Hutson B. Littlefield

🏛️The era

In the 1830s, Gonzales sat on the western edge of the Anglo-American colonies in Mexican Texas. It was the capital of Green DeWitt's colony, a small settlement of log cabins along the Guadalupe River, and it was surrounded by open prairie and river-bottom timber. The families who lived here had come for land, and by the middle of the decade many of them were caught up in a widening quarrel with the government in Mexico City.

That quarrel turned into war here. In the fall of 1835, Mexican troops came to Gonzales to take back a small cannon that had been lent to the settlers for defense. The colonists refused and raised a homemade flag that read "Come and Take It." The skirmish that followed is remembered as the opening shot of the Texas Revolution, and it gave Gonzales its lasting nickname, the "Lexington of Texas."

Over the next several months the war swept across Texas. It brought the fall of the Alamo, the panicked civilian flight called the Runaway Scrape, and finally the Texan victory at San Jacinto in April 1836. Gonzales suffered badly along the way. Its men answered the Alamo's call for help, and the town itself was burned as Texan forces retreated east.

The men who did the fighting were mostly not professional soldiers. They were farmers, merchants, newcomers and long-settled colonists who volunteered, often bringing their own rifles and horses. A grave like this one stands for that citizen army.

👥People & events

The marker honors Hutson B. Littlefield, who served as a volunteer in the Texas War for Independence and is buried here. Beyond his name and that service, the details of his life are not recorded on the marker. We won't fill those gaps with guesses. Many of the men who fought in 1835 and 1836 left only the faintest trail in the written record: a name on a muster roll, a land grant, a headstone.

Those few facts still say a good deal. A volunteer in that war chose to take up arms against the government of a much larger nation, with no promise of success and no standing army behind him. For many such men the reward, if they lived, was land: the young Republic of Texas paid its veterans largely in acreage, because it had little else to give.

The stone you see is a later tribute. More than a century after the revolution, in 1962, the State of Texas set this marker at his grave, topped with a star and wreath. Texas has used that emblem for decades to mark the graves of the revolution's veterans. The marker's wording, which says only that a volunteer soldier lies here, is deliberately plain. It honors the service itself, which a man shared with thousands of others whose names few people now remember.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Texas Revolution reshaped the map of North America. The independent republic it created lasted nearly a decade before joining the United States in 1845. Annexation helped bring on the U.S.-Mexican War, and that war ended with the United States gaining a vast stretch of the Southwest. A volunteer who fought in 1835–36 was taking part, knowingly or not, in a chain of events that remade the country.

The war was also bound up with harder questions that historians still weigh. They include the expansion of slavery into Texas, the place of Tejanos who fought on both sides, and the long tension between the United States and Mexico. It is fair to honor a soldier's courage and also see the war in its full, complicated context.

Graves like this one also show how Americans remember. In the twentieth century, Texas made a sustained public effort to find and mark the burial places of its revolutionary veterans, turning scattered family plots and town cemeteries into a statewide memorial. Similar efforts to mark Revolutionary War and Civil War graves elsewhere in the country reflect the same impulse: to make sure the people who fought for a cause are not lost entirely to time.

🧭If you visit

Look for the star-and-wreath emblem on the marker. That small symbol is how Texas identifies the graves of men who fought for independence, and once you learn to spot it you will see it in cemeteries across the state. Please be respectful here: this is a grave, and the people around it may be visiting family.

Gonzales rewards a longer stop. The town takes great pride in its role as the place where the revolution began, and you will find the "Come and Take It" motto on flags, signs and storefronts. Walking the historic town square and nearby streets gives a sense of how a small frontier colony became the stage for the war's first act.

On a road trip through South Central Texas, Gonzales pairs naturally with other revolution sites. The routes the armies took in 1836 run across this region. Standing at a single soldier's grave after seeing the larger landmarks is a good reminder that the war was fought by ordinary individuals, one of whom rests right here.