Andrew Jackson ("Jack") Berry, ranger, soldier, and rancher, the son of Betsy (Smothers) and John Berry, was born in Monroe County, Indiana, on May 16, 1816. The family moved to Texas in late 1826 and settled in the Atascosito District. In 1834 Andrew moved with the family to Mina, later named Bastrop. He enlisted as a private in the Mina Volunteers on February 28, 1836, and fought at San Jacinto as a member of Company C, First Regiment, commanded by Capt. Jesse Billingsley. After the victory he extended his service until June. He was living in Houston when the town was first laid out. In 1838 he was living in what later became Caldwell, Burleson County, where the Berry family had moved after San Jacinto. With his brothers Joseph and Bate Berry he fought in the battle of Plum Creek on August 12, 1840, under the command of Col. Edward Burleson. In 1843 he enlisted in Capt. Jack (John C.) Hays's Texas Rangersqv, and in 1846 he served at Goliad under Lt. John T. Price. Berry moved his family in 1847 to the future Williamson County, where the family was gathering on the Berry league on Berry Creek and the San Gabriel River. He served as a member of the first grand jury after that county was organized. He enlisted as a private in the Confederate Army and later served as captain in Archie Hart's company, Twenty-seventh Brigade. He joined the Texas Veterans Association when it was organized at Houston in 1873. He left Williamson County and was ranching in Lampasas County in 1876, but moved in 1881 to a ranch he purchased south of Baird in Callahan County, where he spent the rest of his life. Jack Berry married Rhoda Jane Hughes (1824-ca. 1866) on July 29, 1839; they had nine children. He married Mary Catherine Sloan on September 3, 1872; eight children were born of this marriage. In 1936 Mary Catherine was honored at the Texas Centennial celebration in Dallas as the last surviving widow of a San Jacinto veteran. Berry died on July 31, 1899, in Baird when his team of mules, frightened by a train, ran away and he was thrown from his wagon. He is buried in the Ross Cemetery at Baird, where the state of Texas placed a marker for him as a veteran of San Jacinto.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Sam Houston Dixon and Louis Wiltz Kemp, The Heroes of San Jacinto (Houston: Anson Jones Press, 1932). William Moses Jones, Texas History Carved in Stone (Houston: Monument, 1958). W. K. Makemson, Historical Sketch of First Settlement and Organization of Williamson County (Georgetown, Texas, 1904). Jack Pope, ed., John Berry and His Children (Austin, 1988). Clara Stearns Scarbrough, Land of Good Water: A Williamson County History (Georgetown, Texas: Williamson County Sun Publishers, 1973).