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George West Texas - Coryell County
We could not describe the life and events of George West better than the Coryell County Genealogical Society which obtained the following information: In 1875, after the death of his young wife, George E. West, his two little girls, and one other passenger came to ‘Texas from Kentucky in a covered wagon’. He settled on land which had been bought years earlier by his father, Captain Lewis West (b.1799 near Georgetown, Kentucky). He later met and married Alice Smalley, the daughter of Dr. Jonas Smalley, who lived in Jonesboro. They were married on June 5, 1877. Nine children were born to this couple although three died in infancy or early childhood. George West farmed for a few years but was also a well-educated man and wished to enter some profession. As a young man he had earned three diplomas in three different colleges in Kentucky. Leaving the farm, he bought land in the small village of Gatesville and built his home on South 6th Street, where he and his wife reared their children and educated then in the Gatesville schools. His father, Lewis West, who had originally bought the Texas land, died in George’s home in 1895 at the age of ninety-six. In Gatesville, George West went to work in a real estate office owned by Mr. Collins Chrisman. There he wrote out in long hand deeds and abstracts for almost all of the land bought and sold in Coryell County. George West lived past the age of 80, dying in 1921. He left his wife, Alice Smalley West and four surviving children Mrs. Luther (Bessie) Franks; Mrs. Oscar (Eva) Taylor; R. Q. West; Mrs. B. A. (Lewis) Pollard and 14 grandchildren. George West, his wife Alice, and father Lewis West are all buried in the City Cemetery, Gatesville, Texas. In addition, one of his two daughters, Loulu, who came to Texas with him in their covered wagon, is buried there. Nora Darwood WEST, the first wife of Monroe Wilson Murray, was born in Gatesville in 1885. She was the daughter of the above prominent businessman, George Edward West.
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