Thomas Washington Masterson

From Brazoria, TX, he enlisted at Camp Clark in Guadalupe County as a Private in Company B, 4th Texas Infantry on 11 July 1861 and was appointed 5th Sergeant on 3 September 1861. He was promoted to 4th Sergeant on 16 June 1862 and elected 3rd Lieutenant on 14 July.

He was in action with his Company at Fox's Gap on South Mountain on 14 September but not at Sharpsburg on 17 September 1862.

He was promoted to 2nd Lieutenant on 1 May 1863. He was wounded by a gunshot to his left leg at Chickamauga, GA on 20 September 1863. He was sent home by a medical examining board in Richmond, VA on wounded furlough on 20 January 1864 and was listed as absent without leave after 20 May 1864.

He was found unfit for infantry duty at a hospital in Houston, TX on 9 May and assigned to (light) duty in the Trans-Mississippi Department on 6 June 1864. In July he applied for a transfer to the Cavalry, but was denied. He resigned his commission in the 4th Texas on 26 October 1864, then at Camden, AR with Wharton's Cavalry Corps. On 3 December he was assigned as Captain and AAG to Major General John A Wharton (a Brazoria neighbor before the war), cavalry chief of the Department. He was with Wharton until the General's murder in April 1865.

By 1869 he was a successful farmer in Brazoria, Texas, with two plots of land on the Brazos River he bought from his father. He raised sugar cane, corn, and cotton, and built a sugar mill, and called his place the Eureka plantation. His wife ran it after he died, relatively young at age 38, in 1877.

Service information from Davis1 and his Compiled Service Records,2 via fold3, as T. W. Masterson. Personal details from family genealogists and the US Census for 1870. His gravesite is on Findagrave; he was originally buried on the family homestead, but removed to Glenwood Cemetery sometime after 1900.

He married Annie Thomas Chalmers (1844-1914) in December 1865 and they had a daughter Mary Green Masterson (1866-1946) and three sons.

See much more about Wash, his family, and his post-war plantation in Thomas Gilbert Masterson-Thomas Washington Masterson Eureka Plantation (April 2016) [PDF], from the Brazosport Archeological Society.

06/16/1839 in TN

08/30/1877; burial in Glenwood Cemetery, Houston, TX