This is an early biographical sketch of one of the prominent black citizens buried in Camptown Cemetery. The information is drawn from newspaper accounts and census data, though as I went back to search for a possible obituary it became apparent that there was much more data that was continuing to become available and this biographical sketch needs to be expanded.
(photo courtesy of Amy the Spirit Seeker)
Wiley Hubert’s Role in Post-Emancipation Brenham
by Charles Swenson
Wiley Hubert
12/25/1832 - 10/6/1909
Wiley Hubert, who is buried in the Camptown Cemetery, is also one of the most widely cited black citizens of the late 19th and early 20th century in Brenham newspapers. Though he is now practically forgotten, these references help fill out details of his life, fleshing out his rise from a slave to a well-to-do citizen to a degree of certainty not always possible with most freedmen of this period.
He is listed in the 1870 United States Census, the first listing blacks by name in Texas, as a 37 year old mulatto literate carpenter, born in Mississippi. He is married to 25 year old Alice Wiley, also literate and listed as “keeping house,” with a 9 month old daughter, Savannah. Also listed as living at their residence is Jane Atkinson, a 13 year old domestic, and Julia Johnson, a 20 year old who was attending school. He was relatively affluent, with real estate valued at $2000 and personal property listed at $500. By the 1880 Census he also has a son, Roy, 9, listed; according to the 1900 Census, Alice only had these two children.
Some of the newspaper articles about him are relatively uninteresting on the face of it, but reveal facets of his life that open into a broader picture of his existence. Many are simply notices of real estate transfers, yet they document him as a propertied gentleman of relative wealth. They also sometimes hint also at deeper business dealings, such as his transfer to Ed. Walker of a lot in Brenham for one dollar and “other considerations,” with no indication of what those considerations might have been. He was undoubtedly a competent and trusted workman, as reflected in the multiple accountings of sums paid to him for work on city, county and school properties. Other accounts often refer to his work as “very satisfactory.” He a well respected carpenter who extended his work to other areas, such as bridge repair. He was also skilled at moving buildings, whether it was the”studio of Miss Netta Botts” to a new property or the large two story gin at an oil mill 150 yards across a railroad track and gully on rollers and powered by horses, with “not a strain or break in any part of the house when it landed at its destination.”
He was not only a trusted citizen, called to serve not only on many petit juries but county and Federal grand juries but also to help rescue a failing city government. Appointed as an agent to solicit funds for his church he functioned as a stabilizing financial force for the A.M.E. church, as well as rebuilding Camptown churches after they were devastated by the Hurricane of 1900.
He was a proud father whose daughter’s marriage to the “ principal of the colored free school” (his daughter was a school teacher) was the “event of the season in Brenham colored society.” Heroic impulses led him to descend by rope into a well to rescue Henry McDade when he cleaning out a well and was overcome by gas generated by ant poison. He and his family were there when a neighbor’s house fire drove her out in flaming clothes and helped “strip... the woman of her still blazing garments, and ministered to her hurts as best they could till a physician could be summoned.” He was a gardener who took pride in his peaches and still seems to have found the time to raise cotton.
While contemporary newspaper accounts tended to capitalize on the antics, arrests and human frailties of Camptown citizens, with regard to Wiley Hubert they help round out the picture of one of the leading black citizens in post-emancipation Brenham.
