Members of the Scots-Irish Grant clan sailed from the British Isles to the New World early in the 1600's bound for Colonial Virginia and Maryland. Matthew Matthias Grant was born in Virginia, where he grew to adulthood and married Caroline Bullard. The Grant family moved west through the American frontier, settling in Coryell County in central Texas in the 1850's. A final move brought them to East Texas near Beckville in Panola County in the early 1860's. Atlas Matthias Grant, one of Matthew and Caroline's seven children, was born in Tennessee near Lookout Mountain on December 23, 1839. As a Texan, he served in the Confederate Army with the Choctaw and Chickasaw Mounted Rifles from June 1861 to May 1865. After marrying the widowed Penny Ann Wilson Johnson of Coryell County, he and Penny, with her young daughter Pru Ella Johnson, homesteaded near Beckville and raised fourteen additional children. The Grant Place homestead, founded more than 120 years earlier, remained in the family of their daughter Zorah Grant Selman in 1985.