David Rusk

David Rusk, soldier and law-enforcement officer, was the son of John and Mary (Sterritt) Rusk, born in South Carolina in 1814. He and his brother Thomas Jefferson Rusk immigrated to Texas in 1836 from Clarksville, Georgia, and settled in Nacogdoches. He enlisted on April 6, 1836, as a private in Capt. Hayden Arnold's First Company of Col. Sidney Sherman's Second Regiment, Texas Volunteers, and fought in the battle of San Jacinto.

Rusk was five times elected sheriff of Nacogdoches County, first in 1837 and last on March 2, 1845. In 1859–60 he succeeded William R. Scurry as acting commissioner of the boundary survey. Rusk married Elizabeth Reid in Nacogdoches in 1843, and they had nine children. He died in Orange County on September 11, 1877, and he was buried in Oak Grove Cemetery in Nacogdoches.