Howdy, welcome to Wies About Texas, the Texas History Podcast.

Thanks for listening today and thanks to the over 11,000 people who've listened to the show.

Today I'm going to do the first of what will no doubt be a ton of episodes

devoted to interesting Texans from all eras of Texas history.

I'm calling it Texans you should know.

And every now and then we're going to add another

Texan you should know to the series and there aren't any rules on this series so

if there's a Texan you think listener should know about send it to me

at host at wise about texas.com or via Twitter at wise about texas and we'll get an

episode going there also isn't any chronological order to this, but we're going to

start with a man from whom Chambers County is named, Thomas Jefferson Chambers.

The very scientific reason I picked him as the first person is that I was

talking to a friend of mine the other day from Chambers County, so that's how I picked him.

So let's go back to a time even before Texas independence and get wise about Texas.

Now Thomas Jefferson Chambers was born in Orange County, Virginia on April 13, 1802.

Two presidents hailed from Orange County, by the way, James Madison and Zachary

Taylor. Thomas was the 20th child of his father, also named Thomas Chambers.

His father died when he was only 13 13 and his mother then moved the family to Mount Sterling, Kentucky, which is east of Lexington, to be with relatives. Chambers went to school in Lexington and studied science and language and became a school teacher.

And while Chambers was teaching school, he also studied law with two Lexington Kentucky judges,

Jesse Bledsoe and James Clark.

I discovered something interesting that may explain

Chambers' interest in Texas eventually. It turns out that another famous Texan,

...