LEWIS, KENDALL (ca. 1800-?). Kendall Lewis, early Titus County settler, was born in western Virginia before 1800 and grew up with his family in Choctaw Indian country in western Georgia. He married a Choctaw woman; the couple had six children. When the Choctaws began moving west in the late 1820s Lewis moved his family to the Caddo Lake area of Texas. In the early 1830s he settled on Swannano Creek in what is now Titus County. The Lewis family may have been the first permanent settlers of this region. Lewis owned the first tract of land surveyed (on March 30, 1838) in Titus County. He also patented the league and labor of land to which he was entitled. After Choctaw Indians murdered a Titus County family named Ripley in 1841, white settlers became so hostile toward the Lewis family that they were forced in 1842 to move to the Choctaw Nation in what is now Oklahoma. Although Lewis filed a suit for debt in Titus County in 1859, the family apparently remained in the Choctaw Nation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Clarksville Standard, March 19, 1859. Traylor Russell, History of Titus County (2 vols., Waco: Morrison, 1965, 1966; rpt. 1975).
