WALLACE, JOSEPH WORTHINGTON ELLIOT (1796-1877). Joseph Worthington Elliot Wallace, early settler, was born on April 8, 1796, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Some records list his name as Washington rather than Worthington.) After serving in the Seminole War, he lived in Port Gibson, Mississippi, where he was a colonel in the Mississippi militia. He moved to Texas in 1830 as a United States consul. He joined Stephen F. Austin's^qv colony and received a land grant in Matagorda County. At the outbreak of hostilities he operated stores at Wharton and Beeson's Crossing on the Colorado River. In the fall of 1835 he led a group of men from Columbus to Gonzales, where he was elected lieutenant colonel; he was in joint command of the forces at the battle of Gonzales.^qv In 1836 he wrote Thomas Jefferson Rusk^qv reporting Indian depredations in the Bay Prairie area. He and William B. DeWees^qv replatted the town of Columbus in 1837. In 1839 he was a delegate to a convention at Richmond to consider the location of a railroad. He was one of the officers in command at the battle of Plum Creek^qv in 1840. Wallace married Harriet Hazelton Hoit, daughter of Samuel Hoit;^qv she died in Mississippi in 1828. They had had one son, William Hazelton, who died during the Civil War^qv in the service of the Confederacy at Sabine Pass.^qv Wallace was a Mason and a member of the Texas Veterans Association.^qv He died at Columbus on August 24, 1877. His body was reinterred in the State Cemetery^qv in 1955.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: DeWitt Clinton Baker, comp., A Texas Scrap-Book (New York: Barnes, 1875; rpt. 1887; facsimile rpt., Austin: Steck, 1935). Eugene C. Barker, ed., The Austin Papers (3 vols., Washington: GPO, 1924-28). Marker Files, Texas Historical Commission, Austin. Andrew Forest Muir, "Railroad Enterprise in Texas, 1836-1841," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 47 (April 1944). Harold Schoen, comp., Monuments Erected by the State of Texas to Commemorate the Centenary of Texas Independence (Austin: Commission of Control for Texas Centennial Celebrations, 1938). Noah Smithwick, The Evolution of a State, or Recollections of Old Texas Days (Austin: Gammel, 1900; rpt., Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983).

Sarah J. Della Corte