My great grandfather William Ellijay Gilmer was a Drummer Boy in the 14th Georgia Infantry Regiment, Jasper County Georgia, C.S.A. In 1869, he was hired as a deck hand aboard a Chattahoochie River and Gulf coastal steamer from Jasper County Georgia to New Orleans and worked aboard a keel-boat fromNew Orleans to Jefferson Texas. He got married in Gatesville, Texas and settled on the Higgins Ranch in Lampasas County Texas in 1874.

William "Bill" Gilmer was the nephew of Alexander "Sandy" Gilmer (1829-1909) who moved from Jasper County Georgia to Jasper County and Orange County Texas in 1857. Jasper County Texas and Jasper County Georgia was named for Revolutionary War hero Sgt. William Jasper.

Sandy Gilmer became a wealthy ship builder, sawmill owner,lumberman, Civil War blockade runner and lumber yard owner in Orange County Texas, recovering from several under-insured fires that destroyed his sawmills and lumberyards. He lumber businesses were the largest individually owned in the South. In 1855, he built a river steamer in Georgia which promptly sank in the Chattahoochie River and left him pennyless. In 1858, Sandy Gilmer's brother, George, helped him build another ship the "Altha Brooks", which became the Confederate schooner CSS Altha Brooks on March 28, 1863. Sandy Gilmer operated the Altha Brooks as a blockade runner in the Gulf of Mexico and Carribean. He traded cotton and lumber for gunpowder, coffee, flat iron and sailed through the Federal blockade to ports along the Texas coast and the home port of Orange Texas. Sandy Gilmer owned sawmills and lumber yards throughout Newton, Jasper, and Orange Counties in S.E. Texas until his death in 1906.

Although Sandy Gilmer was never in the Confederate Navy, he was the pilot aboard the CSS Lavinia in the battle of Sabine Pass. The USS Harriet Lane was a two-masted, twin side-wheel gunboat which was renamed the CSS Lavinia after it was boarded and captured at the second battle of Galveston on January 1,1863. The CSS Lavinia was interred at Havana at the end of the war and later abandoned and sank off the coast of Brazil.

The last lumberyard owned by Alexander "Sandy" Gilmer's heirs was in Jasper County Texas and was sold in 1923. The legendary ghost of Sandy Gilmer still walks through the dark piney woods in Jasper County Texas and Georgia.