CROWNOVER, JOHN (1774-1842). John Crownover, an early settler, was born on October 7, 1774, to Benjamin and Rachel (Jasper) Crownover, who lived in Union District, South Carolina. Benjamin Crownover served in the Revolutionary War in South Carolina and received 200 acres of land for his service. In 1830 John Crownover moved to Texas from Arkansas with his wife, Elizabeth, and one daughter. He applied for land in May 1835 under Stephen F. Austin's fifth contract. His grant was located in Madison County. John Crownover married Elizabeth Chesney in South Carolina about 1793. Their first three children were born there. They moved to Buncombe County, North Carolina, then to Hardin County, Kentucky, to Illinois, and later to Arkansas and Texas. They had eleven children. Their grown children preceded them to Texas. John C. Crownover, who settled in Fayette County, arrived in 1824 as one of the Old Three Hundred. His sister, Mary Crownover Rabb, who published Travels and Adventures in Texas in the 1820's, came with her husband, John Rabb. John Crownover's will was dated August 18, 1842, and recorded in the Fayette County Courthouse at La Grange in 1843. Elizabeth died in 1844. The name Crownover derives from the name Wolfert Gerretse van Kouwenhove, the first of this family from the Netherlands, who sailed to New York in 1625.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Eugene C. Barker, ed., The Austin Papers (3 vols., Washington: GPO, 1924-28). Worth Stickley Ray, Austin Colony Pioneers (Austin: Jenkins, 1949; 2d ed., Austin: Pemberton, 1970). Villamae Williams, Stephen F. Austin's Register of Families (Nacogdoches, Texas: Ericson, 1984).
