The Life of Aunt Cloe: Enslaved Woman and Church Founder (ca. 1794–1901)

Chloe (or Cloe) Stevens, known as “Aunt Cloe,” an enslaved woman and church founder, was born into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina. No documentation has been found to verify an exact birth date, but obituaries and second-hand accounts of her life state that she was born in 1794 to African parents. Little is known of her early life. Accounts of descendants of the Dever family relay that Stevens was an enslaved woman purchased by Catherine Ann (Coleman) Dever, daughter of Jean Fort Coleman and Rebecca (Holsten) Coleman, in the 1820s and that she came to Texas during that time and soon joined the Methodist Episcopal Church South. Her obituary in the November 13, 1901, edition of the Houston Post, stated that she had three children when she came to Texas. Her husband’s name was not documented. During the 1830s she lived in Liberty County on a farm located on the “Old Spanish Road” and operated by Philip Peyton Dever and Catherine Dever, along with their sons, Thomas and John C., and son-in-law, Augustine Hardin.

During the Texas Revolution, after the fall of the Alamo, members of the Dever family joined the Runaway Scrape in the attempt to flee Santa Anna’s encroaching army and reach safety in Louisiana. Family tradition holds that Stevens stayed behind to tend to Catherine, who was pregnant with her eighth child. The accounts mention that Stevens’s husband also remained with them. Philip Dever and some of their Liberty County neighbors had attempted to join Sam Houston's forces as they moved eastward, but Philip was ambushed and mortally wounded by Mexican soldiers, and his horse was taken from him. He made his way back home on foot, and Stevens tried without success to save his life. After he died on April 9, 1836, Chloe and her husband buried him beneath a tree on the Dever property. Stevens reportedly hid a wagon, watched two horses to guard them from looters, and prepared for their escape after Catherine Dever gave birth to a daughter, Martha Ann, on April 26. They reached Louisiana and reunited safely with the rest of the family.

In the 1850 census, Catherine Dever was still farming in Liberty County with her extended family. By 1860 she had moved to Bexar County with the family of her daughter, Julia Ann, and her husband, Benjamin Billups Gayle. Stevens is listed with Catherine in Bexar County on the 1860 slave schedule. Julia died in September 1862 and left six children, tended by Catherine Dever and Chloe Stevens. In 1865 Stevens was emancipated along with all other slaves in Texas. A newspaper account at the time of her death stated that Stevens recalled that she was seventy-six years old when she was emancipated, which would put her birth in 1789.

In 1867 or 1868 Stevens was one of the original members of the picket church that became the Oak Island Methodist Episcopal Church South near the Medina River in Bexar County. After the Reverend John Wesley DeVilbiss and his sons built a new rock sanctuary in 1872, Stevens actively participated in Sunday school, worship service, and choir. She was affectionately known throughout the Oak Island community as “Aunt Cloe” and remained an active and beloved member of the church even in her extreme old age, as demonstrated by congregation members who moved her favorite chair to the church to provide for Stevens’s comfort during services.

Stevens became a centenarian as she lived through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. In the 1900 census, she was listed as a 100-year-old widowed Black female who mothered three children (all deceased). She lived on the property of Henry Collins Gayle, the son of Julia and Benjamin Gayle, who cared for her in her aged years. The census noted that Stevens could not read or write. On the Gayle property, Aunt Cloe kept a modest house near a seep on a sandy hilltop among oak trees. She maintained a vegetable garden, wild plums, hickory trees, chickens and fowl, and an occasional pig. Chloe Stevens died on November 6, 1901, in southern Bexar County in Gayle’s home. After her well-attended funeral, she was buried in Oak Island Cemetery. Most local newspapers reported that she was 107 years of age at her death.