CLARE, H. T., Beeville Bee, 16 Nov 1900:

H. T. Clare, Dead.  He was one of the oldest residents of the county.  He had resided here 
since 1856 and in Texas since 1836. He helped organize Bee County and is identified 
with its progress.  

Full of years and rich in the esteem of the hundreds who knew him, Henry T. Clare, or 
“Uncle Henry” as he was familiarly known, passed to his reward on last Friday evening 
at half past one o’clock, after an illness of three weeks.  On the following morning his 
remains were carried to St. Joseph’s church where appropriate services were held and 
from there to the Catholic cemetery, where they were laid to rest in the presence of a vast 
concourse of friends, many of whom had from childhood known and esteemed him as a friend.


Mr. Clare was a native of St. Charles county, Missouri, having been born there on 
October 8, 1826, and when 9 years of age immigrated with his father to Texas and settled in 
what is now known as Jackson county, where he grew to manhood’s estate.  He came 
from a line of distinguished ancestry, the Clares of historic County Clare, Ireland.  
His grandfather came to America before the war of Independence and settled in Maryland, 
which having been the only distinctive settlement by England speaking catholics under the 
patronage of Lord Baltimore was a kind of magnet for subsequent immigration of colonists 
of like belief.  

After the revolutionary war the elder Clare moved westward with the tide of immigration, 
taking with him the father of this sketch, who was then a youth, lived for a while in 
Kentucky and later in Missouri, where Uncle Henry was born.

Uncle Henry was too young to participate in the Texas revolution, but he was a witness to 
many of the incidents of that period, and shared the hardships the earlier settlers underwent 
at that time from the Mexican invasion, and after from marauding bands of Indians.  In 1846, 
he joined the ranger force, which was commanded by Captain Sutton, an early ranger captain 
and which joined the army of the United States under Taylor in 1848 and invaded Mexico.

Returning from the Mexican war in 1849, he married in Lavaca County in that year to Miss 
Maggie E. Layton, who has been his life-long companion and survives him.  In 1856 they 
moved to Bee County, which was then a part of Goliad County and settled on the Aransas 
creek, where they lived until 1887 when they moved to Beeville.  

Seven children, five sons and two daughters, survive the union, all grown to the age of maturity 
and his sons are well-known ranchmen and have been identified with the progress of this section 
of the state.

In raising a bonus for the building of the Aransas Pass Railway fourteen years ago, Mr. Clare 
took an active part and when the office of livestock agent was created in 1888, the position 
was offered to him.  He was identified with the road in that capacity until the day of his death.  
How faithful he was in the discharge of his duties every cattleman who has shipped over that 
road knows, for no matter what the weather, he was to be found where duty called him and 
through him have the shippers of livestock been in closer touch with this road than they have 
perhaps with any other state.  

Possessed of a genial position, no ill-will will find lodgment in his heart against any, he was 
known and lived by almost every man, woman and child in Beeville, and his familiar figure will 
be sadly missed by all.