Romance also bloomed on the headwaters of the Sao Lourenco as Eugene Smith, son of Alfred I. Smith and Sue Bowen, daughter of  William R. Bowen announced their engagement.  The two asked  Parson Quillin to perform the wedding ceremony at the Bowen home on the Ariado, and preparations were made for a two-day festa.  The wedding was performed in the morning, after which all sat down for a marriage feast in "central Texas" style.  About mid-afternoon fellow colonist C.A. Crawley arrived for a visit on the way to Peruibe to purchase supplies.  All were delighted to see their companion, especially the parson, who was dissatisfied that no witnesses save family was present to sign the wedding certificate.  To correct the situation, he called the newlyweds into a room in Bowen's house, made them pronounce the vows again, then secured Crawley's signature on the official papers. The general sense of well-being that existed on the colony lands camouflaged a power struggle that had been developing since Frank McMullan’s death.  After much wrangling between the two parties involved, a letter was drafted to the Brazilian Secretary of Agriculture about the situation. Among the sixteen signatories on the letter included: Othniel Weaver, Daniel Weaver, Riley Weaver, and William A. Gill (Billy Bud).

More troubles occurred when unexplainably, the government food supply was shut off.  An appeal for assis-tance was made to the government which did result in money being sent to the Mayor of Iguape, but the items purchased and sent upriver were of very poor quality.  The meat was spoiled and inedible.  The flour proved to be so bad that it was used only as food for the pigs.  No coffee or sugar was supplied.

Earlier requests to the government for a road to be built were finally approved but it was virtually too late for the struggling colonists.  As crops matured and most of it in decent condition there were absolutely no buyers or a reasonable way to get it to market.  Desperate, the farmers sold for a pittance or gave away months of hard labor.  For many, this became the last straw, and they packed their bags and returned to Iauape, Rio, or the United States.  On November 7, the four-member George A. Linn family boarded the steamer Ella S. Thayer for New Orleans. 

At this point, clearly, the colony was falling apart.  This Brazilian adventure took on a new aspect for all con-cerned.  The emigrants attempted to settle on colony lands, but were delayed by the sickness and death of their leader, Frank McMullan.  The power struggle that developed within the colony only served to split the colony.  The exhaustion of money and food supplies was a final blow.  When the road was not completed and crops found no markets, there was no doubt in the minds of most colonists that, to survive, they would have to leave the Sao Lourenco and go to a region more suited to their experience.  Most of the Texans did not abandon their fervent dreams for an exciting new life in an unexplored new land.

By early 1869 many of the colonists began moving out to other more suitable areas which were more popu-lated and offered more opportunity, mainly to the area of Santa Barbara and its sister city Americana.  Some, however, returned to the United States, including the Weavers, Garlington, and Billy Bud with Fannie and child.

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After the falling apart of the McMullen colony, settlers were moving away from the headwaters of the SaoLoureco.  The reasons were varied.  The road to Peruibe was incomplete making it extremely difficult to get goods to market.  Stories of the relatively successful American settlement at Santa Barbara could not help but lure some who wished to live once more in a town.  The Cooks went over the mountains to Santos but had to bury their young son, Pet, beside the trail.  Cortez Fielder and his wife Sara, with two children, headed for the high coastal plain country.  N.B. McAlpine, who married Sue Tarver, headed for the region of the Norris colony near Santa Barbara.  William Hargrove married Julia Beasley, and the two returned to the United States.  C.A. Crawly and his wife, Rachel Russell Crawley, went to Santos, then Santa Barbara.  Rachel's father Thomas Garner, followed the couple to their new home.  Parson Quillin moved to a spot on the railroad from Sao Paulo to Santa Babara  that was locally known as t" he station."   

Jess Wright, with the hounds, found himself moving to Retiro, near the communities of Americana and Santa Barbara.  He was a neighbor of one of the most successful and prosperous Confederados in that area, Mr. Harvey Hall.  Mr. Hall was a wealthy plantation owner from Columbus, Georgia who in 1866 sold all his possessions and land for 10 cents to the dollar and moved to Brazil to start over.  Through hard work and perseverance, he succeeded in creating a duplicate plantation and plantation home on the Capivari River, near Americana.  Crowning the estate was a spacious, typical Old South mansion, a restful respite for guests and travelers.  Mr. Hall became very successful, bringing in another fellow Georgians by newspaper adver-tisements, such as blacksmiths, housebuilders, furniture, and wagon makers to join the colony there. 

