James Webb and Webbville (Part 2)

Webbville as shown on an 1834 map of Jackson County.

Webbville was just reaching its height at the end of 1828 when its top promoter, James Webb, received an unexpected honor from the President of the United States.

This is Part 2 of a two part series on the James Webb and the history of Webbville. Please click here to read Part 1 before continuing.

The U.S. Congress approved the creation of a Federal superior court for the Southern District of Florida on May 23, 1828. President John Quincy Adams signed the Act and three days later named James Webb of Webbville as the new district's first judge.

How President Adams knew the lawyer from Webbville is one of the many mysteries that surround the community. Webb had been elected to the Florida Territorial Legislative Council in 1827, but this alone would not have brought him to the attention of the President. He must have had political connections that recommended him to the Adams administration.

The offer of a Federal judgeship was too big of a prize to decline. Webb accepted the post, resigned his seat in the territorial legislature and prepared to move to Key West. Newspaper accounts and court records indicate that he did return to Jackson County from time to time. In August 1829, for example, he issued notice that he would preside over a term of the Superior Court at Webbville:

Webbville as it appears today.

Chambers, 24th August, 1829.

ORDERED, That there be an extra term of the Superior Court held in and for the County of Jackson in the Western District of Florida on the first Monday of December next, and of which due notice will be given.

James Webb.

Judge of the Southern District of Florida, Acting in the absence of the Judge of the Western District.

He and Rachel had their fourth child that year with the birth of Charles John Webb.

Judge Webb and his family were soon firmly established in Key West and their lands in Jackson County were sold. Webbville was without its namesake by the end of 1829 and his good fortune could not have come at a worse time for the community.

Webbville had won a referendum of voters to become county seat, but the fledgling community of Marianna refused to give up the fight. The Marianna faction somehow managed to sway the opinion of Lackland Stone of Webbville to their side. He now held Webb's former seat in the legislative council and soon pushed through a bill naming Marianna as the county seat. It was approved on October 20, 1828.

Webbville's promoters viewed this action by Stone as nothing short of betrayal. He had been one of them and had even served as their first postmaster. He sold his businesses while running for the legislature, however, and now cast his lot in favor of Marianna, despite the fact that a majority of Jackson County voters had favored Webbville in the recent election.

Baker Creek was one of two important creeks that flowed
near the site of the Town of Webbville, Florida.

Webbville turned to the U.S. Congress for help. Florida was still a territory and not a state, which made Congress the final authority for such matters. A petition was sent to Washington, D.C., warning that the Webbville Academy would be forced to close unless Congress intervened. Florida's Territorial Delegate, Joseph M. White, pushed for action.

The U.S. Congress obliged on January 21, 1829, by overturning the legislative act that had given Marianna the county seat title. Webbville once again claimed the distinction. Congress also approved the town's location on lands reserved for school purposes.

Recognizing that they could not legally overrule Congress, Florida's territorial legislators tried a different approach. They took no action on the county seat title, but instead levied fines against any public officials in Jackson County not conducting business from Marianna:

Sec. 3. Be it further enacted, That the Superior and county courts of said county shall hereafter be holden in the house erected and built as aforesaid; and all other county or public transactions shall be held and transacted in the same, and all the prisoners of said county shall hereafter be confined in the house built and erected as aforesaid.

Sec. 4. Be it further enacted, That it shall be the duty of the commissioners aforesaid, to deliver the said houses to the sheriff of said county, who shall allow the marshal and clerk of the Superior courts, and clerk of the county courts; free access to the said house in which the said courts are to be held, and shall also allow the said officers rooms in the same for their several offices.

Sec. 5. And be it further enacted, That it shall be the duty of the said clerks of the Superior and County courts of said county, to hold their offices at the house aforesaid, in the town of Marianna, or within one mile of the same, and on failure thereof, be or they shall forfeit and pay the sum of twenty dollars for every week thereof, to be recovered in the name of the informer, before any justice of the peace in and for said county, in the same manner as in other cases of debt; one half to be paid unto the county Treasurer for the use of the county, and the other half to the informer; and this act shall be in force from and after its passage. 

Baker Creek Road, in use since the 1820s, passed by the
Jackson County home and farm of James Webb.

The threat of a fines had the desired effect. The public officials of Jackson County quickly relocated from Webbville to Marianna and have remained there ever since. The same legislation also approved the building of a courthouse and jail in Marianna and the collection of public funds for the projects. Webbville remained the county seat in title only.

Almost as if to add insult to injury, the Territorial Council on November 19, 1829 approved the incorporation of the Town of Webbville. Even as its residents were beginning to flee, the community became Jackson County's first incorporated town.

