Tomball - Texas History

The Mahaffey family operated a general store at Texas and Commerce streets in Tomball. The infant in the picture, Hazel Elizabeth Mahaffey, was the first child born in Tomball.  The Mahaffey family, like many European families in the mid-1800s, moved to Texas looking for land and opportunity in the new state. Descended from Scottish settlers in Ireland, the Mahaffeys traveled to the United States in 1765, moving to Texas from Louisiana when land grants became available.

Family members still live in the area, although the last name has not survived due to name changes in marriage, said Justin Elbert, a descendent of the Mahaffey family. Mahaffey Road in Tomball, which connects Hufsmith-Kohrville Road and FM 2920, marks the route the family used to sell its goods. It also marks the site of the new Mahaffey Elementary School in Klein ISD, which opened this fall.

Amos Mahaffey Sr. moved his family by wagon in 1866 to the now-extinct Willow community near Willow Creek. The family grew cotton, corn and other crops on a homestead in the area now occupied by Klein Memorial Park cemetery on FM 2920. Amos Mahaffey Jr., who was 16 when his father died, later became the head of a family of eight children with his wife, Emma Harrison.

“They were the linchpin of the whole Willow Creek area,” Elbert said. Elbert is the great-great-great grandson of Amos Mahaffey Jr. Amos Mahaffey Jr.’s son Robert Oran Mahaffey opened a general store in the late 1800s off of Texas and Commerce streets in Tomball. In addition to selling general merchandise and farm produce, the two-story wooden building housed a blacksmith.

One story that has passed down through generations of the family tells how Amos Mahaffey Jr. rode two or more days to Houston to vote in elections, said Elbert’s grandmother Anne Barnes, who heard the stories from her grandmother, Elizabeth Mahaffey.  Barnes said her grandmother also related how her mother Emma Mahaffey once braved the Galveston Hurricane in 1900 when it reached Tomball to help a neighbor deliver a baby.  “She saddled up a horse, put on a cloak and a lighted lantern and forded Willow Creek to help,” 

Barnes said, The family lived in a three-room house, hand-hewn from cypress trees along Willow Creek, at a site near Mahaffey Road and FM 2920. “It’s kind of neat to live in the same neighborhood that your ancestors grew up in and drive by the house and say [to my kids], ‘That’s where your great-great-great-great-grandfather lived’.” Elbert said.

Barnes said she believes her ancestors would be proud to see the family name on the new elementary school. “[My grandmother] would be so proud and elated,” Barnes said. “Education was important to people like Grandpa [Amos] and he wanted his kids to go to school.”