Coit, Henry William

Henry William and Florence Routh Coit
From Proud Heritage, Vol 1 by DCPA. This 300 page hardcover book is available online.

Henry William Coit was born in 1862 on the family's 320 acre farm which straddled the Dallas and Collin Counties line due north of Dallas. The nearest town was Piano, about six miles to the northeast. The Civil War had started, and the men of Texas were flocking to the support of the Southern Confederacy. His father, John Taylor Coit, had been busy in the months preceding his birth raising a company of Cavalry, which became Company E, 18th Texas Regiment under Colonel Nicholas Darnell and Lieutenant Colonel John Taylor Coit. Within a month of his son's birth, John Coit's regiment left Texas for Arkansas. He served with distinction there and (after having been captured at Arkansas Post and later exchanged) in 1863 in General Patrick Cleburn's Division, Army of Tennessee. He was wounded at the battle of Chickamauga and was in various hospitals until finally released and sent to San Antonio as a recruiting officer.

When he returned home, John Coit was in such poor health he was unable to farm. He leased his land and moved to Dallas, where he practiced law. He lived in a house he rented for twenty dollars per month from Maxime Guillot.

Henry W. Coit's family consisted of: Father: John Taylor Coit born 1829, died 1872, graduated Princeton University 1850. Mother: Catharine Malloy Bunting born 1837, died 1883, attended school in Salisbury, North Carolina. Graduated from Harmony College, South Carolina. Their children were: (1) John Clinton Coit born 1858, died 1941. He graduated from Austin College, Sherman; married Ida Burrough; no issue. He spent most of his life in Denton, Texas, where he engaged in banking and real estate. (2) Henry William Coit born March 1, 1862, died July 12, 1930; married Florence Routh, born 1869, died 1921. (3) Mary Henrietta Coit died 1896, married Philip Bethea Hamer. They had one son, Robert Coit Hamer. (4) Charles Coit died 1895; attended Washington &: Lee University. He went to Africa to serve as a missionary and died shortly after arriving in Capetown.

After the death of his father in Dallas in 1872, Henry W. Coit moved back to the farm with his mother and the rest of his family, helping with the chores (including driving the oxen which powered the cotton gin they owned); there he stayed the rest of his life, farming the 320 acres. He later acquired the interests of the other heirs and, through the years, purchased adjoining land. At the time of his death, he was farming some fourteen hundred acres.
Sarah Horton Cockrell. He got a "miller" by the name of Alexander Harwood and his son, Rifley B. Harwood, to operate it for him and Aunt Sarah. Sarah Horton Cockrell and James Horton Sr. were brother and sister, children of Enoch and Martha (Stinson) Horton.

Alexander Cockrell was shot to death under unclear circumstances on April 3, 1858 by City Marshall Andrew M. Moore. Moore, on his third day in office, was attempting to arrest Cockrell for violating an ordinance of some sort. The result was that Cockrell was shot eight times in the lower abdomen. The shooting occurred near Cockrell's home on Commerce Street between Houston and Broadway Streets. (Broadway Street then paralleled Houston on the side of the river; it no longer exists.)

Moore was tried for murder, and the courtroom battle in July was the most sensational yet seen in Dallas. Even the town's finest ladies, uncharacteristically, went to the courtroom to see and hear the arguments.

John C. McCoy, the former Peters Colony official who had been the town's first practicing lawyer, prosecuted. One of the four defense lawyers was the same Colonel Warren Stone identified by Bryan as one of his enemies. For three days evidence was presented, but afterwards the jury had no trouble in rendering an immediate verdict: not guilty. One might imagine that this verdict in the death of a community leader as prominent as Cockrell would cause an outpouring of outrage, but for some reason this was not the fact. According to the Herald account, observers greeted the judgement with "an irrepressible outburst of applause in the court-room, which was caught up in the streets and made the welkin ring with demonstrations of satisfaction". Why the citizens where so pleased with the verdict can only be imagined.

