William Wallace Mills

William Wallace (W.W.) Mills was born on Feb. 10, 1836 in Thorntown, Indiana. In December 1858 he followed his brother Anson Mills to the town of Franklin, which Anson later renamed El Paso. Shortly after the election of Abraham Lincoln in late 1860, eight Southern states, including Texas, adopted ordinances of secession. In El Paso the Anglo-Americans were almost unanimously pro-Southern, and at a local election on the question of secession, there were less than a half dozen opposition votes. Two of these were the Mills brothers. Anson left for Washington, D.C., to serve the Union cause and later became a brigadier general; his brother went to New Mexico to join Union forces there. After Confederate forces occupied Fort Bliss in 1861, they caught W. W. Mills in El Paso del Norte across the river and took him prisoner. He eventually escaped to New Mexico. By 1862 Mills was the United States collector of customs at El Paso and Mills was named a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1868–69 in Austin. The election of Governer Davis brought Mills's removal from his post as collector of customs, thus sharply curtailing his local power and influence. Mills's political career had come to an end, although he did serve as United States consul in Chihuahua from 1897 to 1907. His memoirs, Forty Years at El Paso, remain the most complete account of that city during its formative years. Mills and his wife, Mary, moved to Austin in 1910, where they spent their last years. Mills died on February 10, 1913. Image Description: Black and white image shows a portrait of William Wallace Mills. He wears an opened dark colored coat, a light-colored vest and a white shirt underneath. Mills directly looks into the camera with big dark eyes, and only a dark mustache neatly trimmed to decorate his face. His hair has some waves that barely cover the top of his ears and is combed and parted at the side with a receding hairline.