Rubin was born into slavery about 1835 on the John Allen Hancock plantation in Jackson County, Alabama, near Bellefonte. He was mulatto, and, according to family stories of descendants, he was the son of white plantation owner, John Allen. DNA seems to agree. His mother was probably Susan or possibly Daphney Hancock, enslaved women owned by John Allen Hancock. An enslaved black female giving birth to a child fathered by a male in the master’s family was not uncommon in the South.
Beginning in the early 1830s, lured by free or cheap land, six of John Allen’s ten white children began emigrating to Texas probably taking slaves from the plantation with them, most settling on Onion Creek south of Austin. When Rubin was 12 years old, his white mistress, Sarah “Sallie” Ryan Hancock, died and at that time John Allen’s last white son, Tennessee-trained lawyer John, left for Texas, too, probably taking one slave with him.
When Rubin was about 20, his white master and father died without a will so all his possessions, including 20 slaves, were inventoried and sold. Son John, by then a Judge in Texas, came back to the Hancock plantation in Alabama to purchase nine slaves. All of them appear to be related to Salem, who also was born on the Alabama plantation but who was then Judge John’s personal slave in Texas. Three of those he purchased, Rubin, Orange, and Payton, were considered “brothers” by Salem and two young women, Dorcas and Jemima, likely “sisters”. Susan was Jemima’s mother and possibly Rubin’s or Payton’s also (Rubin named his second daughter Susan). Daphney was elderly and probably didn’t live long after 1856. She was included possibly because she was the mother of one of the others.
After a 900-mile journey from Alabama to Texas, the nine slaves were taken to the Judge’s land on Burnet Road and North Loop. There were five small cabins which housed the slaves located behind a bigger log house possibly used by the overseer, James Doughtry, from Alabama, and occasionally by the Judge and his two nephews, William and James, whom the Judge was rearing.
At the Judge’s farm, called The Oaks, Rubin would have worked with his “brothers” and others clearing land, planting and harvesting crops (including wheat, rye, oats, barley, and cotton), tending livestock (including horses, mules, oxen, cattle, 18 milk cows producing 2200 pounds of butter, and 100 sheep), and helping maintain the Upper Georgetown Road (Burnet Road) which ran nearby. The Judge had about 300 acres in cultivation and 20,000 acres unimproved. The big log house and slave houses were in a beautiful grove of oak trees not far from Shoal Creek. There were at least two other small log cabins, one on the creek. Judge John and his white wife, Susan Richardson, and newborn son, Edwin, lived in town so the slaves would have been supervised by overseer Doughtry.
The Judge also had a biracial son born about the time Rubin arrived and a second son soon after. All the slaves would have known when, in 1860, the Judge sent his two biracial sons and their mother, Eliza, to Ohio thus freeing them. They also would have been aware of the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 when Unionist Judge John encouraged his two nephews, William and James, to join a Union cavalry to fight against their Confederate neighbors. Slave-owning Judge John was a Unionist who favored keeping the country together even if it meant ending slavery.
Elizabeth Peoples, Rubin’s wife, came to Texas from Tennessee maybe by 1863 when kinsmen Anderson Peoples and his brother Granville arrived. Anderson and Granville’s parents were Portan and Martha Peoples, and they may have been Elizabeth’s parents also. Or relative Eliza Peoples Jones was born in Tennessee to George Peoples, a black man who also may have been Elizabeth’s father. Like Orange, Rubin may have been allowed weekly visits in the evenings to the slaveowning family where Elizabeth Peoples and many of her family lived. He and Elizabeth formed a lifelong unrecorded marriage. They had one or two children born into slavery (Melvina before 1865) and Susan ca. 1865) and three after freedom (John Charley, Fannie, and Mattie). Rubin also had a daughter, Martha Ann, with a woman named Rosetta Williams, who, after Elizabeth’s death, may have become his second wife. In the 1880 census wife Elizabeth was listed as black and Rubin and children as mulatto.
