Biography

Mary Jane McElroy was over one hundred years old when she died. She had lived through slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Native American colonization, the Jim Crow South, and both world wars by the time she passed away in 1948. She experienced all of this from the vantage point of just two neighboring counties in east-central Texas, Limestone and Freestone counties, both of which were dominated by rural agriculture grounded in slavery before the Civil War. The white population in the two counties overwhelmingly supported secession from the Union when the Civil War broke out. Complicating her story even more, Mary Jane believed her father to be a full-blooded Choctaw, while her mother was Black and enslaved. Mary Jane was thus born into slavery. She encountered racism and the reverberations of slavery but also the sting of rejection when the Mississippi Choctaw refused her application into membership in 1902.[1]

Remarkably, at age fifty-two, she accepted baptism into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the only person in her family to join this American born faith. The missionaries who created her membership record dutifully identified her father as “Indian” on that record and her mother as “African” and simultaneously labeled Mary Jane as “colored,” an indication of the racial ideas that existed in her new faith regarding both strands of her ancestry. Her story thus weaves slavery, Reconstruction, Indian Removal, the Jim Crow South, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints together into an unexpected tapestry all its own.[2]

Mary Jane Hunt and her twin brother Mathew “Mack” Hunt were born into slavery on 27 March 1847 in Mexica, Texas. [3] The Prendergast family who owned a sizable farm in central Texas, enslaved their mother, Mary Collins. [4] Mary Jane’s father, according to her mother, was Bob Hunt, a Mississippi Choctaw who married Collins “by ceremony,” a term used in the antebellum South to indicate that a marriage ceremony had taken place but it was outside the bounds of the law which prevented enslaved people from obtaining legal marriages. Hunt and Collins had four children together, but Hunt left the family before Mary Jane could form memories of him. According to Mary Jane, the Prendergast family probably knew and could attest to the identity of her father, Bob Hunt, but she had no recollection of him. Written sources do not survive to verify her memory. As Mary Jane explained it, her father left her mother “when they [white settlers] drove the Indians he lived with away.” What she knew about her father, she learned from her mother, and she believed that her father was “a full blood Choctaw Indian.” [5]

There are no available records on Mary Jane’s life before her emancipation at the end of the Civil War. She did marry a man named Charles McElroy while they were both still enslaved. McElroy was likely enslaved to neighbors of the Prendergasts when the two wed. Mary Jane married Charles “by ceremony” because, as she explained it, “during slavery time we could not marry by license,” so they were “only married by ceremony.” She was still a teenager when she and Charles wed but no record of the event survives to indicate the date of their marriage. [6]

Like the majority of formerly enslaved people in the American south, Charles and Mary Jane struggled financially in the latter half of the twentieth century. Sometime between 1865 and 1870, the couple moved to neighboring Freestone County, where Mary Jane lived the rest of her life. [7]

Charles’s tax assessment rolls indicate that the budding family owned little and worked hard. Between 1870 and 1890, Charles was never taxed for more than three horses and a few head of cattle, likely renting the land he worked. [8] Also during this time, the couple grew their family, with Mary Jane giving birth to eight children, although only the names of seven survive (one likely died in infancy). They had Willie (1866), Mary (1868), Lucy (1870), Bud (1873), John (1878), Alice (1879), and Edgar (1879). Of the seven, only Mary, John, and Edgar left records behind to indicate their lives beyond their appearances in federal census enumerations. By 1910, all but two of her children had passed away. [9]

What is clear from the historical record, however, was the importance of family networks for the McElroys and other members of the Black community in central Texas. For instance, Mary Jane’s mother, Mary Collins, moved in with her daughter after the death of her second husband, Peter Collins, sometime between 1870 and 1880. [10] In 1900, Mary Collins lived with her daughter Rosa Collins in Dallas, until her death sometime after 1910. [11] Mary Jane, for her part, kept in close contact with her siblings, nieces, and nephews throughout her life. [12]

On 12 October 1899, James Moroni Billingsley from Beaver, Utah, baptized Mary Jane into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Thomas Bowen Lee from Tooele, Utah, confirmed her on the same day. [13] Despite their closeness, none of Mary Jane’s family members appear in baptismal records or other Latter-day Saint documents. Even though Mary Jane’s thoughts about her religious beliefs do not survive, there is no evidence of her undergoing a faith transition. In fact, the 1925 Church Census counted Mary Jane as a Latter-day Saint, living in the Central States Mission, an indication that she identified as a member of the Church three decades after her baptism, and possibly for the rest of her life. [14]

Two years after her baptism, in 1901, Mary Jane and a half-dozen of her extended family members applied for membership in the Mississippi Choctaw tribe. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the interviews and affidavits show how assimilation, race, and identity collided in turn-of-the-century central Texas.

