William Leech West, a Confederate veteran born in Alabama, but thereafter from Mississippi, brought his family to Texas during the Reconstruction period following the American Civil War. They arrived in about 1871. He owned a large farm to the east of the town of Caddo Grove, Texas along the Chisholm Trail. Family legend says that upon arriving in Texas, he temporarily left his wife and children safely in the wagon yards in Fort Worth and rode a rented horse south. His intent was to find an area where there were no fences. He journeyed for several days, staying in local settler's barns, until he found the area he liked near the geographic feature of Caddo Peak[1] in Johnson County.
W.L. West owned and operated a grocery store and post office in Caddo Grove until the railroad bypassed the small community. He later married Cordelia Gray. Along with the rest of the businessmen of Caddo Grove, he moved the entire building housing his store into Joshua, Texas when the railroad came. This building, with its actual dimensional lumber was later dismantled in the 1940s and the salvaged wood used for an addition to his son Samuel A. West's house on Main Street in Joshua. The original house on the old West farm burned in the 1930s. The Wests donated a large portion of the land for the Caddo Grove Cemetery. He, his wife, and many of his descendants are buried in this cemetery in a large plot near the center of the cemetery.[2] A portion of the original homestead land is still owned by two of his grandchildren today. The settlement of Caddo Grove is now just a memory. Only the cemetery remains, although a new elementary school named Caddo Grove was recently built.
References edit
Other sources: Personal interviews with descendants, Samuel A. West Jr. and Mahdeen West Bell conducted by [User:Samuel.west]