carlson1929

@PhDThesis{ carlson1929,
	author = {Avery Luvere Carlson},
	title = {A Monetary and Banking History of Texas: From the Mexican Regime to the Present Day, 1821-1929},
	school = {University of Iowa},
	year = 1929,
}

These notes were taken from the “abstract” of the dissertation held at Yale.

Carlson argues that in the 1830s and 1840s, the scarcity of specie in Texas meant that few banks were in operation. Instead, mercantile and commissioning firms provided credit, accepted drafts, and discounted promissory notes.

The first chartered bank was the Commercial and Agricultural Bank in Galveston, whose president was Samuel May Williams. After Williams’s death, the “good will” of the bank “passed to Ball Hutchings & Company, a private bank, which continued in Galveston under the name of Hutchings, Sealy & Company, Unincorporated, until April 7, 1930, when it was merged with the South Texas National Bank” (3).

In addition to the one antebellum chartered bank, there were “a number of commission firms, firms of lawyers, and land agents, who devoted part of their time to buying and selling exchange” (3).

Among these were Robert Mills and the firm of R. & D. G. Mills, who were cotton factors and commission merchants in Galveston. The Mills bank circulated its own endorsed notes (technically issued by the wildcat Northern Bank of Mississippi," which became known as “Mills Money,” which was equivalent to gold. “Until the outbreak of the Civil War, ‘Mills Money’ was the prevailing paper money in Texas” (4).

B. A. Shepherd of Houston was “the first man in Texas to devote his time exclusively to banking,” instead of as an extension to mercantile business.