In 1887, Congress passed the Allotment Act into law. More commonly known as the Dawes Act, the law was designed to eradicate what white reformers considered the last vestige of Indigenous identity from Native Americans, that is tribal or communal ownership of land. Reformers came to believe that making Native Americans over into private property owners would complete the assimilation process and make Native Americans into American citizens. The Dawes Act thus abolished tribal governments and forced tribes to divide their reservations into individual allotments to be owned privately. [15] Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes – the namesake of the bill – felt private land ownership encouraged competition and the yeoman farmer ideal. After allotment, remaining reservation lands were opened to white farmers. The end result was the loss of millions of acres of land, stripped from Native Americans. [16] Initially, the groups commonly labeled the “Five Civilized Tribes” – Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Muscogees (Creeks) – were exempt from allotment, but in 1893, they were folded into the allotment system. [17] The Bureau of Indian Affairs established committees, nicknamed “Dawes Commissions,” to oversee applications of individuals seeking to receive tribal affiliations and their own allotment. [18]

These commissions attempted to verify a person’s tribal identity before allowing a person to qualify for a land allotment. The process was thoroughly documented and legalistic, but was not scientifically rigorous. Commissioners relied on blood quantum, a practice that calculated the amount of “Indian blood” a person possessed by examining their family tree. As historians have pointed out, such practices were faulty and highly racialized. [19] Mixed race applicants such as Mary Jane were labeled “pretendians,” with Black applicants being especially discriminated against. [20] In the era before genetic testing, the evidence for one’s blood quantum came in the form of witness testimony – like community members acknowledging the applicant as Indian – and extensive, documented knowledge of their family tree. [21] In Mary Jane’s case, she was unable to prove her case. She only had what her mother had told her about her father to rely upon and that failed to satisfy the Dawes Commission assigned to her case. When the commission asked Mary Jane, “was your father a slave?” she replied, “No, he was Indian, he was not slave.” The commission then inquired if she remembered her father, to which she answered, “No, never did see him.” The follow up was, “How do you know that he wasn’t a slave?” Mary Jane replied, “My mother always told me so; my old mistress and all of them told me.”[22]

Mary Jane and her siblings, nieces, and nephews applied for membership in the Mississippi Choctaw tribe alongside Mary Jane. It is not clear who organized the applications, but the case information lists the bundle of seven cases under Mary Jane’s name, which could mean she was the first to file or that the commission simply combined applications grounded in the same claim into one file. [23] Mary Jane and her family specifically applied under the fourteenth article of the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek between the Mississippi Choctaw and the federal government, one of the first legal actions of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Under the amendment, it permitted families to remain in Mississippi and receive land if the head of the family reported to an Indian Agent within six months of the treaty. For the Dawes commissioners, Mary Jane’s case hinged on whether her father, Bob Hunt, had lived in Mississippi in 1830 and had made application under article fourteen of the treaty. [24]

Mary Jane and her family’s attempts were doomed from the start. Slavery ensured that no paper trail existed to verify her father and mother’s marriage, making her claim to Native American ancestry difficult to prove. Slavery, and the subsequent systemic failures of Reconstruction, meant Mary Jane and many of her family members never received proper schooling, thus they never learned to read. The family relied on oral histories to maintain and pass on the knowledge of their ancestors, but without documentation, they were unable to meet the Dawes Commission’s standard of evidence. Some of her family members had a hard time understanding the precise, legalistic language of the article under which they claimed membership. [25]

Slavery made it impossible for Mary Jane to trace her lineage past her mother and father, so that she lacked valuable evidence for the blood-quanta obsessed commission. [26] Several factors beyond the family’s application itself put them at a disadvantage. As historian Katherine Ellinghaus points out in her book The Blood Will Tell, the commission made it especially difficult for African Americans of Indian descent because it: “conferred on mixed-descent children the status of the mother; it enrolled mixed-descent Indians of African American ancestry as freedpeople, not as Native Americans; it imposed residence requirements; and it made administrative errors when it recorded individuals’ supposed blood quanta.” [27]

As Mary Jane attempted to trace her Choctaw membership through her father, she was hemmed in by all four factors that Ellinghaus identified. Three quarters of the way through her interview with the Dawes Commission, after explaining the exact requirements of the treaty and laying out the impossibility of her being able to prove her right to membership in the tribe, the interviewer asked, “Do you want to file these papers?” She responded, “I don’t know whether it would do good or not.” The commissioner’s tone is sympathetic and the exchange reveals that Mary Jane was well aware that her application had a limited chance at acceptance. [28] In the end, the commission denied Mary Jane’s application on the grounds that “the evidence herein is insufficient to determine the identity of Mary Jane McElroy.”[29]

