06/24/2026
On June 20, 1856, Nacogdoches resident William Goyens, a free person of color, died at the age of sixty-two. A blacksmith by trade, Goyens was a native of North Carolina, who came to East Texas in the early 1820s. In Nacogdoches under Mexican rule, Goyens became one of the town’s most prosperous businessmen, and surely its most diversified. His blacksmithing business allowed him to branch out into lucrative sidelines as a gunsmith and cartwright, and he operated a freight-hauling business along the Nacogdoches-Natchitoches corridor. With the profits from these activities he built a house in town, which he operated as a boarding house.
In the early 1830s he purchased a nearby tract of land, afterward known to the locals as Goyens Hill, overseeing his far-flung enterprises from a large, two-story home. Taking advantage of the area’s natural springs, he would eventually operate a sawmill on the property to serve the area’s growing need for lumber, and a gristmill to grind flour and corn meal. Although a slaveowner himself, he was sympathetic to the antislavery cause, and became a friend to the Quaker antislavery leader Benjamin Lundy, who sought to establish a free black colony in Texas in the early 1830s.
Goyens’ world changed abruptly after independence. He could no longer vote in local elections or represent himself in court, and was denied access to the large land bounties available to all whites who had resided in Texas before the revolution. When the Texas Congress passed a bill expelling all free blacks from the Lone Star republic, Thomas Jefferson Rusk and other prominent East Texas leaders lobbied successfully to exempt him from the law. Fluent in the Cherokee language, he served as an Indian agent in Sam Houston’s first administration, convincing Chief Bowls to take no part in the Córdova rebellion in the summer of 1838. At the time of his death, Goyens left an estate that included more than twelve thousand acres of prime East Texas timberland.
A granite marker commemorating Goyens (incorrectly noting his place of birth as South Carolina) was erected on Goyens’ Hill in 1936. For more on the Nacogdoches businessman, see Sam W. Haynes’ recent book, Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas.
