This Week in Texas Methodist History September 28

Methodist Family Victim of Massacre September 28, 1870.

A Texan family with deep Methodist roots was attacked by a band of about seventy Indian and Mexican raiders in present day McMullen County on September 28, 1870. The parents, Thomas Wesley and Sarah Jane Stringfield and six year old Adolphus were quickly killed. Eight year old Ida was lanced seven times and trampled by the hooves of the horses, but she survived. The body of Thomas (four years old) was never found.

Thomas Wesley Stringfield was the son of Milton Stringfield, local preacher who was present at the September 1838 quarterly meeting at McMahan’s Chapel. He was the grandson of James Stringfield who helped organize the first Methodist church in Springfield, Illinois, and the great-nephew of Thomas Stringfield, the former editor of the South-western Christian Advocate (Nashville) and delegate to the 1844 MEC General Conference and 1846 organizational conference of the MECS. Two of his brothers, Littleton Stringfield and James McKendree Stringfield, were members of the Rio Grande Mission Conference who enlisted in the Confederate Army and did not survive the Civil War. They are both buried in Tehuacana Cemetery in Frio County.

The orphaned Ida was raised by family members, including her aunt, Nancy. Nancy’s daughter Sarah Diada was particularly close to her cousin and named a daughter after her. That Ida was your editor’s grandmother.

Ida Stringfield Hatfield carried the scars from the lances and hooves the rest of her life. She died in 1937.