HistoricSiteMarkers
Early Republic

Joseph F. Fenner

Leonard, Fannin County, Texas

Marker Inscription

Star and Wreath Texas War for Independence veteran. Member Shackelford's Company, Colonel Fannin's command, 1836. Erected by the State of texas, 1962

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

This Star-and-Wreath grave marker honors Joseph F. Fenner, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence who served in Shackelford's Company under Colonel Fannin's command in 1836. Erected by the State of Texas in 1962, it commemorates one of the citizen-soldiers of the revolution that won Texas its independence. Fannin's command is best remembered for its tragic end at Goliad, making every survivor's story part of that fraught campaign.

Why it matters

State-erected veteran markers preserve the individual soldiers of the Texas Revolution, grounding a founding war in the specific people who fought it.

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Related people

  • · Joseph F. Fenner
  • · Colonel Fannin

Related events

  • · Texas War for Independence

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

Gober Cemetery

Bonham, TX

The earliest grave in this Fannin County cemetery belongs to R.M.C. Self, who died in 1865, and a decade later settlers drawn by the beauty of the spot raised a brush tabernacle nearby for gatherings. Community custom went so far as to buy a marble slab for a man who died in 1907 with no family or funds. The Carpenter family gave land in 1909, a caretaker came in 1942, and an association formed in 1977 to tend the hundreds of graves, many of them military veterans.

Moore's Chapel Cemetery

Bonham, TX

Alexander Moore and his wife Mary Jane brought their family from Missouri to this part of Fannin County in 1857, and in the mid-1870s donated two acres to a growing community for a cemetery, with neighbor Martha Cashion the first recorded burial in 1876. A Baptist sanctuary rose just to the north on land the Moores also gave, and church, school, and graveyard together became the community center known as Moore's Chapel. A grim cluster of infant graves from the 1880s and 1890s records a typhoid outbreak, while veterans from the Civil War through World War II rest among the pioneer families still tended by a cemetery association.

John P. Simpson

Bonham, TX

A Tennessee native, John P. Simpson reached the raw new county of Fannin about 1837 and signed the petition that created it, in a region named for a hero of the Texas Revolution. He farmed here and became one of its first officeholders, serving as sheriff and chief justice, and he donated the land that became Bonham's courthouse square and downtown. He also led the Fannin Guards, a citizen militia that guarded this stretch of frontier.

Fannin County

Bonham, TX

Anglo-American settlers reached this stretch of the Red River by steamboat in 1836, and Fannin County was created the next year, organized in 1838. It honors James W. Fannin, executed with his surrendered command at Goliad in March 1836, one of the darkest episodes of the Texas Revolution. County officials first met at Jacob Black's cabin, and the seat wandered from Warren to Bois d'Arc — renamed Bonham in 1844 for Alamo defender James Butler Bonham.