In June 1865, when freedom was proclaimed in Texas, Rubin may have done the same thing as Orange: get his wife and children and bring them to Judge Hancock’s place to one of the former slave cabins. Or more likely, he may have joined his wife, Elizabeth Peoples (Fucles), where she was living with a lot of her kinfolks. By 1870, Rubin’s three “brothers”, Salem, Orange, and Payton, were working for and living on the Davis farm just north of Judge John but, since Rubin does not show up in the 1870 census, there is no record of where he lived.
Rubin registered to vote in 1867 as a resident of Travis County for eleven years. He registered again in 1873. In 1875, Rubin was taxed on 3 horses or mules, 6 cattle, and sundry small possessions.
As early as 1875, Elizabeth’s kinsman, Anderson Peoples (also know as Anderson Fuqua or Fucles) and wife Martha Patton owned land along Walnut Creek in the Waters Park area. He bought 12 acres in 1875 and 6 acres in 1877, both in the Rogers Survey. For some years Rubin and his family apparently farmed land in the nearby Thomas Fowler Survey along Walnut Creek in the Waters Park area, working it for shares for the owners, widow Biggs and 4 children living in Nacogdoches. Since Rubin had 35 rented acres in production in 1879, he may have been there long enough to clear it which could have taken several years. In 1879, the land he farmed was valued at $600, livestock at $125, and implements at $30. The produce from his farm was worth $200. He had 3 horses, 2 oxen, 4 head of cattle plus 3 calves and 5 milk cows that produced 200 pounds of butter. Also he owned 5 hogs and 20 chickens which produced 150 dozen eggs. He cut 8 cords of wood. His crops were 25 acres in Indian corn which produced 50 bushels, 3 acres in oats for 25 bushels, 1/2 acre in sweet potatoes for 7 bushels, and 15 acres in cotton for 2 bales. (His stated acreage planted added up to 44 acres instead of 35.)
In 1880, the Biggs family of Nacogdoches sold all 177 acres in the Fowler Survey to T. L. Wren for $40, who, within a month, sold it all to Anderson Peoples for $747. Peoples, a relative of Rubin’s wife, on January 1, 1881, sold 99 acres to Rubin for $448, $175 cash and two promissory notes. Later that year both Anderson and Rubin conveyed right of way to the A&NW railroad which planned to build a line from Austin to Georgetown. The railroad separated 12 acres from the tract and in 1883, Rubin sold that small tract to Dorcas Gregg, probably his sister who had come to Texas with her two small children at the same time as Rubin.
At some point, Rubin had built a two-room house, separate kitchen, fences, and a well on the northern edge of his property adjacent to Anderson People’s land. Elizabeth, Rubin’s wife, was related to Anderson and also to Rubin’s younger “brother”, Payton, whose mother or step mother was Nancy Peoples. Payton, in 1877, had purchased 50 acres a few miles south of Rubin. Rubin’s probable sister, Jemima, married G. W. Corzine and lived near Payton. Living with them was Jemima’s mother, Susan, likely Rubin’s mother also.
Even though Rubin’s kinsman Anderson Peoples donated land for St. Stephens Missionary Baptist Church just west of Rubin’s house, Rubin and family attended St. Paul’s Baptist Church, established in 1873, near 8400 Woodstone which also had a school and a cemetery. In 1886, Rubin’s only son died and in the 1890s his daughter Melvina died. Rubin outlived his three “brothers”. Salem died in 1888, Orange and Peyton in 1908, and Rubin 1916. Elizabeth, who died in 1899 of tuberculosis, and Rubin, along with members of his brothers’ families, were also buried in St. Paul Cemetery. Rubin’s descendants lived on his land until finally selling it in the 1940s.
More information about Rubin and his descendants can be found in After Slavery: The Rubin Hancock Farmstead, 1880-1916, Travis County, Texas by Marie E. Blake and Terri Myers (Texas Department of Transportation, Archeology Studies Program Report 19, 1993). It is available as a pdf on line at SFA ScholarWorks.
Karen Sikes Collins, revised April 2025
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