History Taskforce

06/03/2026

https://www.historytaskforce.org/sarah-e-white-davis.html #/



Sarah Elizabeth "Betty" White Davis
Wife of Nat Hart Davis, Montgomery, TX

The 26-page document below was found among loose papers pertaining to the Nat Hart Davis family when the 22,000 documents in the Gandy Collection were digitized in 2025 by the History Taskforce. The entirety of the collection is being indexed by Family Search and should be available online to everyone soon. The author of the 26-page document is not known, but because of the content, it may have been written by someone in the family of Sarah Elizabeth White, also known as Betty, the wife of Nat Hart Davis. The author of the handwritten notations on the document is also unknown. Some of its information can be verified by entries in the family's Bible. The document's content focuses on their marriage and on members of the White family. It contains information about the deaths of her first two children, burial by a hollow oak and plantings taken from her family home and planted by the graves by Nat Hart Davis. These included lilies, rose of Sharon and hyacinth. (Pages 6, 8, and 20) A detailed description of their original house (now the Davis Museum in Montgomery) and information about other early residents of Montgomery is included.

​This is a true historical look at the lives of many people during those times.

Sarah Elizabeth "Betty" White Davis Wife of Nat Hart Davis, Montgomery, TX The 26-page document below was found among loose papers pertaining to the Nat Hart Davis family when the 22,000...

05/19/2026

Visit our website for a complete guide to all our projects. So much more to come....

05/05/2026

Members of the History Taskforce met with students at Lone Star College - Kingwood on April 28th during a history-themed cultural exhibition. We helped students start their family trees and provided links via QR code to free resources. We explained some of our successful projects which can be found at Historytaskforce.org.

04/23/2026

Wednesday morning, state, county and city officials and citizens honored J. GOLDSTEIN DuPREE, who served as one of twelve Black state legislators in the 12th Texas Legislature during the post-Civil War Reconstruction period in the early 1870s. It is believed that he is buried in an unmarked grave in the historic African American Montgomery Memorial Cemetery.

The marker memorial ceremony was held at the Montgomery Memorial Cemetery which recently was recognized with a county historical marker. The ceremony was organized by our MCHC member T J WILKERSON who served as the Master of Ceremonies and organized the program. Also participating in the ceremony were State Representative WILL METALF, County Judge MARK KEOUGH, and Montgomery city mayor SARA COUNTRYMAN.

04/19/2026

02/20/2026

Recently, our area had the opportunity to experience the site of Big Boy. The Union Pacific Railroad Company Locomotive, also known as Union Pacific 4014, is the type built in 1941 by the American Locomotive Company to haul heavy freight trains. Seeing Big Boy as it approached the city of Springs’ train stop was impressive even for me and many others, judging by the crowds it has generated everywhere it has traveled. Given the fact, I’ve had opportunities to travel the world, this Big Boy was something. One can only imagine what a young African-American boy, born of ex-enslaved people in a time of great prejudices and blaring signs of everything not accessible to him, would have thought the first time he saw a massive black steam engine approaching his hometown of Willis, Texas, in 1876. Such was the case of Ned Eastman Barnes born in 1866 in Danville, Montgomery County, Texas with parents probably sharecropping during this post Civil War environment. Willis was a tiny rural area at the time with mud streets, candle lights, kerosene and oil lamps, log cabins, or rough wood structures for housing, horses, and buggies, or walking as the only modes of transportation; railways must have seemed almost mythical.

Due to segregation, African-American children like Ned Eastman Barnes were allowed a fifth-grade education in their local area. If a child wanted to have the opportunity for advanced learning, they would have to leave the area because those opportunities did not exist for these young, poor black children like Ned Eastman Barnes. As a child, working as a houseboy for the T. W. Smith-Owen family, listening as this sometimes lumbering, sometimes roaring, but always moving train coming to and through his hometown and dreaming of seeing the conductors, addressing various challenges on this equipment, and imagining ways to improve those challenges. He would one day file and receive eight patterns for improvements in this system. He would also receive two additional patents in other areas for other mechanical and structural improvements.

Having had no mechanical engineering education and yet developing a mechanical engineering aptitude, for many of us today seems impossible, but for those in the Barnes community of the time knew it was a fact. He was well-known and appreciated in his community among his family, church, family, and friends. It must not have been easy because, at the time he received his first patents, there were probably many other applications denied. Looking at the life Ned Eastman Barnes, one gets the impression nothing came easy, even trying to list his occupation on the 1900 census. The enumerator left this area blank, yet the community at the time knew he identified himself as an inventor. His occupation was not listed until the 1910 census when he had received approval for four of his patents. He would go on to get a total of 10 patents, and one of those was shared with Berger Edmond.

