The “Aunts & Uncles” series of biographical sketches are Artificial Intelligence (AI) compiled narratives of selected individuals from my Genealogical database. The selected AI will used the RootsMagic Individual Summary from my Genealogical Software, Roots Magic. All genealogical data is my research material acquired over the past 46 years of research. Today's Biography of James Brock & Martha Jane Teal Brock was compiled with the assistance of Claude Sonnett 5 Median and is entitled:
James Brock & Martha Jane Teal Brock
Chesterfield District, South Carolina, to Barbour County, Alabama
My 2nd Great-Granduncle & Great-Grandaunt
Quick Facts
| James Brock | Martha Jane Teal Brock |
Born | 19 October 1822 — Chesterfield District, South Carolina | 11 August 1830 — Anson County, North Carolina |
Parents | Benjamin Brock (1790–1870) & Temperance [–?–] (1800–1880) | William Teal (b. 1799) & Isabella McRae (1800–1855) |
Married | About 1844, Barbour County, Alabama |
|
Died | Conflicting records: 15 May 1888 (1888 probate petition) or 16 May 1883 (tombstone & 1886 petition) | 3 July 1886 — Barbour County, Alabama |
Buried | Pea River Presbyterian Church Cemetery, Clio, Barbour Co., AL | Pea River Presbyterian Church Cemetery, Clio, Barbour Co., AL |
Children | 14 — see below |
|
A Carolina Beginning
James Brock was born on 19 October 1822 in the Chesterfield District of South Carolina, the son of Benjamin Brock (1790–1870) and his wife Temperance (1800–1880). He grew up in the same corner of the Carolina backcountry that so much of our family called home in the early 1800s — rolling piney woods and small farms along the Pee Dee River drainage, not far from the North Carolina line. It was a place where families like the Brocks worked the land, attended small country churches, and knew their neighbors for generations.
Sometime in the early-to-mid 1840s, James and his family joined the great wave of Carolinians and Georgians pushing west into Alabama's newly opened cotton lands. This migration is often called “Alabama Fever” — the pull of cheap, fertile ground that had only recently belonged to the Creek Nation. Barbour County itself had been carved out of Creek cession land and part of Pike County only in December 1832, so when the Brocks arrived, the county was still a young frontier, its courthouse newly settled at Clayton and its rich bottomlands along the Pea and Chattahoochee Rivers just beginning to fill with settler farms.
Marriage and a Young Family
James married Martha Jane Teal about 1844, most likely in Barbour County, Alabama. Martha Jane was born 11 August 1830 in Anson County, North Carolina, the daughter of William Teal (b. 1799) and Isabella McRae (1800–1855). Like the Brocks, the Teal family had made the journey from the Carolinas to Alabama's booming cotton frontier.
We know the marriage took place about 1844 because their first child, William Daniel “Squire” Brock, was born on 27 April 1845 — interestingly, his birthplace is recorded as Chesterfield, South Carolina, suggesting the young couple may have begun married life back in James's home district before finishing their move to Alabama. By the time their second child arrived in December 1847, the family was firmly settled in Barbour County, where all the rest of their children would be born over the next twenty-seven years.
Raising a Family on the Barbour County Frontier
The 1850 federal census finds James and Martha in Division 23 of Barbour County with three young children — William, Temperance, and baby Mary — and two additional people in the household, nineteen-year-old George W. Carroll and thirty-nine-year-old Eliza Stonaker, likely boarders or hired hands helping to work the farm. James, thirty-eight, was recorded as a farmer born in South Carolina; Martha, twenty-two, was noted as a native of North Carolina.
A decade later, the 1860 census shows the family in Beat #15 of Barbour County with seven children at home, ranging from fifteen-year-old William down to five-year-old Elizabeth. James was still farming, and the family's steady growth mirrored the growth of Barbour County itself, which by 1860 had become one of Alabama's wealthiest cotton-producing counties, its economy built on the labor of enslaved people and increasingly tied to the volatile price of cotton on the world market.
By 1870, five years after the Civil War had ended, the census recorded James, forty-nine, and Martha, thirty-nine, in Township 9 Range 24 with a house full of children — William, now twenty-four, down to baby Lila, just one month old. The Brocks had eleven children living under their roof that year, a testament to Martha's many confinements and to a family determined to hold together and rebuild after the upheaval of war.
