On the 1924 Land Office map of Navarro County, the surveySurveyA numbered tract laid out on the ground from one land grant and named for the person it was granted to.Nearly every deed in Navarro County still describes land as out of a named survey, by its abstract number.More in the glossary → that runs up to the northwest edge of Blooming Grove carries a woman's name: Jane M. Cazneau, file 1-893. The town grew up against its southeast corner.¹

Her Land OfficeGeneral Land OfficeThe Texas state office in Austin, set up in 1836, that keeps the record of every grant of public land and issued the patents.Its files on each survey (certificates, field notes, sketches and patents) are still kept and can be read online.More in the glossary → file says that in August 1857 a deputy surveyorDeputy surveyorA surveyor working under the district surveyor who ran the lines of a survey on the ground and wrote its field notes.More in the glossary →, Isaac Walker, laid out 606 acres for her "on the waters of Chambers Creek about 15 miles West from the Town of Corsicana."² He called it all pasture. The land came "by virtue of part of her HeadrightHeadrightLand the Republic of Texas granted to people for having settled here. Heads of families living in Texas on 4 March 1836 got a league and a labor; single men got a third of a league. The 1836 constitution shut out people of African descent and American Indians.Jane Cazneau's certificate was issued by the Matagorda County district court in 1853, and both her Navarro surveys were laid down from it.More in the glossary → Certificate for a leagueLeagueA Spanish land measure, about 4,428 acres. Under Mexico it was the grazing land in a settler's grant.A league and a labor together came to about 4,605 acres.More in the glossary → and Labor issued by the District Court of Matagorda County on the 8th day of October 1853." The Land Office found it lay over an older survey for H. Constable that had been forfeited, let it stand, and patentedPatentThe state's final grant of title to a survey, signed in Austin. Until a survey was patented the land still belonged to the state.The patent is the first link in the chain of title for most land in the county.More in the glossary → it to her in March 1859.³

1924 mapTopo201220182022

The same certificate paid for a second piece of Navarro County. In May 1857 Milton Wright surveyed 2,101 acres for her on Briar Creek, about nine miles northwest of Corsicana: one laborLaborA Spanish land measure, about 177 acres. Under Mexico it was the farming land in a settler's grant, beside the league for grazing.Here it means the land measure, not work.More in the glossary → of farming land and the rest pasture.⁴ It was patented in August 1859.⁵ The rest of the certificate was laid down somewhere else; its other surveys are in separate files.⁶

A headright was the land Mexico, and then the Republic of TexasRepublic of TexasThe independent country Texas was from 1836, when it broke from Mexico, until it joined the United States at the end of 1845.More in the glossary →, promised to people who settled before independence. A league and a labor came to about 4,600 acres, the share for the head of a family.

Jane Maria Eliza McManus was born near Troy, New York, in 1807. In 1832 she came to Texas in a venture to settle German families on Mexican grant land. The colony broke up at Matagorda, but she kept coming back: nine trips to Texas by 1849, and claims along the Brazos at Waco and on the coast.⁷ In 1849 she married William L. Cazneau.⁸ So by the time the Matagorda court issued her certificate in 1853, she was Jane Cazneau.

She made her living as a writer. Her columns in the New York Sun in the mid-1840s pushed for the annexationAnnexationTexas joining the United States. Congress voted for it in early 1845, and Texas became a state on 29 December 1845.More in the glossary → of Texas. In the Mexican War she went to Mexico City with a secret peace mission and reported from behind the lines, the only American correspondent to do it.⁹ She wrote a book on the presidents of Texas in 1845, and another, Eagle Pass; or Life on the Border, about the two years she and her husband lived on the Rio Grande.¹⁰ Later she wrote for taking Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

In the summer of 1845 an unsigned essay on Texas in the Democratic Review spoke of "our manifest destinyManifest destinyThe belief, common in the 1840s, that the United States was meant by Providence to spread across the continent.The phrase first appeared in print in 1845, in an essay calling for the annexation of Texas.More in the glossary → to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." The words have long been credited to the magazine's editor, John L. O'Sullivan. In 2001 the historian Linda S. Hudson argued, from a computer comparison of the writing, that Jane Cazneau wrote the essay. O'Sullivan's biographer disagrees. It is not settled.¹¹ In Navarro County the idea was older than the phrase: in 1838, west of present Dawson, a Kickapoo hunting camp asked a party of surveyors to leave.

Is the Jane M. Cazneau on the map the same woman? The Land Office file does not say. But she took the Cazneau name only in 1849, she had lived at Matagorda, and Hudson writes that she registered her headright claim in 1838 and later gave half of it to Gen. Thomas J. Chambers for his legal help in getting it recognized.¹² No other Jane M. Cazneau turns up.

The two Navarro patents were collected in December 1860 by B. J. Chambers, who paid the government dues: $1.64 on the Chambers Creek survey and $7.20 on Briar Creek.¹³ Barzillai J. Chambers was the general's nephew, a former district surveyorDistrict surveyorThe official surveyor for a land district, which could take in several counties. He recorded the surveys made in it and sent them on to the Land Office.More in the glossary → who had settled in Navarro County in 1855 as a farmer and land dealer.¹⁴ Other Land Office files show him paying the dues and picking up patents for several other granteesGranteeThe person a land grant was made to, whose name the survey carries.More in the glossary → in the county,¹⁵ so his name on hers shows who handled the paperwork, not who owned the land. He later gave land for the town of Cleburne, and in 1880 he ran for vice president on the Greenback ticketGreenback PartyA farmers' and workers' party of the 1870s and 1880s that wanted more paper money in circulation to ease debts and low crop prices.In 1880 it ran James B. Weaver for president and B. J. Chambers of Texas for vice president.More in the glossary →.

Nothing puts her in Navarro County herself. In the years these surveys were run she was living mostly in the Dominican Republic and New York. She died in December 1878, when the steamer Emily B. Souder went down on the way to Santo Domingo.¹⁶

Who held her land after 1859, and whether she sold it herself, is in the county deed records, not yet read. If you hold an abstract of titleAbstract of titleA bound history of a piece of land: every recorded deed, will, lien and release, from the original grant to the present, usually made by a title company.Older families often still have one in a drawer. It is the quickest way to trace who held a tract.More in the glossary → on ground northwest of town that runs back to the Cazneau survey, it would settle it.