Charles "Don Carlos" Percy
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Charles "Don Carlos" Percy (1704-1794) was founder of the Percy family of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.
An Irish-Catholic adventurer, Percy arrived in British West Florida in 1775. For services to the Crown, he received a 600-acre land grant in Louisiana. With this and other land parcels, he established three successful indigo plantations which enabled him to amass great wealth. The main plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, he named Northumberland Place in an effort to establish ties with the fabled British Percy lineage of Hotspur. For a while Percy was an alcalde or magistrate under the Spanish government, hence his nickname, 'Don Carlos.' At the age of ninety, Percy reportedly gave in to melancholia and drowned himself in a creek.
His son, Thomas George Percy Sr., (Princeton 1806) wed Maria Pope, (a relative of British poet Alexander Pope) in 1814, while Maria's sister Matilda wed John Walker, a Princeton University graduate and one of Alabama's first two senators. John and Thomas settled on two adjacent estates in Huntsville, Alabama, and named their sons after one another.
The sons of Thomas George Percy helped develop the Mississippi delta into the leading cotton producing area in the world. William Alexander Percy, the youngest son, became rich before the Civil War and married Nana Armstrong, a cousin of George Armstrong Custer and granddaughter of General James (Trooper) Armstrong, a hero of the War of 1812.
Nana's son, William Armstrong Percy, became a famed Confederate colonel, and was a railroad lawyer after the war.
LeRoy Percy (1860-1929), son of William Armstrong Percy, served as a U.S. senator and battled the Ku Klux Klan in 1922.
LeRoy Percy was the great-uncle of writer Walker Percy (1916-1990), and gay activist William Armstrong Percy, III.LeRoy's son was William Alexander Percy, WWI hero, lawyer, poet and memoirist, best known for "Lanterns on the Levee."
