Ashall Dancer
ASHALL AND MARY WARD DANCER
Ashall Dancer was born in 1795 in Tennessee. In 1813 he married a woman named Mary Ward in Stewart County, Tennessee. She was born in Tennessee about 1798. The couple had eleven children, two born in Bastrop County, Texas. Ashall and his wife moved to Texas around 1836, traveling from Tennessee and settling in Bastrop County. Bastrop County papers give a list of all the children of Ashall and wife at the time of immigration into Texas.
In 1839 church elders A. Dancer and R. G. Green were sent from the Providence Church in Bastrop County to help organize a church in Fayette County, the Plum Grove Baptist Church, often referred to as the Hopewell Church. In October of 1839 A. Dancer, a strong anti-missionary Baptist was chosen as its pastor. It was the first church of Primitive Baptist faith west of the Colorado River.
One of their sons, John Dancer, served with Capt. Dawson and died on September 18, 1842 in the Salado Creek massacre. He is buried with the soldiers on Monument Hill overlooking La Grange in Fayette County.
In 1849 Ashall Dancer was killed by Indians Mary Dancer died in 1853.
DANCER, ASHALL (ca. 1795-ca. 1849). Asiel (Asahel) Dancer, a Baptist church elder and lay minister, was born, probably around 1795, in Tennessee. Around 1813 he married a woman named Mary, also of Tennessee, and the couple had eleven children. One of their sons, John Dancer, served with Capt. Nicholas M. Dawsonqv and died on September 18, 1842. He is buried with the Dawson and Mier expeditionqv soldiers on Monument Hill overlooking La Grange in Fayette County. Dancer and his wife moved to Texas around 1836, traveling from Tennessee and settling in Bastrop County. In 1839 church elders Dancer and R. G. Green were sent from the Providence Church in Bastrop County to help organize a church in Fayette County, the Plum Grove Baptist Church, often referred to as the Hopewell Church. In October 1839 Dancer, a strong antimissionary Baptist (see BAPTIST CHURCH), was chosen as its pastor. The church was affiliated with the Union Baptists of western Tennessee and evidently split over the missionary question shortly after its inception. In December 1841 Z. N. Morrellqv became its pastor. Asiel Dancer died in Bastrop County around 1849; his wife died in Bastrop County in 1853.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: James Milton Carroll, A History of Texas Baptists (Dallas: Baptist Standard, 1923). La Grange High School, Fayette County: Past and Present (La Grange, Texas, 1976). Houston Wade, comp., The Dawson Men of Fayette County (Houston, 1932). Leonie Rummel Weyand and Houston Wade, An Early History of Fayette County (La Grange, Texas: La Grange Journal, 1936).
Betty McCarty McAnelly
The only photo of Ashall that I have was published in “Texas Tales Your Teacher Never Told You” Wordware Publishing, Plano, Texas. The photo is of the Plum Grove Church (also known as Hopewell) in Fayette County, Texas. Ashall Dancer is the one on the right. I do not have information on the gentleman to the left. As Ashall reportedly died circa January of 1849, the photo predates that time.