SAMUEL MAVERICK
In 1834, with 25 of his father’s enslaved laborers, Sam took over a plantation in Alabama where a neighbor gave him 400 head of cattle to settle a debt. Yet Sam didn’t like plantation life, so the next year he moved to Texas, leaving the farm in the care of his enslaved families, who allowed the cattle to wander unfenced, grazing and breeding freely. The caretakers also evenutally moved to the Texas Gulf Coast with the cattle.
Neither Maverick nor the caretakers ever branded their cattle, some suggest because it was cruel. Neighbors began claiming unbranded cows wandering apart from a herd, referring to them as “mavericks.”
Author Rudyard Kipling used the word in his 1896 short story, A Mutiny of the Mavericks, popularizing it to describe those who operated alone and outside the rules.
In Texas, Sam Maverick went on to have an incredibly exciting military and political career, barely cheating death in several harrowing situations including the Alamo. Yet today he is best remembered for one of the most mundane details of his life: a lackadaisical attitude toward branding cows he never particularly wanted.
In 1895, City Council memorialized Charleston’s Maverick family by naming one of the streets east of Hampton Park after him. It developed in the first decade of the 20th century as an integrated neighborhood for working-class families.
Just east of Hampton Park, a two-block residential lane named Maverick Street runs between Rutledge and King. A modest little road it may be, yet its name comes with a surprising Charleston connection.
Today when someone uses the word maverick, I remember those Saturday Night Live skits where Tina Fey caricatured 2008 Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who used it repeatedly in her rambling speeches. The PR people behind her and running mate John McCain’s campaign had seized upon the word maverick to brand the duo as outside independent thinkers, those who blaze their own trail rather than follow the crowd.
Likewise, tv and movies incorporated the word when creating rule-flaunting characters such as poker-playing cowboy Bart Maverick, with James Garner in the title role of the popular late 1950s-early ‘60s western. Today everyone is familiar with Tom Cruise’s envelope-pushing aviator Maverick of the Top Gun movie franchise.
So how did the word enter our lexicon?
English emigrate Samuel Maverick (1602-1670?) arrived in Barbados around 1624 before continuing to Massachusetts. Rapidly accruing land, he became influential enough to meet with King Charles II in April 1664, a year after the king granted the lands south of Virginia down to Spanish Florida to his eight noble benefactors, the Lords Proprietors of Carolina. Though there’s no record of what they discussed, perhaps it’s not surprising that some of Maverick’s descendants later moved to Charles Town.
His great-grandson, also named Samuel, became a well-established Charleston businessman. After the death of that Samuel’s grandfather in 1793, his grandmother married Revolutionary War hero Gen. Robert Anderson. Samuel, oddly enough, then married his grandmother’s stepdaughter, Elizabeth, in October 1802. Nine months later they welcomed their first child, Samuel Augustus Maverick, born at the family’s Pendleton District home where they spent summers in the state’s cooler northwest corner.
Like other Charlestonians, the Mavericks annually returned to the Lowcountry once the summer’s heat had abated. Over the next four years, they had four more children here, though one lived less than a day. Then in September 1809, their daughter Ann Caroline died of yellow fever, not an uncommon occurrence as Lowcountry epidemics were frequent in the 19th century.
Such losses were not new to Samuel Maverick, who had lost some of his own siblings in epidemics. After his daughter’s death, he felt overwhelmed by the health risks of living in a crowded port city like Charleston, so he moved the family to their rural Pendleton home permanently, though he continued to operate his businesses in Charleston.
Samuel Sr.’s determination to break away from the crowd was apparently not lost on Samuel Augustus, who grew up, received a degree from Yale University, then studied law to become a licensed jurist in Virginia and South Carolina. He ran for a state legislative seat in 1830, however his views opposing nullification of federal tariffs
ran contrary to most South Carolinians’. He lost by a landslide.
Sam began investing in land. Among his properties were several acres just below the peninsula’s neck between King Street and Rutledge Avenue, according to the Facebook page Historic Maverick Street in Charleston, SC.
Everyone expected Sam would gradually take over his father’s businesses in Charleston and Pendleton. To their surprise, however, Sam announced that instead, he was heading west to seek fame and fortune on the frontier.
In 1834, with 25 of his father’s enslaved laborers, Sam took over a plantation in Alabama where a neighbor gave him 400 head of cattle to settle a debt. Yet Sam didn’t like plantation life, so the next year he moved to Texas, leaving the farm in the care of his enslaved families, who allowed the cattle to wander unfenced, grazing and breeding freely. The caretakers also evenutally moved to the Texas Gulf Coast with the cattle.
Neither Maverick nor the caretakers ever branded their cattle, some suggest because it was cruel. Neighbors began claiming unbranded cows wandering apart from a herd, referring to them as “mavericks.”
Author Rudyard Kipling used the word in his 1896 short story, A Mutiny of the Mavericks, popularizing it to describe those who operated alone and outside the rules.
In Texas, Sam Maverick went on to have an incredibly exciting military and political career, barely cheating death in several harrowing situations including the Alamo. Yet today he is best remembered for one of the most mundane details of his life: a lackadaisical attitude toward branding cows he never particularly wanted.
In 1895, City Council memorialized Charleston’s Maverick family by naming one of the North Central neighborhood streets after him. It developed in the first decade of the 20th century as an integrated neighborhood for working-class families.
