Pearl Qualls & Paul Edward Rainwater, Sr.

Paul E. Rainwater, Pearl Qualls Rainwater, Paul, Jr.

Paul Edward Rainwater, Sr. was born on 15 May 1885 in Georgia, one of six children born to Charles Allison Rainwater and Cornelia Jane Veasey.

At the age of fourteen, Rainwater killed an acquaintance having been provoked by an insult about his deceased mother. He was charged with and convicted of voluntary manslaughter, but the sentence was commuted by the governor. ¹ In about 1902, he came to Texas in search of a new beginning. By 1910, he was living in Dallas and working as an electrician for the local electric company. He eventually set up in business for himself as an electrical contractor.

Paul married a local girl, Pearl Qualls, and the couple had one son, Paul E. Jr., in 1916. He is shown at age 2½ in the photo on the right, which was taken in La Rosita Ranch, a small community on the Texas-Mexico border, some miles south of Eagle Pass.

In the 1930s, Paul Rainwater, Sr. traveled to El Salvador where he advised and apparently managed for a time, the electric company of San Salvador, Compañía de Alumbrado Eléctrico de San Salvador. He is shown in the photo on the left touring one of the substations with then President-General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, a military dictator who ruled El Salvador from 1931 to 1944.

In 1935, Paul and his family took up residence in Grapevine, Texas, a small Tarrant County community some miles northwest of Dallas, where they lived for 10 years. He died in 1945, and was originally buried in Grapevine Cemetery, where his tombstone was transcribed by the DAR when the cemetery was recorded in the 1940s. However, when the cemetery was re-recorded in 1982², the transcribers noted that his tombstone was not found. He is now buried (and probably always was) with his wife, son, sister Josephine and some of his wife’s relations in Five Mile Cemetery ³ in south Dallas.

Sources
¹ “A childhood murder changes two lives: the hidden story of Paul E. Rainwater”
Susan Chance-Rainwater, Dec 2020
² 926: Cemeteries of Northeast Tarrant Co., TX, Evelyn D’Arcy Cushman, 1981, Fort Worth, TX, PDF
³ 931: Genealogical Data from Early Dallas Co., TX Cemeteries, Vol. 5, Five Mile Cemetery, Dallas Genealogical Society, microfische, publ. 1981, Dallas, TX, PDF

Credits
These photos were removed from a family album and sold on Ebay in March 2002.

© 2020 Susan Chance-Rainwater
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