Ned Eastman Barnes died in 1952 and is buried in Willis, Montgomery County, Texas, his hometown.

C. Stubblefield Walker

02/10/2026

History Taskforce's very own Cynthia Stubblefield Walker will speak at this conference.

02/08/2026

Thank you to all our followers! We love sharing information, projects and more is coming soon. The History Taskforce appreciates your interest.

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12/31/2025

Celebrating the life of Orbra Toliver, the great carpenter behind Thomas Chapel United Methodist Church restoration
By Ann Meador

When the History Taskforce decided in 2021 that we wanted to try to restore the Thomas Chapel United Methodist Church in Willis, we knew we needed a carpenter who knew a lot about old historic wooden church buildings.

Because it was a Recorded Texas Landmark Building from 1899, it would have to be reconstructed with the same methods and same materials that were used by the sons of the slaves on the Greenwood Plantation in Danville when they built it. We soon discovered that there are not a lot of people who still know how to do that.
I started by talking to pastors across this area who had churches of a similar age to see who they got to make repairs on their own churches.
After talking to several elderly pastors in New Waverly, Crockett, Lufkin and numerous rural churches, one name kept coming up in these conversations…..Orbra Toliver…..in fact, the Rev. Orbra Toliver of the Toliver Memorial Church of God in Christ, right there in Willis. I called him to explain the project and he suggested that we meet at the church on Martin Luther King Boulevard.
We walked around the building looking at all the things that needed to be fixed. I had to confess to him that right at that moment I wasn’t sure where I would get the money to pay for this work. He just said that he would help with the work.
I appreciate your offer but this is a different denomination from your church, I said.

God doesn’t live in any one church, he said. We are all brothers and sisters in God’s family and we should help each other. And so we did.
For the next three years, Rev. Toliver worked daily on that building, taking out rotted boards, rebuilding subfloors where raccoons had gnawed through to get inside, and building handrails on handicapped ramps with such skill that it is difficult to see where the boards were joined to each other. And he always took time to teach his skills to whatever volunteers we could find to help him.
To satisfy the architects at the Texas Historical Commission in Austin, he rebuilt windows from scratch to match the original ones and reproduced doors exactly like the ones that were original to the structure in 1899. Then he took out the pine slab that served as a threshold, likely found in the scrap pile at a local sawmill, and reset the door.
He often pointed out that the boards of different widths and lengths that made up the wall and ceiling of the 1952 community room addition probably came from the same scrap pile. Sawmills were a major employer of church members in those days. And since they did not have money, they had to make do with whatever they could find to use, he explained.

He was always careful to preserve this part of the story of the old building.
Sometimes when his cellphone rang, he would take a break from his work to speak to a church member or neighbor. He would sit on the steps of the church to pray with them, counsel them or read scripture with them from the Bible he kept in his work truck. In a little while he would come back inside, pick up his tools and go back to the repair he was working on.
After three long years of work on Thomas Chapel, it was as complete as we could make it with the money we had. Rev. Toliver seemed pleased with the results and returned to helping his neighbors and church members with repairs that they could not pay for. He always was there to help those who needed his skills as a carpenter and as a pastor.
Last January he was doing exactly that when he was called out to help someone in the community who needed help with damage caused by Hurricane Beryl.

During that work, something went wrong and he fell from the roof, suffering a head injury. He never fully regained consciousness.
From his bed in a Houston treatment center after nearly a year, in the early hours of Dec. 1, he was again called out - called Home to be a helper to the Great Carpenter.
We will all miss him.

12/20/2025

The Historical Commission's recent receipt of county reimbursement grant funds highlights the strong commitment of the Commissioners Court to historic preservation. These funds, designated for qualified 501(c)(3) nonprofit historic organizations, are instrumental in supporting the preservation of the county's cultural heritage. An excellent example of this commitment is the History Taskforce, which received a grant for their restoration efforts on the Thomas Chapel Church in Willis, TX. This funding not only aids in the physical restoration of the site but also helps maintain the community's connection to its historical roots. The Commissioners Court's dedication ensures that such projects can continue, fostering appreciation for local history and heritage.