Amon Bond was born in July of 1798 in or near Baltimore, Maryland. His parents, Henry and Elizabeth Bond were both Quakers, and Amon apparently lived by those tenets for his entire life, although there is no record of Amon having actively participated in his faith as a member of a Quaker Meeting in either Tennessee or Texas. His family moved to McMinn County, Tennessee, when he was a young boy. It was there that he became lifelong friends with two other boys who later joined with him in becoming pioneers and community founders in the far away land of Texas — Abel Landers and David G. Nutt.
Amon, Abel, and David G. all appear to have started married life around 1820. They lived as farmers in the same area of Tennessee on lands inherited or purchased from various family members. Amon married first. He tied the knot with Sarah Elizabeth Carter in Blount County, Tennessee, in October of 1818, beginning a union that lasted until her death in what would become Hood County, Texas, in 1860. Their marriage produced fifteen children, many of whom emigrated with them to that frontier region in the early 1850s.
The three young men’s growing up together under the influence of Amon’s Quaker family apparently had a profound impact on some of their moral choices in adulthood. Quakers were almost alone in southern states like Tennessee in staunchly opposing slavery. Amon, Abel and David all grew up opposing it too and all three of them made life choices profoundly affected by that belief. A thorough search of census and probate records shows that neither Amon, nor his parents, ever owned slaves, although they lived in the south and appeared to be landed farmers with operations of a size and means to have done so. This was VERY unusual in that place at that time.
Neither Abel Landers nor David G. Nutt appear to have owned slaves until inheriting a small number each from their fathers upon those gentlemen’s deaths. That divergence appears to have been the reason that Amon kept farming in Tennessee right up to 1850, while Abel and David and their families pulled up stakes around 1840 and moved to Missouri — apparently for the express purpose of being able to free the slaves they had inherited in a place where those people could live as free persons without fear of re-enslavement of either themselves or their family members.
Amon and Sarah and several of their sons appear to have worked together to build a prosperous situation for themselves over the course of thirty years in Tennessee. But like the situation their friends the Nutts and the Landers found themselves in over in Missouri, by around 1850 it was becoming apparent that bad times were coming. The western frontier beckoned, and Amon and a couple of his younger sons began to literally explore the possibilities. As early as 1851-52 they apparently traveled as far as the northern regions of the newly minted state of Texas, and they liked what they saw. Ed Bond applied for and received a land grant that happened to be located on the west banks of a river called El Rio de los Brazos de Dios and on their way to check it out the men stopped to visit with their friends the Nutts and the Landers in Newton County, Missouri.
By 1854, Amon and Sarah, and most of their children and grandchildren, pulled up stakes from Tennessee and became the first white folk to settle on the west banks of the Brazos River north of Barnard’s Trading Post and Mill, near what was known as the Stockton Bend of the river. Their nearest neighbors were Pleasant Thorp and his folk several miles to the west and Pastor Joe Robinson across the river to the southeast at what became Acton but was then known confusingly as Comanche Peak Post Office – it being both across the river and at least four to five miles as the crow flies from that well-known landmark.
In 1856, Amon traveled to Missouri to lead a small group from the Nutt and Landers families to join his group in Texas. His friends Abel and David tied up business concerns in Missouri and brought a large group comprised of most of their extended family members two years later in 1858.
All three men were around sixty years of age by that time — considered advanced in years in those days — and fathers and grandfathers many times over. But they all spent their last decade on this earth building the beginnings of something new. Amon and his two friends ended their lives in a new land, actively participating in founding a community with a vision based on the moral convictions of respect for humanity and love of family that they had lived all their lives.
Amon was not the eldest, nor was he the man many would have said was the leader of their group. But it was his moral compass that had been the touchstone for all of their lives. Of the three, he passed first.
Tradition says he died and was buried in February 1870 next to Sarah, his faithful wife of forty-two years, in a grassy meadow on top of a bluff or hill with a panoramic view of the Brazos River valley and the site planned for the town of Granbury. Many believe their graves, unmarked and unadorned per Quaker tradition, lie somewhere within the oldest section of what is now Granbury Cemetery with its sweeping view of the land they and their friends had come to love.
