Guide to the Houston Family Papers

The Houston family of Virginia included three generations of Presbyterian ministers. Samuel Houston, born in 1758, was the grandson of John Houston, who immigrated with his family from Ireland and settled in Rockland County, Virginia. He was a graduate of Liberty Hall Academy. During the American Revolution, he served in the Rockland militia and fought under General Nathaniel Greene in the Battle of Guilford Court House in 1781. He was licensed to preach in 1782 by Hanover Presbytery, and he was ordained as a minister the following year. He worked as a supply and pastor in churches in Tennessee and in Virginia, where he eventually purchased land and split his time between preaching and farming. He married Mary Hall around 1783; after her death, he married Margaret Walker.

Samuel Rutherford Houston, born in 1806 to Samuel and Margaret Walker Houston, was a Presbyterian minister, teacher, planter, and missionary in Turkey and Greece. Houston graduated from Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1825, and then taught for six years at the Deaf, Dumb and Blind Institute in Philadelphia. In 1831, he entered Princeton Theological Seminary, transferring after one year to Union Theological Seminary in Virginia. Shortly after his ordination in 1834 by Lexington Presbytery, he married Mary Russell Rowland. Later the same year, Houston was posted by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions as a missionary to Turkey and Greece. He served on the Island of Scio, at that time part of the Ottoman Empire, from 1834 to 1837, then moved to the Province of Laconia in Greece, where he remained until 1841. Mary Houston died in 1839; they had one surviving child, Rutherford Rowland Houston, who also became a Presbyterian minister. Houston returned to the United States in 1841 and worked as stated supply and pastor to churches in Greenbrier Presbytery in Virginia. In 1842 he married Margaret Parks Paxton; they had nine children. Houston died in Wigton, West Virginia, in 1887.

Rutherford Rowland Houston attended Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, graduating in 1861. While at the Seminary, he worked as an instructor in Oriental languages. He was ordained as an evangelist in 1863 by the Greenbrier Presbytery and worked as stated supply and pastor to churches in Greenbrier and Montgomery presbyteries. He married Margaret Steele of Illinois. The couple had nine children.