Cockrell's widow, Sarah, did not let public sentiment prevent her from assuming her late husband's work. The very next year she opened the town's finest inn, the St. Nicholas Hotel. It far overshadowed the comfortable Crutchfield House. The St. Nicholas drew its name from its manager, Nicholas H. Darnell, a former Indian fighter and Texas politician, who inaugurated the hotel with a grand ball attended by persons from all over the state.
Those attending danced to the music of an orchestra seated on a raised platform. Sarah Cockrell also persevered with her late husband's plan to construct a new bridge over the Trinity. She obtained a charter from the State of Texas to form the Dallas Bridge Company, but before the work could begin the Civil War intervened and stalled the project indefinitely.
By the eve of the Civil War some 500 people lived in Dallas. They could read in the Herald of typical happenings in their frontier town (but only on the inside pages - the front page was reserved for state, national, and international news and advertisements): four horses and two mules had either strayed or been stolen from La Reunion; a runaway slave, named Caesar, was being held in the Dallas jail until his owner could identify him; a caustic review characterized the performance of a visiting circus as miserable". A brief stroll around the red-brick courthouse would reveal the following businesses in operation: two hotels, two exchange offices, two livery stables, two drugstores, seven mercantile houses, two brickyards, two blacksmith shops, a carriage factory, a jeweler, an insurance agency, a boot and shoe shop, two saddlers' shops, two mechanics' shops, two saloons, two schools, a barber shop, a tinner, a cabinetmaker, a milliner, a steam-powered sawmill, and a newspaper and printing office.

Dallas' greatest need, however, even more than a bridge, was that outlet to the world beyond. The ox-wagon carrying goods to and from Jefferson - a town with a navigable waterway to New Orleans via the Red River and the Mississippi - were slow and expensive. Use of the Trinity would have been more convenient, faster, and more economical.

Yet another possibility had merged: the railroad. From the marriage of Henry William Coit and Florence Routh on November 16, 1889, the following children were born: (1) Florence Catharine Coit born 1891, died 1893. (2) Henry Campbell Coit born October 11, 1893, died December 8, 1965; married Winnie Warren. They had six children. (3) Mary Helen Coit born March 5, 1896, died April 26, 1908. (4) Mildred Routh Coit born September 1, 1898; married Leslie W. Rogers. They had three children. (5) John Clinton Coit born September 1, 1900, died February 25, 1972, married Ruth Riddle Casler. No issue. (6) William Hunt Coit born February 28, 1905, died December 18, 1969; married Mary O'Reagan. No issue. (7) Richard Bunting Coit born October 12, 1908, married Margaret Edythe Hatcher of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. They had two children. (8) Routh Coit born October 12, 1908, died 1976, married Paul Leslie Williams. They had two children.

In 1901 Henry W. Coit leased the 2400 acre Gregg Ranch at Krum. He made a good crop of wheat that year. He used the Buffalo Pitts 20-horsepower steam engine which powered his thresher to break the stubble. The most it would plow in a day was twenty acres, which was much too slow. The Buffalo Pitts dealer in Dallas had been shipped, without notice, a huge 35-horsepower tractor. This was unheard of power for those days, and the dealer couldn't find a buyer. However, he had a sharp young salesman named R. B. George who said he knew the only man in Texas who would buy it. He set out to find Henry W. Coit and made the sale. With this engine and a string of six triple disc plows, forty acres per day were plowed. People came from miles around to see this wonder!

During his life, he served as President of Renner Farmers Gin Co., President of the Texas State Cotton Ginners Association, President of the Renner School Board, Director of Parkland Hospital, and Director of the United States Grain Growers Association. Mr. Coit was one of the organizers and a Director of the National Farm Bureau and was a Director of the Liberty State Bank of Dallas.

In the mid-1920's the County Commissioner for the district, J. W. Slaughter, promised Henry Coit he would build an airline road from Renner to Dallas if Coit would get the landowners along the route to donate the rights of way. He did so; the road was soon completed from Renner to Mockingbird Lane. It saved a lot of people many miles. Slaughter named it "Coit Road". Later, Central Expressway was built over it from Forest Lane south.

Almost all of the Coit property is in Richardson and Dallas; about half of it lies east of Coit Road between Arapaho and Campbell Roads and approximately half west of Coit Road from just south of Campbell Road to McCallum Road, with Meandering Way the west boundary.