Alfred Marmaduke Hobby

Alfred Marmaduke Hobby was a famous Texas merchant, politician, Confederate officer, and poet. He was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1836, the son of Martin and Anna Elizabeth (Slade) Hobby. Hobby's neohew was William P. Hobby, governor of Texas from 1917 to 1921. His grandnephew [(William P. Hobby, Jr.)], was lieutenant governor of Texas 1973-91. In the 1850s Marmaduke Hobby's mother, a widow, moved with her sons to Madison, Florida and then to Galveston, Texas. Hobby entered a mercantile partnership and established a general store at the new town of St. Mary's of Aransas, Refugio County, about 1857. Although only about twenty-two, he almost immediately became a political leader of the county. Upon the resignation of Henry Lawrence Kinney in 1861, Hobby was elected to the Texas House of Representatives for the Eighth Texas Legislature. He was an ardent supporter of states rights and organized a chapter of the Knights of the Golden Circle at St. Mary's. At the Secession Conventionqv he represented his district and voted for secession. Hobby was reelected to the Ninth Texas Legislature but resigned to enter the Confederate States Army. On May 14, 1862, he organized and became major of the force later known as the Eighth (Hobby's) Texas Infantry regiment. He would eventually rise to the rank of Colonel. Hobby commanded the Texas forces at the Battle of Corpus Christi, repelling a Union invasion. While stationed at Galveston during the war, Hobby married Mrs. Gertrude Menard. After the war he disposed of his Refugio County holdings and settled at Galveston, where he resumed the mercantile business. During the war he wrote several patriotic poems. These, including "The Sentinel's Dream of Home," were widely published in newspapers of the period. After the war he devoted himself more seriously to literary work. His best-known prose was his Life of David G. Burnet (1871). Serfs of Chattenay and Miscellaneous Poems (ca. 1881) contained his "Poem in Honor of Colonel Thomas S. Lubbock." Hobby spent the last years of his life in Silver City, New Mexico, where he died on February 5, 1881 in a wagon accident near Mimbres Creek. Hobby had no children, his wife had children from an earlier marriage.

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