By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

Sarah Ann Vouchere Walker (1811-1899), widow of Alamo defender Jacob Walker, lived 70 years on the Texas frontier, raising nine children and running a Waco-area plantation for almost half a century.

She was born on the family plantation in the Louisiana territory on April 16, 1811. At 16, she married 28-year-old Jacob Walker of Rockridge, Tenn., in Natchitoches, La.

The couple moved to Texas by 1829, when they were recorded in land agent Stephen F. Austin’s Book of Citizens. They had six children.

Her family name, Vauchere, is sometimes spelled Vouchere, depending upon the source, says one of her descendants, 72-year-old Gene Williams of Lacy-Lakeview. He knows from his own research that the family pronounced the name “Vo-shay.”

The Walkers settled first in Nacogdoches. Jacob Walker took part in the siege of Bexar and capture of the Alamo stronghold in December 1835, and afterwards remained there as a member of Capt. William R. Carey’s artillery company. He was one of the team of cannoneers who repelled the Mexican army under Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna from Feb. 23 until March 6, 1836.

Susanna Wilkerson Dickinson, who with her toddler daughter Angelina were the only white survivors of the Alamo, testified to the fate of the garrison’s defenders.

Her account said the battle ended when “three unarmed gunners who abandoned their then useless guns came into the church where I was and were shot down by my side. One of them was from Nacogdoches and named (Jacob) Walker. He spoke to me several times during the siege about his wife and children with anxious tenderness. I saw four Mexicans toss him up in the air, as you would a bundle of fodder with their bayonets, and then shoot him.”

The young Republic of Texas issued Jacob Walker’s estate the first Headright Grant of “a league and a labor” (more than 4,400 acres). The exact parcel, however, wasn’t named until after 1841, when the Republic’s Indian agent, Leonard G. Williams (another ancestor of Gene Williams), selected it for her.

The Walker Grant was east of the Brazos River, beginning at a point just north of the mouth of the Bosque River and extending past White Rock Creek. The property also stretched east beyond Tehuacana Creek.

Sarah Ann Walker remarried in 1837 to James Robert “Jim Bob” Walker, a cousin of her late husband. They had three children together.

The move of her household, slaves and stock began during the time she was pregnant with her third child with Jim Bob Walker, Rebecca. The baby came early and was delivered “somewhere on the Sabine Trail,” according to family lore.

While moving in 1850, Jim Bob Walker died, and from then on Sarah Ann Walker was listed as the head-of-household on all U.S. Census records.

Early McLennan County documents record that she lived by selling off 130 acres along the Brazos for $3,660, and that she rented out some of the other acreage. She built her home near what is present-day Lacy Drive at Craven Avenue.

Sarah Ann Walker, who outlived most of her children, died on Dec. 10, 1899, and is buried in the family plot known as Stanfield-Walker Cemetery.

Williams said his grandmother, Lela Ann Stanfield Williams (1886-1979), was a girl of 13 when Sarah Ann Walker died, and recalled her great-grandmother as “mean” and authoritarian. Of course, the frontier life wasn’t for sissies, Williams added.

Sources: Handbook of Texas Online; Daughters of the Republic of Texas