Dr. Primm's Will

Dr. William Primm was born in Stafford County, Virginia in 1778 and bought his first league of Fayette County land from William and Stacy Barton in 1835, for six thousand dollars. He went on buying, and died in 1865 holding more than eight thousand acres in the county. He worked none of it himself, having brought enslaved people up from Louisiana to do that. In 1817, in Ohio, he had freed a woman named Celia. All of his children were hers, and his will of May 1865 left them the estate in defiance of Texas law, acknowledging that many persons condemned him for having children born of a woman of African descent. Two burying grounds went with the land, and only one of them survived. The Primm family cemetery held six recorded graves when Joe Cole surveyed it in 1958 and Norman Krischke in 1965, Celia's among them. She died in January 1868. Searchers in 1986 could not find the plot at all and reported a gravel pit where it should have been, but it has since been located again, with four headstones standing in various states of repair. The other was described in 1958 as a large Negro cemetery on the west bank of Barton's Creek, the burying ground for the people Primm had enslaved. No sign of it could be found even then, and it has never been recovered. The account came from Doug Stoglin, whose grandfather Lewis had been brought from Louisiana as a boy. The settlement took Primm's name and kept it until its post office closed in 1927. The railway station was renamed Kirtley, and a story told by Katy men holds that this followed a misread train order in 1912, Prim having been read as Plum, which sent two trains at each other on the curves toward West Point with nobody hurt. No contemporary account of that collision has been found, and no postmaster named Kirtley ever served either office.