Nathan Patten: Civil Rights Advocate and Republican Party Founder in Texas (1825–1898)

Nathan Patten, miller, collector of customs, city official, civil rights proponent during Reconstruction in Texas, and one of the founders of the Republican party in the state, was born at Patten’s Mills, Washington County, New York, on June 16, 1825, to parents James W. Patten and Narcissa R. (Colvin) Patten. His siblings were Julius, Martha, George, and Mary Jane. In his youth, Patten worked as a towboat agent on the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal. This was listed as his occupation on the 1850 federal census, when he was living in Albany, New York. Nathan Patten married Melinda Mather in 1852, and the 1855 New York census recorded them in Brooklyn, where Nathan worked at a foundry. Eventually the couple had four children: George, Florence, Moses, and Nathan Jr. The extended Patten family took a ship from New York to the Texas port of Indianola in 1859 and traveled inland by ox-drawn wagons to reach their new home on the Hill /McLennan County line about eighteen miles northwest of Waco. Once the family was established on their 640 acres of land, they built a gristmill on their property and began to grind grain for their neighbors.

When the Civil War began, the mill became an important part of the region’s economy and kept area families supplied with flour and meal. After the death of their father, Nathan Patten and his brother George continued to run the mill. Because they were originally from New York, they were soon suspected of being Union spies. On one occasion, Confederate troops were dispatched from Waco with orders to kill the Patten family. After meeting with the family, the troops changed their minds and decided not to harm them.

To put to rest suspicions about their loyalty to the Confederacy, the family decided to buy a slave. By the second year of the Civil War, due to the shortage of men, many families failed to produce grain crops and had no bread. Subsequently the Pattens supplied the nearby community with grain and flour on credit and turned no one away in need.

As the war continued, officials of the Confederacy ordered the Patten brothers to join the Confederate Army. Later these officials insisted that only one of the Patten brothers would have to join the Confederate military. As a compromise, it was agreed that George would operate the mill, and Nathan would aid the Confederacy by becoming a freighter hauling cotton to Mexico and bringing supplies back to the Waco area.

In 1863, after making several of these six-week trips, Nathan decided to flee to Mexico and then to New Orleans to join other Union exiles. As the war progressed, life got worse for the Pattens and their neighbors. A lack of supplies pushed up the price of much needed goods. Coffee sold for $15 a pound and a spool of thread was $18. According to oral histories provided by Patten descendants, Melinda Patten later revealed that the Patten family secretly fed Unionists who hid in the woods near their farm. When the war ended, the Pattens wiped thousands of dollars off their books because so many heads of area families had been killed or injured and were in extremely bad financial circumstances. Melinda Patten took her children to New Orleans where they were reunited with Nathan and subsequently traveled to New York for a time, while he returned to the Patten Ranch near Waco.

Nathan Patten was appointed to the difficult post-war position of supervisor of (voter) registration for a large district in Texas by Gen. Joseph J. Reynolds and was elected to serve as a representative from McLennan County to the Constitutional Convention of 1868–69. Patten helped found the Republican party in Texas where he was associated with Unionist Republican Texas governors Edmund J. Davis and Elisha Marshall Pease, and Black politicians George Ruby, Norris Wright Cuney, and Richard Nelson.   

Patten, who used the title “Colonel” but did not earn this title as the result of any military service, was appointed to the position of collector of customs at Galveston in 1869 by Republican president Ulysses S. Grant and replaced Col. John L. Haynes, who had served two years as the collector. Patten moved his family to Galveston where he served as collector from 1869 to 1874. During his service he appointed George Ruby to the position of special deputy collector at Galveston in 1869 and Norris Wright Cuney to the position of night inspector in 1872. (Cuney was later appointed collector of customs at Galveston in 1889 and appointed Patten’s son George as deputy collector of customs.) In her book, Norris Wright Cuney:  A Tribune of the Black People, Maud Cuney-Hare described Nathan Patten as “a splendid man and a good friend.”

 While residing in Galveston, Nathan Patten also served as a city alderman from 1870 to 1872 and served on the city school board. In April 1870 he presided over Galveston’s celebration of the ratification of the Texas Constitution of 1869 and the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which granted voting rights to Black men. This event was attended by thousands and featured a picnic, torchlight parade, marching bands, and a twenty-one-gun salute from the U.S. Customs Revenue Cutter Delaware.

The 1880 census reported Patten in Houston and working as a government official, but he was living in Waco later in the 1880s. In the mid-1890s he worked as a “crier for the federal courts” in that city. Nathan Patten died at the age of seventy-three on January 14, 1898, at the home of his son, Dr. George M. Patton, in Waco. He was buried at the city’s Oakwood Cemetery.