I I was awakened by the sound of heavy duck-cotton frontier trousers shuffling together as a man circled the end of my bed in October 2024. Making his way to my side, he stood with two young daughters. I asked the apparition, What’s your name? The voice in my head replied, “Benjamin Brinn.” When did you die? “1864.” Not surprising, I thought, looking at those tiny Victorian eyeglasses.
As best as I can determine, Benjamin Brinn or Bruen, Brune, or perhaps another Soundex variation of the name appears to have been German. For several months I assumed he was of Irish descent, mostly because of his strawberry-blond beard and long, straight hair extending beneath a slouch hat.
He later told me that he had lived on Morgan Creek in the “Logan Territory.” So I started with Logan. My first search took me to Logan in Panola County. There was no Morgan Creek there. I reversed the search and began with Morgan Creek instead, and the Texas Hill Country produced a match. But there was no Logan Territory or Logan Territories.
A genealogist at the Herman Brown Free Library in Burnet explained that she knew of no historic place by that exact name. There was, however, Logan Vandeveer. He was a Texas Ranger, a veteran of San Jacinto and one of the influential early residents of what became Burnet County. He held substantial acreage in the region, supplied beef and provisions to Fort Croghan and Fort Mason, helped organize Burnet County, and became its first postmaster. He died in 1855 at approximately forty years old.
That did not prove anything about Benjamin Brinn – it changed the question.
Could “Logan Territory” be local nomenclature, rather than a location? Could someone living on or near land associated with Logan Vandeveer have understood the geography that way? And could Benjamin Brinn have been a tenant, laborer, neighbor, or otherwise connected to property whose occupants were never clearly captured in the surviving census record?
I still do not know.
One of the two Morgan Creek parcels produced no tenant I could identify in the 1850 or 1860 census. And among the surviving Vandeveer material are eleven boxes of financial records at the Texas General Land Office in Austin that have yet to answer the only question I really care about: Is the name Brinn somewhere inside them?