The 1880 census, taken in the Atkinsons precinct of Barbour County, shows James, fifty-five, and Martha, fifty, with seven of their younger children still at home — Alex, Sarah, James, Charley, Eliza, Ella, and little Martha J. By then James and Martha had spent more than three decades farming the same corner of Barbour County, watching their older children marry and start families of their own nearby.
Land, Debt, and the Cotton Economy
Two surviving legal documents give us a glimpse into the everyday financial life of a Barbour County farm family in the years after the war. On 23 January 1861, just as the nation was sliding toward civil war, a relative by marriage, C. C. Teal, borrowed three hundred dollars from James Brock, pledging land in Township 9, Range 25 as security for the debt — a reminder that James was a man of some means who could extend credit to kin, and a small window into the tightly interwoven Brock-Teal family economy.
A second document, dated 17 March 1874, shows James on the other side of a very common post-war arrangement: he signed a promissory note to James N. Lightfoot for $38.02, payable in cotton from his own crop, in exchange for fertilizer and plantation supplies. This kind of “crop lien” agreement — borrowing against next season's cotton to buy the fertilizer, seed, and supplies needed to plant it — became the backbone of Southern farming in the Reconstruction era, tying small farmers like James into a cycle of debt that would shape Southern agriculture for the rest of the century.
A Family Touched by the Civil War
James and Martha were raising a large family in Barbour County when the Civil War came. Their eldest son, William Daniel Brock, served the Confederacy in Company B of the 57th Alabama Infantry Regiment, a unit organized at Troy in neighboring Pike County in March 1863 and made up largely of men from the surrounding counties, including Barbour. The 57th Alabama saw hard fighting in the Atlanta campaign and later in Tennessee at Franklin and Nashville before being transferred to North Carolina, where it surrendered at war's end. William survived the war and returned home to Barbour County, living on until 1926.
Meanwhile, back home, James and Martha were raising young children through the uncertainty of wartime and the difficult Reconstruction years that followed — Alexander, Elizabeth, Christain, Sarah Jane, James Pleasant, Charles Henry, and Eliza Jane were all born to the family between 1855 and 1866, meaning several of their children came into the world during the very years the Confederacy rose and fell.
Loss: Martha's Death in 1886
Martha Jane Teal Brock died 3 July 1886 in Barbour County, Alabama, at the age of fifty-five. At the time of her death, three of her children — Charles, Ella, and Martha “Mattie” — were still minors. A petition later filed in probate court by her son James Pleasant Brock recounts the family's situation with striking clarity: James Brock had died “intestate” (without a will) and Martha had survived him as his widow, raising their youngest children alone until her own death. The petition notes that no guardian had yet been appointed for the minor children and asks the court to set aside their legal exemption from the estate — a practical, protective step taken by an older brother looking out for his younger siblings.
James's Death and the 1888 Estate
The documentary record is genuinely conflicted about the year James died, and the county's own probate file does not agree with itself. His tombstone at Pea River Presbyterian Church Cemetery reads 16 May 1883, and an earlier petition in the same probate file — filed by son James Pleasant Brock after Martha's 1886 death, asking the court to set aside exempt property for the still-minor children — likewise states that James Brock “died intestate on the day of May 1883.” Yet a second, later petition in that same estate file, sworn by son W. D. Brock on 26 November 1888, states plainly that James “departed this life at his home... on or about the 15th day of May 1888,” and it was this 1888 petition that finally set the estate in motion, naming M. L. Passmore as the new administrator. Whether James actually died in 1883 and the estate simply went unsettled for years, or whether 1888 is correct and the earlier petition's date was a clerical slip, is a question left for future research — both dates are preserved here rather than resolved.
The 1888 probate petition is a rich document. W. D. Brock, acting on behalf of the family, described James as having died “seized and possessed” of a substantial amount of real and personal property across Township 9, Range 24 and neighboring townships — land that had been set apart as a homestead for James's minor heirs, plus additional acreage that James had begun selling on credit to his son-in-law W. E. Ramage. The petition named James's surviving children and their spouses one by one: W. D. Brock, Tempie Brown (wife of B. B. Brown), B. F. Brock, A. L. (Alex) Brock, Sarah Knight (wife of C. W. Knight), J. P. Brock, Lila Chambers (wife of George Chambers), and Charlie Brock, all over twenty-one, along with the still-minor Mattie, Florence and James Ramage (grandchildren), and Ella and Martha Brock. The petition asked the court to appoint a new administrator, since the original administrator, Sheriff G. T. Long, had left office before the estate was fully settled.
