When Isaac Brock, of China Spring, shuffled off this mortal coil more than a century ago, one thing was certain — his date of death: Sept. 3, 1909.

It’s his alleged date of birth that gives folks pause; if it was true, it made him one of the oldest people to have ever lived. According to some of his descendants who have tried to nail down the claim, Isaac Brock, the “Walking Man,” was 122 years and 184 days old when he strolled into eternity.

That audacious claim would have him besting the world’s oldest verifiable human life (Jeanne Calment of France, who died on Aug. 4, 1977, at 122 years and 164 days). Heck, it puts him in league with biblical patriarchs.

A thoroughly weathered tombstone with faded lettering in the China Spring Cemetery hints at the curious tale:

“AT REST: Isaac Brock. Born March 1, 1787. Died September 3, 1909.

Aged 122 years, 6 months and 2 days.

He died as he lived — a Christian.”

Conflicting life stories

So many newspaper clippings and contemporary accounts of the old man’s life contain so many discrepancies, it’s difficult to gauge what really took place during his many decades.

Some accounts had him a fearsome teenage hunter, responsible for feeding his entire Tar Heel mountain community with game. Some accounts say he came to Texas before the 1836 war for independence from Mexico. Still other tales say he made it to Waco by the 1850s to operate a blacksmith shop near the old ferry that later was replaced by the Waco Suspension Bridge.

The short version of his story is that as a young man, he went to Georgia to work in the gold mines, and after several years went to DeKalb County, Ala., to apprentice himself to the blacksmithing trade, later opening his own establishment.

About 1837, he married wife No. 1, Lucinda Carolina Hill (some records say Hall) of Alabama, who bore him four children before she died in 1849. Isaac married within four years, on Sept. 30, 1852, in Rusk County, Texas, to Sarah Jane Sparks, an Alabama woman age 19. They had 12 more children before her death in 1907 at age 74.

Tales of Confederate service

Roger Conger, Waco historian of the mid-20th century, wrote that about 1858, Isaac Brock moved back to East Texas and in the 1860s tried to enlist in the Confederate Army as a blacksmith.

Various sources say either that he was turned down for being too old or that he was accepted at last when he agreed to take the place of another man. Still other contemporary newspaper accounts say Isaac was pressed into service and that “in his heart he was a Union man.”

What is definitely known is that after the Civil War, he appeared in McLennan County and settled on the north side of the North Bosque River.

One of his many children, Sallie Brock Ballard, recalled the long trek from Smith County to Waco in 1872. She also remembered how her scrappy pappy made his own furniture, shod horses into his 90s and walked the 35-mile round trip from his China Spring home into town just two years before Brock died from “a sudden attack of old age,” as one reporter put it.

Indeed, some accounts said he died in the home of a daughter, Mrs. Ed Drahn, while others contend he died in the county poor house.

According to the Waco Semi-Weekly Tribune of Sept. 8, 1909, the blind and feeble Brock has been ejected from his home of many years in China Spring by his kin who contended that Isaac “was off his mental balance, was fretful and inclined to be fractious and liable to hurt somebody.” At his “lunacy trial,” as such legal proceedings were known in the day, Judge John W. Davis defended the old man before County Judge McCullough, who ordered him to be admitted to the county poor house on the county farm east of the river. Superintendent John S. Moore told the paper, “ He died easy, like a baby going to sleep. There was no pain, no struggle, not a word. The candle of life had burned to its limit.”

“So much has been printed about Isaac Brock, his alleged great age, his adventurous and ever romantic life (much of it pure invention) that it might have been supposed that even though a poor man, as to this world’s goods, he would have been laid to rest with more of pretentiousness,” read the Waco Semi-Weekly Tribune.

Annette Foster Ditto, married to Brock descendant Stephen Wayne Ditto, said that she thinks Brock was likely born around 1805. It was his father, David — who married a first cousin, Eunice — who was born around 1788 in Anderson County, S.C., she said. The Isaac who was born in 1787 in Buncombe Co., N.C. was actually Eunice’s brother, she said.

Census records

Indeed, according to the 1880 U.S. Census, Isaac Brock of McLennan County, Texas, was a 75-year-old farmer (not a 93-year-old one). He was listed as a 48-year-old blacksmith in the 1860 federal census, when he was a resident of Rusk County. His enlistment papers as a private with Company H, 19th Texas Infantry in 1862 list his age as 53. Of course, he told one newspaperman that he gave officials the wrong age so he could get in.

Annette Ditto added that she believes several of Brock’s line still live in the greater Waco area.   

However, another descendant, named Carolyn Brock Fetherlin, said that after years of skepticism about Brock’s age, she’s come around again to being a true believer.

Fetherlin’s father, George Brock, was the first son of Lafayette America Brock, who was the second son of Isaac Brock and Sarah Jane Sparks.

“I really can’t prove either (birthdate),” she said, “I have more things saying he was that old than the other way.”

Just a big joke?

Carolyn Ballinger reported on the Brock family genealogical forum that: “Isaac ‘Texas’ Brock, as he is called, was a man who liked to ‘pull one’s leg’ and gave the (birth) date of his uncle as a jest — you have to know the Brock men to understand what I am saying. The reporter who put all the misinformation in the paper didn’t check his facts very well. Dear ol’ Isaac also told people he was once a Texas Ranger, served in the Mexican-American War, etc. And if you check you find that none of it is true.”

The controversy brings to mind the 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. When the newspaperman learns the “truth” about the infamous deed of the title, his response was: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Sources: Ancestry.com, FamilyTreeMaker.genealogy.com; USGWarchives.net; Roger Conger: A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF WACO (1964); WACO Semi-Weekly Tribune (Jan. 15, 1908); WACO Tribune-Herald, Jan. 9, 1971.)

tjryan@wacotrib.com

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