The issue of the county seat location surfaced one more time during the Fayette County fiasco of 1832, but Marianna retained its unofficial but very real status as seat of government for Jackson County.

Webbville's loss in the county seat battle marked the end of the town. Its population and businesses shifted to Marianna. Building materials were salvaged from the now vacant buildings for use in homes, barns and fences throughout western Jackson County.The site eventually fell under the ownership of W.D. Barnes, who lived there and named his Webbville Plantation after the failed community. By the time of the War Between the States (or Civil War), his farm was all that remained to remind travelers on the Campbellton Road that the town had ever existed.

Webb-Porter House in Key West, Florida
The home was built by Hon. James Webb
shortly before his relocation to Texas in 1838.
Library of Congress

James Webb, meanwhile, lived in Key West and serve on the Federal bench until 1838 when he resigned his post and relocated to Houston, Texas. He went from there to Austin at the insistence of President Mirabeau B. Lamar, the President of the Republic of Texas, who appointed him to successive positions as Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State.

President Lamar's interest in Webb probably had something to do with his family relationship to the judge's wife, Rachel Elizabeth Lamar Webb. He soon recognized that James Webb was a talented and brilliant official, however, and named him Attorney General of the Republic of Texas on November 18, 1839.

The Texas Revolution of 1836 had made Texas an independent nation. Webb's service to the republic gave him the unique status of having held multiple high-ranking positions in the governments of two different nations.

He continued as Attorney General of Texas until March 20, 1841, when he became the Lone Star republic's Minister to Mexico. The latter country refused to seat him so he returned home to represent the Travis-Bastrop-Fayette-Gonzales district as Senator from 1841-1844. Webb served as chairman of the Judiciary Committee and as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee.

James Webb also practiced law in Texas in partnership with Williamson S. Oldham, a former speaker of the Arkansas House of Representatives and onetime Associate Justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court. He was a member of the Convention of 1845 that cleared the way for Texas to become part of the United States.

Webb County in Texas, seen here on a 1920 map, was named
for James Webb, onetime resident of Webbville, Florida.

After statehood he became a reporter for the Texas State Supreme Court and worked with Thomas H. Duval to produce the first three volumes of Texas Reports. Duval, a former Clerk of Courts for Leon County, was the son of former Florida Governor William P. Duval for whom Duval County is named.

Webb became the Secretary of State for the now State of Texas in 1849, holding that post until 1851 when he resigned and moved to the Corpus Christi area. He was named the first judge of Fourteenth Judicial Circuit of Texas in 1854 and was still serving on the bench when he died while en route to the town of Goliad for a session of the court on November 1, 1856.

The man for whom Jackson County's lost town of Webbville was named is buried in the City Cemetery at Goliad, Texas. His tombstone notes that he was a Mason and grand master of the Texas Lodge in 1844.

Although his namesake town in Florida no longer exists, his memory lives on in Texas where Webb County was named in his honor.

Not a single building remains at the site of Webbville today.

For a visual tour of historic Webbville as it appears today, watch a new program from Two Egg TV on Sunday! A link will be posted here as soon as it the program is up and airing.

James Webb and Webbville: A remarkable man and Jackson County's first town

A view south down Union Road from the site of
Webbville in Jackson County, Florida.

Webbville is one of Florida's best known ghost towns. It was Jackson County's first incorporated community and - according to the U.S. Congress at least - remains its official seat of government.

Note: This is Part One of a two part series. Click here to continue to Part Two.

Not a soul lives on the site today, but its stories remain some of the most interesting in the county's history.

Florida had been a U.S. territory for only two years when James Webb arrived from Georgia in 1823. A veteran of the War of 1812 and a former school teacher, he had practiced law in both Virginia and Georgia before coming to the "Chipola Settlement" at the age of 31.

Jackson County was only one year old and then stretched from the Choctawhatchee River on the West to the Suwannee River on the east. It included all or parts of today's Holmes, Washington, Bay, Calhoun, Gulf, Franklin, Liberty, Gadsden, Leon, Wakulla, Jefferson, Taylor, Madison, Dixie, Suwannee, Lafayette and Hamilton Counties.

Not a building remains on the site of Jackson County's
first incorporated town. The one-time county seat of
Webbville has vanished without a trace.

Attorneys were few and far between in this vast region. Marianna, Chipley, Bonifay, Panama City, Port St. Joe, Apalachicola, Quincy, Tallahassee, Monticello and other well-known communities of today did not yet exist but settlers were arriving in increasing numbers.

