Sterling Brown Hendricks: Lawyer, Soldier, and Politician (1821–1909)
Revised by: Randolph B. "Mike" Campbell
Published: 1952
Updated: May 2, 2022
Sterling Brown Hendricks, lawyer, soldier, and politician, son of James and Mariah (Willeford) Hendricks was born near Courtland, Alabama, on July 21, 1821. He grew up in Mississippi, where he studied law and was admitted to the bar before he moved to Texas in January 1841 and settled at Washington-on-the-Brazos. After his return from the Somervell expedition in 1842, he taught school in Bowie County and later established a store at Elysian Fields in Harrison County. He married Margaret M. Shaw in 1849, and they had at least four children.
Hendricks represented Harrison and Panola counties in the House of the Ninth Legislature, 1861–62, and at the end of his term entered the Confederate Army as captain of a company from Harrison County that was known as “Hendricks’ Company”. He was elected lieutenant colonel when the unit became Company E of Col. George F. Moore's Seventeenth Texas Cavalry. Hendricks’s regiment fought in the defense of Vicksburg in late 1862 but surrendered at Arkansas Post when it fell to Union troops early in 1863. Following imprisonment in the North, Hendricks Company was exchanged in the spring of 1863 and then joined General James Deshler’s Brigade in the fighting east of the Mississippi River. While Hendricks was commanding the regiment in Louisiana, Pendleton Murrah appointed him financial agent of the Texas penitentiary.
Following the war, Hendricks, who was a Presbyterian and a Mason, returned to Harrison County and lived as a merchant and farmer. He died on December 11, 1909 and was buried in the McKay Cemetery at Elysian Fields. His narrative, "The Somervell Expedition to the Rio Grande, 1842," was published in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly in October 1919.
Bibliography:
Randolph B. Campbell, A Southern Community in Crisis: Harrison County, Texas, 1850–1880 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1983).
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The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.
Revised by Randolph B. "Mike" Campbell, “Hendricks, Sterling Brown,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed March 09, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/hendricks-sterling-brown.
Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
TID:
FHE19
- 1952
- May 2, 2022
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