Category: African-American Tryon Family

Categories: Tryon Name Study

This category is intended for those with the Tryon surname or links to the Tryon surname (e.g. spouses, children) where the Tryon name comes down from an African-American ancestor.

Leon County, Texas
There are many African-American families with the surname Tryon in Leon County, Texas in the late 19th and early 20th Century. They nearly all link to a few men who were born before the Civil War who almost certainly were born into slavery.

Houston County, Texas
Another family group of African-American Tryons was living in the late 19th and early part of the 20th Century in the rural area of Crockett, Houston County, Texas. An additional family group lived in or near Grapeland in Houston County.

Many descendants of these families are also found in the early 1900s in Oklahoma, mainly Okfuskee County and Oklahoma City.

Many of the families are found in both the Leon County area and the Houston area at different times. The two are only about 100 miles apart. What they all have in common is the Tryon surname and either living in or having a close relative in Leon County, Texas. These include R Tryon (abt.1807-), Ezekiel Tryon (1848-1918), Henry T Tryon (1866-), Samuel Tryon (abt.1853-), Calvin Tryon (abt.1870-aft.1940), John Tryon (abt.1848-), and Amos Tryon (abt.1825-bef.1880).

In the 1860 census slave schedules there is one slave owner, Seldon "Mason" Tryon (1812-1863) in Leon County. He was born and spent his early life in Connecticut, then lived in North Carolina in the 1830s, Arkansas about 1840 and settled in Leon County, TX by 1843. In the 1860 slave schedules he had seven slave houses and about 30 slaves. Some of the older former slaves with Tryon surname, who likely belonged to Seldon Tryon, come from North Carolina, and, at least one from Arkansas, based on their later census records. Note that the census slave schedules did not include names.

Circumstantial evidence suggests the Tryon surnamed African-American families of the Leon county region in the late 19th and early 20th century were descendants of slaves of Seldon Tryon.

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