One day in October 1877, eleven years after he had come down to this strange land, he was shot dead by Jess Wright, the Texas Cowboy, in a field near his home.  There were no witnesses, but it was surmised that the shooting had followed an argument between the two men.  An apparent feud between the two men came to a climax over Hall's shooting one of the cowboy's mules who had wandered into Hall's plantation and was trampling the cotton fields.  In a rage, Wright approached Hall and demanded satisfaction.  Within minutes Hall lay dead.

After saying a quick goodbye to his wife and family. Wright fled the colony.  Before nightfall, a posse of Con-federates and Brazilian State Guard came looking for him, but Wright had caught a ride on a passing train and was in the port city of Santos, one hundred miles away, by the next morning.  From there he caught a ship to New Orleans, safely out of reach.  We do not know if he took his hounds with him.  Both families were prominent.  The Wrights had their friends and the Halls had theirs, and the ugly incident marred relationships within the colony for years to come.  Things were especially bad for those who helped Mrs. Wright and the children go to Texas to join her fugitive husband, now employed as a lawman.  The belief was that Jess had learned to use his six-shooter too well during the Civil War. Charlie Hall, son of the deceased, planned to go to Texas and hunt down Mr. Wright and settle the score.  Cooler heads prevailed and he was dissuaded by his younger brother and the matter was eventually dropped.

Charlie Hall, his son, died in 1910 and the old home place remained in the family until 1917 when his widow sold it to a wealthy pharmacist in Americana.  It was turned into a school and is still in operation today.

By mid-May families started to give up and leave.  The three members of the John Baxter family, without money and desperate, were allowed to return to the United States on the U. S. Warship Guerriere on May 31, 1969.  On September 6 of the same year, The Gills, Weavers, and Garlingtons boarded the British Lion at Rio de Janeiro, en route to New Orleans.

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...On September 10, 1871, McMullen colonist, Reverend Richard Ratcliff established the First North American Baptist Church at Santa Barbara.  The congregation at Santa Barbara grew through the 1870s but received a severe challenge when pastor Ratcliff decided to return to the United States about a year after the death of his wife.  With five young children, Ratcliff believed that he could not give them proper care in Brazil and moved to Mexia, Limestone County, Texas.  Paron Quillen took over the church's ministry.  In 1879, a second Baptist church, named the Station Church, was located on the railroad leading into the interior,  was started in Santa Barbara, and Parson Quillin was appointed by the Southern Baptist Convention in the United States to be the missionary pastor.  In 1880 a report from the church's membership to the North American Baptists lauded Quillen as being "able in the pulpit, exemplary in daily life; sound in doctrine, simple in manners, esteemed by the Americans and popular with the Brazilians; perhaps more conversant with Brazilian affairs than anyone is known to them, and adapted in every respect to the missions."

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....In 1879 the Southern Baptist Convention agreed to accept the First Baptist Church of Brazil as a self-supporting mission.  So the English-speaking church at Santa Barbara, led by the Reverend E. H. Quillin, actually began the Southern Baptist mission effort in Brazil.

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The first years of all mission efforts are stressful, but few suffer the multiple problems of the Santa Barbara field.  Heading the list of difficulties was E. H. QuillinHe was born in Tennessee in 1829, and his family moved had moved to Texas, where he was ordained to the Baptist ministry in 1858.  He pastored the Santa Barbara Baptist Church for four years.  His wife had attended the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and requested a joint missionary appointment with her husband.  She was a school teacher and an accomplished linguist, at least according to her husband.  

When the foreign mission board first decided to sponsor the Santa Barbara mission., critical evaluation of Quillin began to arrive from Texas, B.H. Carroll, one of the most influential figures in Texas Baptist ranks, warned the head of the foreign board that Quillin might well embarrass Baptists.  An anonymous source recently returned from Brazil reported that the pastor was a "confirmed opium eater and in every way indiscreet."  He urged the head of the board to warn newly appointed missionary W.B. Bagby, who replaced Quillin as pastor in Santa Barbara about him. 

