Henry Prentice Redfield
Giddings, Lee County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Texas Soldier Henry Prentice Redfield(May 27, 1819 - February 27, 1900) Born Derry, N.H.; came to Texas, 1831. Joined army, 1835. Fought at Battle of Gonzales, 1835; Siege of Bexar, 1835; San Jacinto, 1836 (all in Texas Revolution). Fought in Indian wars. Wounded at Battle of Plum Creek in 1840. In Battle of Salado Creek, 1842. In Mexican War he joined 1st Texas Cavalry, 1846-47. Fought at both Resaca de la Palma and the Siege of Monterrey. Married (first) Sarah Card and (second) Julia Kersting. Recorded - 1970
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Henry Prentice Redfield came to Texas as a boy and, at sixteen, took up arms for its independence—fighting at Gonzales, the Siege of Bexar and San Jacinto in the revolution of 1835-36. He went on to fight in frontier conflicts with Native peoples, was wounded at Plum Creek in 1840, and later rode with the 1st Texas Cavalry in the U.S.-Mexican War at Resaca de la Palma and Monterrey. He lived until 1900, a veteran of nearly every early Texas war.
Why it matters
Redfield's soldier's life spans the founding battles of the Texas Republic and the war that brought the Southwest into the United States.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When Henry Prentice Redfield's family brought him to Texas around 1831, they were stepping into one of the most contested corners of North America. Texas was then a northern province of a young Mexican republic, thinly settled, its prairies and river bottoms opened to Anglo-American colonists under land grants that Mexico hoped would populate the frontier. Those settlers arrived with different laws, language, and expectations, and the friction between them and the central government in Mexico City grew year by year.
This was still very much a frontier in the fullest sense. Beyond the scattered farms and small towns lay open country where Comanche and other Native peoples had ranged and governed for generations, and where the reach of any distant government—Mexican or, later, Texan—faded quickly into open grassland. A boy growing up here in the 1830s learned early that the map's tidy borders meant little on the ground.
By the middle of that decade the tension snapped into open revolt. The Texas Revolution of 1835–36 turned ordinary colonists—farmers, storekeepers, and teenagers barely old enough to shoulder a musket—into soldiers almost overnight. Redfield came of age precisely as his adopted homeland went to war for its independence, and the conflicts that shaped his life would follow one after another for more than a decade.
People & events
Henry Prentice Redfield was born in Derry, New Hampshire, in 1819, a long way from the Texas prairies where he would make his name. Brought to Texas as a boy of about twelve, he was only sixteen when he took up arms in 1835—still a teenager when the fighting began at Gonzales, the skirmish often remembered as the opening shot of the Texas Revolution. From there he was in the thick of it: the Siege of Bexar that same year, and then, in the spring of 1836, the decisive Battle of San Jacinto that secured Texan independence.
Most men who survived such a run might have hung up their rifle. Redfield did not. Through the years that followed he was drawn into the frontier conflicts between the young Texas Republic and Native peoples, and in 1840 he was wounded at the Battle of Plum Creek. Two years later, in 1842, he was in the fighting at Salado Creek. His was not a single dramatic moment but a long, repeated answering of the call to arms.
When war came again in 1846—this time between the United States and Mexico—Redfield rode with the 1st Texas Cavalry, serving in 1846–47. He fought at Resaca de la Palma and at the Siege of Monterrey, campaigns that carried him well beyond the borders of the republic he had helped create. Through it all he built a life as well as a record: he married twice, first Sarah Card and later Julia Kersting, and he lived on until 1900, dying just shy of his eighty-first birthday—an old man whose memories reached all the way back to the founding fights of Texas.
Its place in the American story
Redfield's life is a single thread running through one of the most consequential transformations in American history: the passage of a vast region from Mexican province to independent republic to part of the United States. He fought in the revolution that created the Republic of Texas, and then, a decade later, in the war that folded much of the Southwest into the American nation.
The U.S.–Mexican War in which he served with the 1st Texas Cavalry reshaped the map of the continent. The conflict's outcome brought enormous new territories under United States control and set the stage for debates—over expansion, settlement, and the future of the lands between Texas and the Pacific—that would occupy the country for years. Redfield was one of the ordinary soldiers whose service made that national story real on the ground.
His career also captures a hard truth about frontier America: expansion and nation-building came through repeated armed conflict, including the wars with Native peoples who had long held the land. One man's service record here touches the revolution, the frontier struggles, and the war with Mexico—the full, tangled sequence by which Texas and the Southwest became American.
If you visit
This is a memorial marker in Giddings, in the rolling country of Lee County, Texas—the kind of quiet Central Texas landscape where the enormity of a single life can sneak up on you. Stand and read the span of dates and battles, and you're looking at more than sixty years of history compressed onto one plaque: from a boy born in New Hampshire to an old soldier who outlived nearly everyone he fought beside.
What's worth pausing over is the sheer sweep of it. Trace the conflicts in order—the revolution, the frontier fights, the war with Mexico—and let the distances sink in, from the coastal plain of San Jacinto to the streets of Monterrey. Few markers let you follow one person across so many chapters of a region's making.
If you're building a Texas history road trip, Redfield's marker pairs naturally with a route through the state's revolutionary and republic-era sites. It's a reminder that the grand events you'll read about elsewhere were lived out, one battle at a time, by real people—some of whom, like this New Hampshire boy turned Texas soldier, carried the whole story in a single lifetime.
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
- · Henry Prentice Redfield
Related events
- · Battle of San Jacinto
- · Battle of Plum Creek
- · Battle of Salado Creek
- · Mexican-American War
Themes & tags
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