One of the earliest American communities in this region was the old Chipola Settlement, which lay south of today's Waddell's Mill Pond and west of the Chipola River. Similar settlements were growing elsewhere within the present Jackson County limits at Campbellton, Greenwood, Irwin's Mill Creek and on the Apalachicola River near Sneads.

James Webb was a family man and it seems strange today that he would pull up stages and head off into a largely unexplored wilderness but this was how fortunes were made on the American frontier of the early 19th century.

His wife, the former Rachel Elizabeth Lamar, was expecting a child at the time and remained back in Georgia with her family and the couple's 10-year-old daughter, Mary Elizabeth, while James headed south to Florida. He would clear land and build a home before they traveled down to join him.

James Webb's land was located in the Southeast 1/4 of Section
9 and the Southwest 1/4 of Section 10, as shown on this 1826
survey plat. The creek running east to west is Russ Mill Creek.

Webb eventually laid claim to four pieces of land in Jackson County, but the most important of these were two adjoining parcels between Russ Mill Creek and Baker Creek. Located near today's Baker Creek Road, they combined to total about 450 acres, 100 acres of which he cleared over the next few years.

Rachel, Mary and the new baby boy, Thomas Francis Webb, arrived in Florida in 1824. The family grew by another member one year later when another baby boy, James William Webb, was born.

Sugar production then rivaled cotton on the plantations of Jackson County and was especially popular along the wetlands and creeks of the Chipola Settlement. James Webb grew sugar cane on his farm, probably sending the stalks down the creek to the sugar mill near the Natural Bridge of the Chipola River at Florida Caverns State Park. Little is known of this early refinery, but the Pensacola newspaper regularly reported the arrival of hogsheads of sugar from the Chipola River region.

Jackson County grew dramatically between 1822 and 1825. The population soared from fewer than 200 to more than 2,000 in that short time period. The Chipola Settlement emerged as the largest community within today's county limits and a central village began to grow on Section 16, Township 5 North, Range 11 West.

Union Road crosses Russ Mill Creek by way of a wooden
bridge. The creek was an important source of water power
for grist and saw mills that served Webbville.

James Webb hung out his shingle there and opened a law office, one of the first in Jackson County. He later partnered with Peter W. Gautier, a prominent figure in frontier Florida. Other businesses opened as well, among them Col. L.M. Stone's general store. Some idea of the prosperity of the community can be obtained from early real estate listings which mention two story homes with wraparound porches and a brick store building.

The growth of the community further spurred by an act of the Florida Territorial Legislative Council on January 20, 1827. Hoping to head off a growing dispute over the permanent location of a county seat for Jackson County, the legislators appointed a commission to select the final site, survey the community and initiate the sale of lots. James Webb was one of the five members named to this board.

While the selection committee did its work, the legislative council decreed that the courts of Jackson County would meet on Section 16, Township 5 North, Range 11 West. This was the location of Stone's Store, Webb's law office and the growing community of business and houses that would become the county's first town.

Stone's Store had been named a U.S. Post Office the previous June and on February 2, 1837, ads appeared in the Pensacola Gazette announcing that the village had been named Webbville.

Jackson County's first post office, first hotel and first
public school stood atop this hill at Webbville.

James Webb was instrumental in many of the accomplishments of the town that bore his name. He served Board of Trustees for the Webbville Academy, Jackson County's first public school. The students studied Greek and Latin, as well as mathematics, science, literature and other courses of the day. The school opened its doors in 1827 and students sat for their first quarterly finals on May 25, 1827:

The first quarterly examination of the students of this institution took place this day, under the direction of the Trustees, and they take much pleasure in stating, to parents and guardians who have placed their children and wards in this Seminary, that the examination was highly satisfactory and reflected much credit on the teacher, for his care and abilities in conducting the school, and upon the pupils, for their industry and attainments. - Trustees of Webbville Academy to the Pensacola Gazette, May 27, 1827, published in the Pensacola Gazette, June 22, 1827.

James Webb signed the report as one of the school's seven Trustees. The others were Peter W. Gautier, Thomas Baltzell, William P. Hort, Joseph Russ, William J. Watson and Thomas Russ.

Webbville hosted a 4th of July celebration that year. A "numerous assemblage of citizens" listened as Benjamin W. Cumming read the Declaration of Independence. A speech and dinner followed, but the evening's toasts - accompanied by gunfire - were the highlights of the day.

Independence Day of 1827 found Webbville on the verge of great success. Its population and business community were growing. It had been temporarily designated as county seat and the county's first school was functioning well.

The prosperity would not last. A major political fight loomed on the horizon, as did a change that would start James Webb down the path to a remarkable life.

Please click here to continue to Part 2 of this two part series.