The Children of James & Martha Brock
James and Martha raised fourteen children to adulthood or near-adulthood, an impressive family even by the standards of their era. Two — Elizabeth and Christain — died in early childhood, sometime before the 1870 census. The rest lived long lives, married into the Brown, Grant, Ramage, McRae, Knight, Powell, Clark, Chambers, and Shelby families of Barbour and neighboring counties, and many remained within a few miles of the family homeplace near Clio for the rest of their lives.
Child | Born | Died | Married |
William Daniel “Squire” Brock | 27 Apr 1845, Chesterfield Co., SC | 4 Jun 1926, Barbour Co., AL | Josephine T. Brown (1842–1913), 8 Mar 1870 |
Temperance A. Brock | 30 Dec 1847, Barbour Co., AL | 1 Jun 1928, Clio, Barbour Co., AL | Robert B. Brown (b. 1855), 8 Jan 1880 |
Mary J. Brock | 3 Feb 1849, Barbour Co., AL | 29 Jun 1872, Barbour Co., AL | James Grant, 25 Jan 1870 |
Lilly Ann Brock | 3 May 1853, Barbour Co., AL | 25 Oct 1883, Clio, Barbour Co., AL | William Eberhart Ramage (b. 1852) |
Benjamin Franklin Brock | 22 Aug 1855, Clio, Barbour Co., AL | 11 Mar 1927, Clio, Barbour Co., AL | Mary Elizabeth McRae (1855–1932), 27 Feb 1879 |
Alexander L. “Alex” Brock | 21 Aug 1855/1858, Barbour Co., AL | 5 Mar 1937, Barbour Co., AL | (1) Amanda Knight (1864–1910), 30 Dec 1880; (2) Sallie White (1874–1947), 17 May 1911 |
Elizabeth Brock | abt. 1858, Barbour Co., AL | bef. 1870, Barbour Co., AL | — |
Christain Brock | 1860, Barbour Co., AL | bef. 1870, Clio, Barbour Co., AL | — |
Sarah Jane Brock | 17 Jul 1861, Barbour Co., AL | 15 Jan 1948, Clio, Barbour Co., AL | Clayton Webster Knight (1857–1941), 20 Jan 1881 |
James Pleasant Brock | 11 Apr 1864, Barbour Co., AL | 27 May 1938, Troy, Pike Co., AL | Lillie Pearl Tucker Powell (1890–1965) |
Charles Henry “Charlie” Brock | 29 Jan 1866, Barbour Co., AL | 21 Jan 1945, Clio, Barbour Co., AL | (1) Neda Clark, 26 May 1901; (2) Florence B. Clark (1878–1913), 30 Nov 1902; (3) Levanah Clark (1888–1948), 20 Sep 1913 |
Eliza Jane “Lila” Brock | 8 Jun 1866, Barbour Co., AL | 30 May 1934, Enterprise, Coffee Co., AL | George H. Chambers (1869–1921) |
Ella Brock | Jul 1872, Barbour Co., AL | 3 Apr 1941, Enterprise, Coffee Co., AL | Henry M. Shelby (1866–1906), 10 Dec 1889 |
Martha J. “Mattie” Brock | 1874, Barbour Co., AL | 1934 | — |
Final Resting Place
James and Martha Jane Teal Brock rest side by side in the Pea River Presbyterian Church Cemetery near Clio, Barbour County, Alabama — the same small country cemetery where so many of their children and grandchildren, including William Daniel Brock, Alexander L. Brock, and Sarah Jane Brock Knight, would eventually be laid to rest. It remains, to this day, a fitting resting place for a family that spent more than sixty years farming the Barbour County soil they first broke as young Carolina transplants.
A Note on the Records
This biography draws directly on census records (1850–1880), two Barbour County land/debt instruments (1861 and 1874), Barbour County probate records and court minutes (1886–1889), cemetery and Find A Grave documentation, and Alabama marriage records for the children. Where sources disagree — as with James's year of death — both versions are noted rather than silently resolved.
James Brock & Martha Jane (Teal) Brock are my 3rd GreatGrand Uncle & GreatGrand Aunt.
Prepared by
Charles Purvis
CPurvis1@gmail.com
