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A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
March 2, 1836, then ending the next month with the surrender of Mexican forces and the capture of General Santa Anna on the battlefield at San Jacinto, with Texas thereby established as an independent republic. Throughout the next decade, AngloAmerican settlement of the region continued. From east of the Sabine, more and more men and their families lit out for the new territory, lured by the well-advertised prospect of cheap land and abundant work. Often with little or no notice, these pioneers left their old lives behind them, along with signs saying simply, “Gone to Texas.” One of those pioneers was Isaac Van Zandt, son of Jacob and Mary (Isaacs) Van Zandt. The Van Zandt family originally sailed from Holland prior to the American Revolution, settling in New York then migrating to North Carolina. Jacob took his family to Franklin County, Tennessee, in 1800. Isaac was born there on July 10, 1813.1 When Isaac married Frances Cooke Lipscomb in December 1833, he and his father were proprietors of a store in Maxwell, Tennessee, near Salem. When Jacob died in 1834, the young couple moved to Coffeeville, in northern Mississippi, where Isaac opened his own store. A daughter, Louisa, was born later that year, and a son, Khleber Miller, was born on November 7, 1836. Widespread hard times struck in 1837, and the Van Zandt business failed. The family was struggling and in debt, but Isaac was enterprising and intelligent. Having become somewhat accomplished at public speaking through his membership in a local debating society, Isaac decided to take up the study of law. In 1838 he took his examinations and was admitted to the Mississippi bar, and within the next year he had hung his own “Gone to Texas” sign and moved with his family to a small, one-room log cabin in Elysian Fields, in the Red River District (later part of Harrison County). On January 5, 1840, another son, Isaac Lycurgus, was born. Van Zandt had persuaded a wealthy local landowner to donate land whereon to establish a town and a college, and he became active in laying out the town that was to become Marshall, Texas,