Henry Walter Ragland

Henry Walton Raglin, soldier and civil servant, was born in 1817. He was orphaned at an early age and raised by a sister and brother-in-law, W. D. Hains. He first arrived in Texas from Columbus, Mississippi, and was enrolled under the name Ragland as a private in the Army of the Republic of Texas on May 26, 1836. After serving at Goliad under Gen. Thomas J. Rusk he was discharged on August 26. He returned to Mississippi in the fall of 1836 and came back to Texas in the spring of 1837. He was robbed en route at New Orleans of all that he owned and arrived in Houston penniless. In 1837 he became an auditor for the Republic of Texas, and on April 15, 1838, he was appointed assistant clerk in the General Land Office. He served in that capacity until July 1, 1839, when he was promoted to chief clerk, and in December 1840 he succeeded John P. Borden as ad interim commissioner of the General Land Office. In January 1841 he was in turn succeeded by Thomas William Ward, and in March Raglin became a traveling tax agent for the republic. In 1840 he joined the Masonic fraternity in Austin, and in October he was elected a corporal in the Travis Guards and Rifles. He is said to have volunteered for service in 1842 in response to the invasion of Rafael Vásquez. Raglin followed the government first to Houston, where he was enrolling clerk of the Senate of the Sixth Congress from November 1841 until July 1842, and then to Washington-on-the-Brazos in October 1843. There, from December 1844 to June 1845 he served as enrolling clerk of the Senate of the Ninth Congress. He then worked as a clerk in the state department under Ebenezer Allen until annexation. In January 1845 he was chosen secretary of the local Masonic temple.

Raglin was married to Anna Jane Magee in the "Mississippi Settlement," some six miles east of Anderson, Anderson County, on April 13, 1847, and became the father of seven children. In 1849 he was the Anderson agent for the Texas State Gazette. In 1850 he was living in Grimes County, the father of two daughters and the owner of $1,000 in real estate. Soon thereafter he returned to state service, but in March 1852 he resigned as chief clerk of the General Land Office due to personal difficulties with the new commissioner, Stephen Crosby. Raglin again served as enrolling clerk for the Senate during the Fifth Legislature, 1853–54. In November 1862 he resigned from the comptroller's office when he could no longer support his family on the meager salary that the job offered, and for the remainder of the Civil War he was superintendent of the Texas School for the Blind. After the Civil War Raglin made "an entire failure in...stock growing" and lost almost all of his capital. After giving up farming, he moved to Burton, then a railhead, and became a railroad cashier. With the end of Reconstruction in 1872, Raglin's old friend Stephen H. Darden was elected state comptroller; in January 1873 he appointed Raglin clerk. Raglin died in Austin on December 7, 1882. Governor Oran M. Roberts, Lieutenant Governor Francis Marion Martin, and two former governors served as his pallbearers. He was a member of the Texas Veterans Association. His papers, including a diary of his military service and work as a traveling tax collector in 1841, are preserved in the Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin.