives from San Augustine at the Convention of 1836 at Washington-on-the-Brazos and there signed the Declaration of Independence. On March 17, 1836, when the convention adjourned, he returned to San Augustine and joined the Texas army in the company of Capt. William D. Ratcliff. He reached San Jacinto the day after the battle had been fought. Blount returned to the United States and in Alabama, sometime after February 1, 1838, married Mrs. Mary Landon Lacy; they had eight children. Blount brought his wife to Texas in 1839.
He was the first county clerk of San Augustine County and from 1846 to 1849 was postmaster at San Augustine. He was a delegate to the Democratic state convention in 1850 and to the national Democratic convention at Cincinnati in 1876. He acquired 60,000 acres, on which he raised cotton. During the Civil War he was fiscal agent for the Confederate States of America. He was a charter member of Redland Lodge No. 3 at San Augustine, and a member of the Episcopal Church. He was vice president of the United Confederate Veterans when he died, on February 7, 1890. He was buried at San Augustine. An oil portrait of Blount by Stephen Seymour Thomas was presented to the Dallas Historical Society and placed on exhibit in the Hall of State in 1950.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Sam Houston Dixon, Men Who Made Texas Free (Houston: Texas Historical Publishing, 1924). Louis Wiltz Kemp, The Signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence (Salado, Texas: Anson Jones, 1944; rpt. 1959). Norman Kittrell, Governors Who Have Been and Other Public Men of Texas (Houston: Dealy-Adey-Elgin, 1921). Vertical Files, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin.
L. W. Kemp
Handbook of Texas Online
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fbl31
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1808 - 1890 (81 years)
