Richard Pugh

Richard “Dick” Pugh was married to Mary Louise Williams. Pugh was in the Confederate army but after a slight wound in his hand near Murfreesboro was furloughed in January 1863, apparently thanks to the intervention of his father-in-law, for sixty days and went to join his wife in Texas. He traveled through Vicksburg on his way, encountering Robert Campbell Martin, Jr..1

According to Martin in a letter to his wife:

Dick says that he has heard from the Bayou once or twice. His mother had when he last heard still two hundred Negroes on the place who were at work. It was true about the beating of David. Banks had disbanded the Negro Brigade. He knew nothing from either David’s father’s or my father’s places. He seems to think that the people on Lafourche are getting on much better than we anticipated. The Yankees or someone (supposed by his friends (Dick’s)) supposed to have a mortgage on the place are making sugar on Mr. John William’s place. Bob Ogden did as we first heard welcome Butler and congratulated him upon the success of the Yankee arms. I wish that we could get some news from father. I regret much his having returned to the Lafourche as I could neither see then nor now the necessity for so doing. I fear it was an unwise step although I may be mistaken. Dick says that he learns from home that the Negroes are dying up fast and that many are returning home for something to eat. Their owners are obliged to send them off as they have nothing. If this is so it is a proof not only of their inability to care for themselves but of the horrors that this war will bring upon the Negroes whenever they act in the manner they did on the Lafourche.2

Once in Texas, Pugh apparently worked at the Salt Works in Neches Saline (also known later as Brooks Saline), judging from purchasing orders addressed to him by J. B. Miller, who was a detailed salt maker in Smith County. Pugh and/or Miller apparently had a contract to provide salt to the iron works in Kickapoo, sometimes referred to in correspondence as the Government Iron Works.3

  1. Robert Campbell Martin, Jr., to Maggie Martin, January 18, 1863, Martin-Pugh Papers, Nicholls State University, Items 317 and 318.↩

  2. Robert Campbell Martin, Jr., to Maggie Martin, January 18, 1863, Martin-Pugh Papers, Nicholls State University, Items 317 and 318.↩

  3. See Items 154, 155, 156. Also, Willis Prescott apparently brought slaves to the Kickapoo works in November 1864. See Willis Prescott to John C. Moore, November 8, 1864, Weeks Family Papers, Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations, Series I, Part 6, Reel 18, Frames 667-668. The contract itself is at Weeks Family Papers, Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations, Series I, Part 6, Reel 18, Frames 599-600. See also these letters from a J. H. L. Hull station at Kickapoo.↩