HistoricSiteMarkers
Early Republic

Henry Mordorff

Smithville, Bastrop County, Texas

Marker Inscription

A San Jacinto veteran. Born 1817. Died March 20, 1870. Erected by the State of Texas 1936

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Henry Mordorff, born in 1817, was among the volunteers who fought at San Jacinto in 1836, the battle that won Texas its independence. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1936, on the centennial of that victory, to honor his service and grave near Smithville.

Why it matters

His marker anchors the sacrifices of ordinary Texas Revolution soldiers to the local ground where they lived and died.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Related people

  • ยท Henry Mordorff

Related events

  • ยท Battle of San Jacinto

Themes & tags

Military & WartimeWestward ExpansionFrontier HistoryMemorial

Nearby & related markers

Site of Wood's Fort

West Point, TX

From 1828 to 1842 the fortified residence of Zadock Woods served the colonists of this vicinity as a refuge against Indian attacks during the turbulent years of Mexican Texas and the Republic. Woods, a veteran of the War of 1812 and one of Stephen F. Austin's original "Old Three Hundred" colonists, was by then an old man. He was killed at the Dawson Massacre on September 18, 1842, remembered as the oldest man to fall in that fight against invading Mexican forces.

Stephen Scallorn

Smithville, TX

Stephen Scallorn was one of the ordinary families whose migration built the Republic of Texas. A Maryland-born frontier physician who had preached and doctored across Kentucky and Tennessee, he followed his son's glowing accounts of Texas after San Jacinto and settled near Plum Creek in the late 1830s, helping plant one of the region's early Baptist congregations. His long life spanned the whole arc of the Republic and early statehood โ€” and cost him two sons, killed with Dawson's men in the border fighting of 1842.

Woods Prairie Cemetery

West Point, TX

Zadock Woods, a War of 1812 veteran and one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, settled here in 1828, built a fortified home, and started this cemetery for family and neighbors. Woods himself died in the 1842 Dawson Massacre and lies elsewhere, but a fellow captive who survived imprisonment in Mexico, Joseph C. Robinson, rests here beneath a 1936 Texas Centennial marker. Pioneers bought and preserved the graveyard in 1875 to protect the resting place of the area's earliest families.