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- The Handbook of Texas Online
JACKSON, GUY CADE, JR. (1905-1980). Guy Cade Jackson, Jr., county judge, businessman, and conservationist, was born on June 24, 1905, at Galveston, one of seven children of Guy Cade and Berta Nell (Briggs) Jackson, and a grandson of early cattleman James Jackson. His boyhood on the J-K Ranch at Double Bayou was popularized in his brother Ralph Semmes Jackson's memoirs, Home on the Double Bayou. As a young man, Jackson briefly lived in West Texas and worked as a successful traveling salesman. He was married in 1930 to Mary Katherine Cook; they had three children. Their eldest son, Guy C. III, served as county judge in 1977-78.
Jackson was elected county commissioner in 1928 and two years later won election as one of the youngest county judges in Texas. He held this office from 1931 to 1944. In office he was instrumental in establishing the Chambers-Liberty Counties Navigation District. He resigned in August 1944 to become one of the new district's three commissioners. He served on the CLCND board from 1944 to 1948 and 1952 to 1960. Both as county judge and as CLCND chairman he championed development of the Trinity River watershed. He helped organize the Forward Trinity Valley Association in 1940 and the Fraternity of the White Heron in 1944, two groups that worked actively to promote these same projects. He also served as a director of the Trinity Improvement Association. These activities led Jackson to take an early role in conservation activities. In 1944 he helped to found and served as the first president of the Texas Water Conservation Association. He also helped establish the Trinity Bay Conservation District and in 1952-53 chaired a statewide study commission on water use and conservation for Governor Allan Shivers.
During the Tidelands controversy in the early 1950s, he chaired the statewide Citizens Tidelands Committee, and during the 1952 presidential campaign he was among several prominent Texas Democrats to support Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. Jackson led an effort in 1949 to establish a Chambers County Historical Society. He and his wife moved to Kerrville in 1960, when he retired from active politics and his law practice. At the time of his death there on April 24, 1980, he was serving as a director of the Upper Guadalupe River. He also operated an antique store and real estate business. He was a Methodist. He and his wife are buried in the Garden of Memories at Kerrville.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Jewel Horace Harry, A History of Chambers County (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1940; rpt., Dallas: Taylor, 1981). Margaret S. Henson and Kevin Ladd, Chambers County: A Pictorial History (Norfolk, Virginia: Donning, 1988). Houston Post, February 13, 1955. Ralph Semmes Jackson, Home on the Double Bayou: Memories of an East Texas Ranch (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961). Miriam Partlow, Liberty, Liberty County, and the Atascosito District (Austin: Pemberton, 1974). Who's Who in the South and Southwest, Vol. 3.
Kevin Ladd
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