SUBLETT, FRANKLIN BOLIVAR
SUBLETT, FRANKLIN BOLIVAR (1828–1866). Franklin Bolivar Sublett, planter and Confederate soldier, was born in San Augustine on December 18, 1828, the son of Easter Jane (Roberts) and Philip A. Sublett. He settled in Trinity County, probably in the early 1850s, and in addition to practicing law, developed a large and prosperous plantation. By 1860 he owned 80,000 acres, the largest landholdings in Trinity County, and 117 slaves. He was thus among the largest slaveholders in Texas on the eve of the Civil War. In 1860, according to the census, his plantation produced 400 bales of cotton and 5,000 bushels of corn. During the war Sublett served as a brigadier general in the Third District, Texas State Troops and as lieutenant colonel, Second Infantry, Texas State Troops. He was remembered as a man of high intelligence and a gifted orator but preferred the quiet life of a planter and never ran for public office. General Sublett died in San Augustine soon after the war, on December 22, 1866, and is buried at the Sublett Ranch Cemetery three miles east of San Augustine, near the historic Sublett house.
Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). Vertical Files, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Ralph A. Wooster, "Wealthy Texans, 1860," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 71 (October 1967).