Joseph D Grigsby
Birth 24 Sep 1771
Loudoun County, Virginia, USA
Death 13 Aug 1841 (aged 69)
Jefferson County, Texas, USA
No pioneer was more respected than Joseph Grigsby, an early cotton planter and legislator. Born in Virginia in 1771, Grigsby and his wife moved to Kentucky, where some of their children grew to adulthood. In 1828, financial reverses caused the family to resettle in Jasper County and subsequently, at Grigsby’s Bluff, the site of present-day Port Neches. Their daughter, Frances, married George W. Smyth, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence.
Grigsby served in three of the first four Texas congresses. His plantation, with its twenty-five slaves, was the birthplace of the county’s earliest cotton culture. The planter also operated a primitive, horse-driven sawmill and built the first horse-driven cotton gin at Beaumont, a town site in which he owned a one-quarter interest. Any possibility that a cotton plantation-slave economy might evolve in Jefferson County ended in August 1841 when Grigsby died. His estate was of such size that the executor, George W. Smyth, could not obtain the necessary bond, and an enabling act was enacted by the Texas legislature to exempt him.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/140230258/joseph-d-grigsby