 A second source of trouble was one of Quillin's converts.  The Reverend Antonio Teixeira de Albuquerque emerges from the murky chronicles of the colony either as one of its foremost converts or as its premier confidence man.  Texeira had been a Catholic priest who converted to Methodism before finally joining the Baptists.  Texeira was a fine linguist and reputedly the best pulpit orator in Brazil.  At first, Quillin raved about his coup and warned that Methodists were circulating malicious rumors about their turncoat.  But five months later Quillin conceded that his premier Brazilian convert was an imposter, a drunk, a gambler, and a habitue of houses of prostitution.  "He would now make a good Catholic priest -- he has every essential element."  

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Quillin also regretted the apostasy of a Mr. Pyles, a minister from Florida who had settled in the community.  Pyles was inclined to "spiritism and speculative theology, I fear he will not be useful."

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But clearly not all the problems were external to Quillin.  Even if one ignores the rumor of his drug addiction, there was still the problem of his poverty.  Theoretically, the Santa Barbara church was a self-supporting mission station as it represented itself to the foreign mission board.  But if Quillin is to be believed, there was little support involved.  The pastor received no salary and when the Reverend W.B. Bagby arrived, Quillin resigned to pursue more lucrative opportunities.  Although he was crippled and unable to labor (perhaps the pain from his injury accounts for the charge of drug addiction), he had to support a wife and six children.

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Toward this end Quillinproposed an elaborate scheme of missionary education.  Arguing that both practical life and practical preaching were necessary for Brazil, he proposed that the foreign mission board support a mission school for Brazilian children.  He and his wife would manage the institution.  His elaborate proposal began with the claim that traditional denominational mission efforts in Brazil had failed to convert many people.  A free school with an able faculty without a dogmatic or religious course o0f instruction would be far more successful.  For five days a week no religious activities beyond prayers and "moral lectures" would be permitted.  Weekends would be devoted entirely to voluntary religious instruction.  Such a school, Quillin argued, would unite the community as well as spread the gospel.

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The new liberal Brazilian constitution tolerated all religious groups but protected the favored status of Catholicism.  Therefore, there was little chance of converting the present generation.  But education could teach the young and extend civilization.

Quillin tried to establish a mission school at Piracicaba using $500 to $600 of his own money.  But his effort failed, and he has his investments.  So he returned to Santa Barbara, where he opened a coed school with thirty regular students and requested a subsidy of $3,000 annually from the foreign mission board, a request which the impoverished agency approved.

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Upon his return to Santa Barbara in 1881, Quillin penned a bleak portrait of the American community.  The sources of his pessimism were complex: their fear that the Brazilian government was moving towards the emancipation of slaves, the continuing Jesuit influence in government, the timidity of the chief executive toward continuing emigration from the Southern United States.  As a result of these tendencies, "the hearts of many are failing, and some of our best citizens are busily arranging for an early return to the land of their fathers, "  To what extent Americans would abandon Santa Barbara he would not estimate, but he believed that some Southerners would remain and that "North American industry and enterprise will... go down to posterity as a living reality, and that the little church that is under the aegis of your Mission Board will survive and help evangelize Brazil.

 The vision the emigrants shared was one of dual spiritual citizenship in both the divine and political sense.  "We are in Brazil, under Providence we will remain.  Yet we are American citizens and in this will always remain.....Our chief aim -- move forward a little... (which) will permeate the circle of Brazilian life long after our name may have faded (from) the record of time."

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After Quillin turned the congregation over to Bagby in 1881, the new missionary momentarily turned the Santa Barbara congregation into a thriving parish.  But Bagby remained only two years, and after 18783 it declined again.  In 1885, the Reverend Hector Soper, formerly of the English Mission in Rio, became pastor.  He allegedly introduced the temperance movement to Santa Barbara but remained only one year.  Although Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians equally represented the religious preference of the Santa Barbara colony, even the Baptists conceded that their two rivals were better established and supported. 

The popular parson's physical condition, however, was not good.  Always a cripple, Quillin's health began to deteriorate rapidly in the middle of the 1880s, and on March 21, 1886, he died of a liver ailment.  He was buried in the Campo Cemetery at Santa Barbara.