Julia Dickinson Allen lived in Bastrop County from 1857 to 1863 and was the wife of Col. Robert Thomas Pritchard Allen, an 1812-1888 West Point graduate who worked as a civil engineer, mathematics professor, Methodist preacher, U.S. Mail Agent, co-publisher of the Pacific News in San Francisco from 1849 to 1850, and founder and commandant of the Kentucky Military Institute and the Bastrop Military Institute. Family visitors in Bastrop sometimes included Governor Sam Houston, whose son Sam Junior was a B.M.I. cadet. During the Civil War, while her husband served as colonel of the 17th Texas Infantry and commandant of Camp Ford at Tyler in 1863-1864, Mrs. Allen became an angel of mercy to prisoners there, nursing the ill, consoling the homesick, cheering the despondent, and attending church services with them; she was so esteemed and loved that one of the Federal prisoners wrote a poem in her honor. After the war, she and her husband returned to Kentucky, where Col. Allen resumed operation of the Kentucky Military Institute, supported until 1873 by his brother-in-law Jay Cooke of Philadelphia, who had gained international fame as the United States' financier for the Civil War before his business failure in the Jay Cooke money panic.