Bayland Guards
Baytown, Harris County, Texas
Marker Inscription
On April 27, 1861, Dr. Ashbel Smith organized a group of volunteers from Bayland (now Baytown) and Cedar Bayou in Harris County, and Barbers Hill in Chambers County. The group, known as the Bayland Guards, drilled on Smith’s Evergreen Plantation and worked in local defense of Galveston Bay. On August 13, 1861, they mustered into the Confederate forces as Company C of the Galveston Infantry Regiment. The regiment was redesignated in October as the Second Texas Infantry Regiment and that December, it moved to Camp Bee in Houston. Among the Bayland Guards were three sons of Republic of Texas presidents Sam Houston and Anson Jones: Samuel Houston, Jr., Charles Elliot Jones and Samuel Edward Jones. The Bayland Guards fought with the rest of the regiment at the Battles of Shiloh, Corinth and Hatchie Bridge in 1862. At the Battle of Shiloh, half of Company C was wounded or killed. During the Vicksburg campaign in 1863, the Second Texas distinguished itself by defending a crescent-shaped fortification in the center of the line of Confederate defense while withstanding Union assaults and 46 days and nights of shelling and bombardment. The Second Texas infantry and the other defenders were surrendered at Vicksburg on July 4, 1863 and were promptly paroled to make their way back to Texas. The decimated regiment reorganized at Houston in the fall of 1863 and served out the war on the Texas coast from Matagorda to Galveston, helping to deter General Banks’ attempt to invade Texas early in 1864. The regiment was surrendered on May 26, 1865. After the war, many members of the Bayland Guards became leaders and respected individuals in their communities.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the spring of 1861 Dr. Ashbel Smith raised a company of volunteers from the Galveston Bay settlements, drilling them on his own plantation before they mustered into Confederate service as part of what became the Second Texas Infantry. Among their ranks were sons of Republic of Texas presidents Sam Houston and Anson Jones. The regiment fought at Shiloh, where half the company fell, and endured the forty-six-day siege of Vicksburg before its survivors were paroled and served out the war along the Texas coast.
Why it matters
The Bayland Guards trace one Texas community's path through the Civil War, from a plantation drill field to the bloodiest battlefields of the western theater and the fall of Vicksburg.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the spring of 1861, Texas was barely a generation removed from its own independence and only fifteen years into American statehood when it cast its lot with the Confederacy. Along the marshy edges of Galveston Bay — at Bayland, Cedar Bayou, and Barbers Hill — small farming and plantation communities suddenly found themselves on a wartime coast, watching the horizon for the Union blockade that would soon try to choke off Southern ports.
Galveston was the largest city in the state and its busiest harbor, which made the bay a place worth defending. When war came that April, the impulse in these settlements was intensely local: neighbors organizing to guard the waters they lived beside, drilling close to home before anyone imagined marching a thousand miles to fight.
That local beginning is the key to understanding this marker. What started as a home-guard company raised among planters, farmers, and their sons would be swept up into the vast machinery of a continental war, carried far from the Gulf into the brutal campaigns of the western theater.
People & events
The company took shape under Dr. Ashbel Smith, a figure already woven into Texas history, who gathered volunteers in late April 1861 and drilled them on his own Evergreen Plantation. For a few months they were a defensive force for Galveston Bay, but by that August they mustered formally into Confederate service as Company C — the Bayland Guards — of what would soon be renamed the Second Texas Infantry Regiment.
Among the ranks was a striking piece of Texas lineage: three sons of Republic of Texas presidents. Samuel Houston, Jr., son of Sam Houston, served alongside Charles Elliot Jones and Samuel Edward Jones, sons of Anson Jones. The generation that had known the Republic firsthand was now sending its children into a very different war.
What followed was hard. In 1862 the regiment fought at Shiloh, Corinth, and Hatchie Bridge, and at Shiloh alone roughly half of Company C was killed or wounded. In 1863 the Second Texas earned its reputation defending a crescent-shaped work at the heart of the Confederate line at Vicksburg, enduring forty-six days and nights of shelling before the city fell on the Fourth of July. The survivors were paroled, made their way home, reorganized that fall, and served out the war along the Texas coast until the regiment's final surrender in May 1865.
Its place in the American story
The path of the Bayland Guards is, in miniature, the path of the Confederacy's western war. Shiloh announced that this would be a conflict of staggering casualties; Vicksburg, falling the day before the guns cooled at Gettysburg, split the Confederacy along the Mississippi and marked a turning point from which the South never recovered.
What makes this marker resonate is that it attaches those enormous events to one stretch of Texas bayou. The men who withstood the siege of Vicksburg were the same men who had drilled on a plantation field within sight of their own homes. National history is often told through generals and capitals, but it was carried out by companies like this one, raised street by street and farm by farm.
There is a quieter national theme here too — the reknitting that followed. The inscription notes that many of these veterans returned to become community leaders. Across the reunited country, the men who survived the war shaped the towns and institutions of the decades that followed, carrying their experience into ordinary civic life.
If you visit
Stand at this spot in Baytown and let the landscape do the work. The Galveston Bay country is flat, humid, and close to the water — the kind of place where you can imagine a company forming up on open ground, more accustomed to farm work than soldiering, and then vanishing over the horizon toward battlefields none of them had ever heard of.
Read the marker slowly and notice how much distance it covers: from an April muster to Tennessee, Mississippi, and back to this coast. It is a reminder that the men behind these names were local before they were soldiers, and local again afterward if they were lucky enough to return.
If you're building a road trip around Civil War Texas or the greater Houston area, this makes a thoughtful stop precisely because it is not a famous battlefield. It's a home front — the place where the war began for a handful of families — and it pairs well with a broader loop through the bay's history, where the water was once a frontier to be watched and guarded.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Dr. Ashbel Smith
- · Samuel Houston, Jr.
Related events
- · Battle of Shiloh
- · Siege of Vicksburg
Themes & tags
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