Founder remembered as Adamsville's centennial celebration winds down
By JEFF JACKSON Special to the Dispatch Record

PHOTO COURTESY OF CANDICE BUCHANAN The tombstone of Adamsville's founder, John T. Adams, is located in the Green Mount Cemetery in Waynesburg, Pa. Adams was the first postmaster for the Adamsville community in the early 1890s.

The Adamsville Heritage Association has established the founding date of the Adamsville community as 1908. This date was based on a plat map or subdivision map dated Jan. 20, 1908, and it coincides with the year the Straley Common County School changed names to Adamsville. People have lived in the area since Lampasas County was created in 1856.

As Adamsville winds down its centennial celebration year, readers might be interested in learning more about the man for whom the town takes its name.

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Adamsville, Texas, was named for John T. Adams. His tombstone in the Green Mount Cemetery in Waynesburg, Greene County, Pa., indicates he was born Dec. 8, 1846. The cemetery is just above the Waynesburg College campus.

Adams was the son of Jesse Adams and Jane K. Gallagher. The Rev. Jesse Adams was a wellknown Cumberland Presbyterian minister.

John Adams' name is found on the 1850 Census of Morgan Township, Greene County, Pa. He would have been 3 years old at the time. Ten years later the family resided in Redstone Township, Fayette County, Pa., and in 1870 Adams still lived with his parents, in Franklin Township, Greene County, in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania.

When Adams came to Texas, he partnered with McCall Smith in the mercantile business near Townsen Mills. Smith was from Washington County, also in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania. There is no record of how the two men became friends, although it is likely they went to school at Waynesburg. They both arrived in Lampasas County sometime before 1880.

The men set up shop as merchants a mile or two west of Townsen Mills. They are listed in the Townsen Mills section of the "Texas State Gazetteer and Business Directory of 1884-85."

In 1880, Smith and 19 charter members met in the home of L. Jasper and Mary Ann Townsen, and they organized the Pleasant Valley Cumberland Presbyterian Church in the community that would become Adamsville. Today, that church is Adamsville Presbyterian Church.

In 1891, Perry Townsen was killed in an accident at his mill. He had been postmaster for the community, and after his death Townsen Mills closed as a post office.

The new post office was established that year at Smith & Adams General Store, and Adams became the first postmaster for the Adamsville community. Thomas J. Straley became postmaster in 1892.

Sometime before 1900, the partners Adams and Smith parted ways. Smith married the daughter of Harrison Miller and moved to San Diego County, Calif.

Adams never married. He remained in Adamsville for a while, worked as a stockman and lived with Fred and Daisy Thompson.

In 1920, he was a resident of San Saba County and listed his occupation as farmer.

He died in San Saba County on Nov. 11, 1924, just shy of his 78th birthday.

Adams' brief death notice said the funeral was at the residence of longtime friend Webster Miller (son of Harrison Miller), and his body was shipped back to Pennsylvania for interment.

He was buried near his parents in the Green Mount Cemetery on Nov. 16, 1924, a long way from the small Central Texas community that bears his name.