Major J.S. Irvine SCV Camp #2031

I am the son of Josephus and Jane Patton Irvine. I was born in Lawrence County, Tennessee, on August 25, 1819. We moved from Tennessee to Texas in 1830. My Daddy died on the way to Texas, caught the fever, so mama had to care for all us youngsters. We settled first near Milam, and moved four years later to a farm four miles south of San Augustine. I was one of four brothers who served in the Texas Army in 1835-36. In the fall of 1835 I enlisted in Capt. Henry W. Augustine's company and participated in the siege of Bexar. Again I volunteered for the Texas army in March 1836 and served in a company from Sabine County under Capt. Benjamin Franklin Bryant. With Col. Sidney Sherman's Second Regiment I fought in the battle of San Jacinto. It is possible that I was the youngest Texas soldier in that battle, but heck, there was a whole lot of youngsters there. I was discharged on May 1st but I enlisted a third time on July 4, 1836, and served for three months in Capt. William Scurlock's company from San Augustine. I married my wife Nancy McMahon in 1838; we had eleven children. We had a place out by Quicksand Creek in Newton County. After the war I went back home to Newton County. There, I served as tax assessor/collector of Newton County from 1856 to 1860, when the census evaluated my property at $5,000; the 1861 tax roll shows that I owned one slave, but he was a free man, the census just didn't have a place for freedman back then. At the outbreak of the Civil War, I raised and was captain of a company that became Company C of James B. Likens's Battalion of Texas Volunteers. After a reorganization of the battalion, it was designated the 11th or Spaight's Battalion of Texas Volunteers, and I was elected by the men to the rank of major. I led my troops in the battle of Fordoche or Stirling's Plantation in southern Louisiana on September 29, 1863, where my son, James Patton Irvine, was killed. Me, I contracted yellow fever in the swamp, as did many of my soldiers. I had to resign my commission in December 1864, due to my the yellow fever. I am a Mason and a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church. My Lord took me home on May 17, 1876, and I am buried at Wilson's Chapel, Newton County. A state marker was erected on my grave in 1963.