David Alexander Nunn, lawyer and Confederate Army officer, was born in Summerville, Mississippi, on October 1, 1836, the son of John and Jane (Tubb) Nunn. John Nunn was a former soldier of Andrew Jackson. David Nunn was educated at Murfreesboro and attended law school in Lebanon, Tennessee. He furthered his legal studies in New Orleans and was admitted to the bar in Mississippi in 1857. On June 8, 1858, he married Helen Williams at Macon, Mississippi, and the couple set out for Texas on their wedding day. Although they had intended to settle in Waco, they made their home in Crockett, where in 1859 Nunn was elected the town's first mayor; his wife taught school there. By 1860 they had an infant daughter, Corine. When Texas seceded from the Union (see SECESSION), Nunn raised a cavalry company from Houston and Madison counties. The company was mustered into Confederate service on September 29, 1861, as Company I, Fourth Texas Mounted Volunteers, at Camp Sibley, near San Antonio, and assigned to Gen. Henry H. Sibley's Arizona Brigade. It took part in the Confederate invasion of New Mexico in 1862. Unfortunately, Nunn was unpopular with his men and resigned in response to their petition on February 27, 1862, shortly after the battle of Valverde. He returned to Crockett, raised a second cavalry company for service with Walker's Texas Division, was elected captain, and served with it until the end of the war. Nunn was a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1875 and served as chairman of the seven-man committee that devised the public-education aspects of the state's basic laws. After the session Nunn returned to the practice of law. He died in Crockett on August 13, 1911.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Martin Hardwick Hall, The Confederate Army of New Mexico (Austin: Presidial Press, 1978). Southwestern Historical Quarterly 15, Notes and Fragments, October 1911.