Despite the difficulty in knowing what she had been taught about who her father was and what his tribal affiliation was, her African American ancestry superseded her Native American ancestry in the eyes of the commission. The commission described her as having “very prominent cheek bones, black eyes, and brown skin and shows slight traces of Indian blood; but her negro characteristics are very prominent[,] the flat nose and thick lips expecially [sic], and the skin is the color of very many negroes who are mixed with the white race.” The commissioners then added, “she does not speak Choctaw and she knows of no compliance on the part of her ancestors with the provisions of the fourteenth article of the treaty of 1830.” [30]

Despite such a rejection, other evidence indicates that Mary Jane was proud of her mixed racial heritage. She clearly communicated her ancestry to the missionaries who baptized her, and that was two years before she applied to the Dawes Commission. Her Latter-day Saint membership record included a note that her father was an “Indian” and her mother was “African.” In spite of her mixed-race identity, the majority of official documents only recorded her as Black, an indication of the ways in which even a remote degree of African ancestry was thought to outweigh other racial identities. Latter-day Saints followed the same practice. The missionaries who created her baptismal record wrote the word “colored” next to her name, a term used to unofficially indicate Black African ancestry in the margins of Latter-day Saint membership records. [31] By 1907, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would entrench around a “one drop” policy that would bar anyone of Black African ancestry, “no matter how remote a degree,” from priesthood ordination and temple admission, a policy that would have prevented Mary Jane from temple admission if she could have left her home in central Texas for such an event in the first place.[32]

Sometime before 1910, Mary Jane’s husband Charles died. [33] The date and cause have not been found, though it must have had a profound impact on her as she did not remarry. She moved in with her youngest son, Edgar, and his wife Callie. [34] As Edgar served in the first World War, Mary Jane likely helped look after her many grandchildren. [35]

There is little recorded about Mary Jane’s life in the twentieth century, aside from occasional appearances in the county newspaper. In 1940, she was in a short feature about the history of the county, though the paper seems to frame her almost like an artifact of slavery and the past, juxtaposing a picture of her against a historic building and an old bell, saying “Mary Jane Catherine McElroy, who was 100 years old in March. A former slave, she has lived in Fairfield since 1869.” [36]

Another story, from 1938, offers readers a feel-good story about the reuniting of friends. It reports that “Aunt Mary Jane” returned stockings to her friend Martha Cox after borrowing them – and not seeing each other – for 68 years. [37] Yet the story includes several unspoken messages as well. It contains implications about the dividing effects of slavery and the Reconstruction South. Mobility and poverty made travel and leisurely visits difficult, a fact that helps to account for the 68-year-gap between borrowing stockings from her friend and returning them decades later.

Finally, in 1940, a local paper ran a story reporting on Mary Jane’s 100th birthday. A community store hosted a party for Mary Jane and “showered her with gifts.” It is possible that her one hundredth birthday did occur in 1940 but based on the birthdate she used in her baptismal record, her age on the 1870 census, and the age she gave to the Dawes Commission, she was still seven years shy of one hundred in 1940. [38] She did, however, eventually live to see her one hundredth birthday. [39]

Mary Jane Hunt McElroy died on 28 January 1948. [40] Multiple newspapers ran her obituary because of her advanced age, reporting that she was 107 years old. Even though that was inaccurate, she was one hundred years old, a remarkable longevity all its own. Old age ran in Mary Jane’s family, as her mother lived to be at least 97 years old. [41] Mary Jane outlived her husband, Charles, and possibly all of her children. [42] She was remembered as “Aunt Jane,” and according to her obituary in the Fairfield Recorder, “she was known and respected by a large number of white folks in Freestone and Limestone County, where she spent practically all of her life.” [43] But Mary Jane’s life was much more complex than even her old age might indicate. Her story connects to the horrors of slavery, Reconstruction, Native American displacement and assimilation, and the trials of the Jim Crow South—and along the way she joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

By Austen Bergstrom

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[1] “U.S., Native American Applications for Enrollment in Five Civilized Tribes, 1898-1914,” Mississippi Choctaw, Cases MCR2838-MCR2923, images 1408-1412, interview with Mary Jane McElroy, 10 July 1901.

[2] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Records of Members Collection, Southwestern States Mission, Lone Star Conference, CR 375 8, Box 6935, Folder 2, Item 39, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[3] Mississippi Choctaw Cases, interview with Mary Jane McElroy; Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Records of Members Collection, Southwestern States Mission, Lone Star Conference, CR 375 8, Box 6935, Folder 2, Item 39, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[4] United States, 1860 Census, Texas, Limestone County, L. B. Prendergast.

[5] Mississippi Choctaw Cases, interview with Mary Jane McElroy.

[6] Mississippi Choctaw Cases, interview with Mary Jane McElroy; United States, 1860 Census, Texas, Limestone County, L. B. Prendergast. One of Luke’s daughters has the last name “Mc Elroy” in the census, implying that the family lived in proximity to a McElroy family, one that possibly enslaved Charles.

