Capt. William W. Lang

  Notes and Events:

• Note: Served as Lieutenant, later promoted to Captain. ¹⁰⁹ 1861 joined the volunteers from Mississippi and Alabama known as the "Ruffin Dragoons", Company A, part of the Third Alabama Cavalry Regiment of the Confederate States Army. 1863 to 1865 served in Elmore's Texas Regiment.

• Note: From the "Handbook of Texas Online." ¹¹⁰ LANG, WILLIAM W. (1829-?). William W. Lang, farmer, businessman, and public official, son of William A. and Temple (Thurman) Lang, was born in Wayne County, Mississippi, on May 15, 1829. He graduated from Oakland College, Mississippi, in 1848. On June 1, 1853, he married Frances Huberta Turner. They had four children. Lang engaged in cotton planting until 1860, when he moved to Falls County, Texas, to take up farming on the Brazos River. At the outbreak of the Civil Warqv in 1861 he enlisted in a Mississippi cavalry regiment of the Confederate Army and soon rose to the rank of captain. In 1863 he resigned this commission and enrolled in Elmore's Texas Regiment, in which he served until the end of the war. Upon his discharge in 1865 he returned to his Falls County farm. From 1874 to 1880 Lang was master of the state Grange.qv In 1875 he was appointed by Governor Richard Cokeqv to select the site for a branch of the state penitentiary in East Texas, and in 1876 he represented Falls County in the House of the Fifteenth Legislature. He was an unsuccessful candidate for governor at the state Democratic convention in 1878. Lang was elected president of the Southwestern Immigration Company in 1880 and from 1881 to 1884 was in Europe in the interest of the company. From 1885 to 1889 he was United States [Ambassador] consul at Hamburg, Germany. Upon his return to Texas, he moved to Dallas, where he was president of the Texas Paper Mill Company.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Memorial and Biographical History of Dallas County (Chicago: Lewis, 1892; rpt., Dallas: Walsworth, 1976). Ralph A. Smith, "The Grange Movement in Texas, 1873-1900," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 42 (April 1939).

• Education: Graduated from Oakland College, 1848, Claiborne County, Mississippi.

William married Frances "Huberta" Turner, daughter of Abner B. Turner and Chaste Ester Love, on 1 Jun 1853. (Frances "Huberta" Turner was born on 20 Jan 1830 in West Bend, Clarke Co., AL and died in Texas.)