Bright, David (1770–1837)

David Bright, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, was born in Augusta County, Virginia, in 1770. He married Judith Dinsmore on June 6, 1799, in Virginia. Bright and his family came to Texas from Illinois and Arkansas in 1822 and landed near the mouth of the Colorado River. On December 20, 1823, he voted in the alcalde election at San Felipe. He was one of the electors in the Colorado District in April 1824, when the Baron de Bastrop was chosen Texas delegate to the state convention of Coahuila and Texas. In 1823 and 1824 he cut brush for the chainmen of surveyor Horatio Chriesman in the Oyster Creek area of Fort Bend County. On May 10, 1824, Bright and his wife agreed that their daughter Betsy might marry Noel Roberts, and on May 24 their daughter Mary signed a marriage bond with Gabriel Straw Snider. One daughter had already married Eli Hunter, another of the Old Three Hundred. On July 15, 1824, Bright received title to a league of land on Oyster Creek in what is now eastern Fort Bend County and a labor of land that later became part of Austin County. The census of 1826 classified Bright as a farmer and stock raiser aged over fifty. His household then included his wife, a son, and a daughter. In April 1836 the Bright family and the Reels family camped near Liberty during the Runaway Scrape. Bright died on September 2, 1837. His daughter Mary Bright Snider, evidently a widow by 1837, married Patrick Reels on November 25 of that year.