[7] United States, 1870 Census, Texas, Freestone County, Charles McElroy.

[8] Texas, County Tax Rolls 1846-1910, Charles McElroy, 1870, Freestone County.

[9] United States, 1870 Census, Texas, Freestone County, Charles McElroy; United States, 1910 Census, Texas, Freestone County, Edgar McElroy; United States, 1930 Census, Texas, Freestone County, Edgar McElroy; Texas, Deaths, 1890-1977, John McElroy, 19 June 1942. John McElroy does not appear in any census before his death in 1942. There is a possibility census takers recorded his nickname – possibly Bud – and misheard his age. John reporting his parents as Mary Jane and Charles McElroy makes it likely he was indeed their child.

[10] United States, 1880 Census, Texas, Freestone County, Charles McElroy.

[11] United States, 1900 Census, Texas, Dallas County, Rosa Collins; United States, 1910 Census, Texas, Dallas County, Effie Mcrey.

[12] Mississippi Choctaw Cases, interview with Mary Jane McElroy. Within the testimonies of the applications, Mary and her family testify to knowing, visiting, and interacting with their extended family.

[13] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Church History Biographical Database, Thomas Bowen Lee; Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Church History Biographical Database, James Moroni Billingsley.

[14] “McElroy, Mary Jane Hunt,” Presiding Bishopric stake and mission census, 1925 census, Family History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[15] “Dawes Act (1887),” Milestone Documents, The National Archives.

[16] "Dawes Act, Allotment, and Assimilation," in Gale U.S. History Online Collection (Gale, 2024).

[17] “Dawes Act (1887),” Milestone Documents, The National Archives.

[18] Katherine Ellinghaus, Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy (The University of Nebraska Press and the American Philosophical Society, 2017), 24-25.

[19] Ellinghas, Blood Will Tell, xv-xvi.

[20] Ellinghas, Blood Will Tell, 28.

[21] Ellinghas, Blood Will Tell, 27.

[22] Mississippi Choctaw Cases, interview with Mary Jane McElroy.

[23] Mississippi Choctaw Cases, interview with Mary Jane McElroy.

[24] The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, Treaty With The Choctaw, 27 September 1830, 7 Stat., 333, Proclamation, Feb. 24, 1831.

[25] Mississippi Choctaw Cases, interview with Jeff Prendergast.

[26] Mississippi Choctaw Cases, interview with Mary Jane McElroy.

[27] Ellinghaus, Blood Will Tell, 32.

[28] Mississippi Choctaw Cases, interview with Mary Jane McElroy.

[29] Department of the Interior, Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, In the matter of the application of Mary Jane McElroy, et al., for identification as Mississippi Choctaws, Decision, Muskogee, Indian Territory, 7 October 1902.

[30] Mississippi Choctaw Cases, interview with Mary Jane McElroy.

[31] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Records of Members Collection, Southwestern States Mission, Lone Star Conference, CR 375 8, Box 6935, Folder 2, Item 39, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

[32] W. Paul Reeve, Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood, (Deseret Book, 2023), chapter 13.

[33] United States, 1910 Census, Texas, Freestone County, Edgar McElroy.

[34] United States, 1910 Census, Texas, Freestone County, Edgar McElroy.

[35] United States, Texas, Freestone County, World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918, Edgar McElroy, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.

[36] “Fairfield’s Story Stretches Far Into Past,” The Fairfield Recorder (Fairfield, Texas), 10 October 1940, 7.

[37] “Returns Borrowed Stockings After 68 Years,” The Fairfield Recorder (Fairfield, Texas), 7 March 1938.

[38] Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Records of Baptisms, Southwestern States Mission, Lone Star Conference, CR 375 8, Box 6935, Folder 2, Item 39, Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah; Mississippi Choctaw Cases, interview with Mary Jane McElroy; United States, 1870 Census, Texas, Freestone County, Charles McElroy.

[39] “One Hundred Years Old On Saturday Mar. 27,” The Fairfield Recorder (Fairfield, Texas), 21 March 1940.

[40] Texas, Department of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Certificate of Death, Mary Jane McElroy, 28 January 1948.

[41] Mississippi Choctaw Cases, interview with Mary Jane McElroy.

[42] A man named Will Hunt with the same birthday, race, and birthplace as Willie died in 1958 in Dallas. His parents were listed as “No-record,” meaning there is a possibility that it could be Willie McElroy and that he adopted his grandfather’s surname. Texas, Death Index, 1903-2000, Will Hunt, 10 Oct 1958.

[43] “Old Time Negro Dies Jan. 29th,” The Fairfield Recorder (Fairfield, Texas), 12 February 1948; “Negress Believed Over 107 Dead,” Corsicana Daily Sun (Corsicana, Texas) 14 February 1948, 6.

Documents

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