Simon Peter Ford
Muldoon, Fayette County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Star and Wreath Born 1816. Came to Texas in 1830. Participated in the Battle of San Jacinto as a member of Captain William Wood's company. Died 1896 in Flatonia, Texas. Erected by the State of Texas 1962
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Simon Peter Ford came to Texas in 1830 as a teenager and, at twenty, fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in Captain William Wood's company—the decisive 1836 clash that secured Texas independence. He lived on into the 1890s, a link between the revolutionary generation and the settled state. Texas erected his marker in 1962, its Star and Wreath honoring a veteran of the founding fight.
Why it matters
San Jacinto veterans like Ford were the human foundation of the Texas Republic, and commemorating them kept the memory of independence alive for later generations.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Simon Peter Ford came to Texas in 1830 as a boy of about fourteen. That was a charged year. Mexico had grown uneasy about how many Americans were pouring into its northern province, and in 1830 it passed a law meant to restrict further immigration from the United States. Families kept coming anyway, and friction between settlers and the government deepened.
Through the early 1830s, disputes over trade, soldiers, taxes and self-government piled up. In 1835 open fighting broke out. Within months it had grown into a full revolution.
By the spring of 1836 things looked grim for the Texians. The Alamo had fallen, and Sam Houston's small army was retreating east with Santa Anna's forces following. Then came San Jacinto.
People & events
On April 21, 1836, Houston's army attacked Santa Anna's camp near the San Jacinto River. The assault was swift and overwhelming, and the famous cry was "Remember the Alamo!" In a remarkably short time the Mexican force was routed. Santa Anna himself was captured soon after, and the path to Texas independence was open.
Simon Peter Ford was there, about twenty years old, serving in Captain William Wood's company. The marker gives us that fact and no more, and it is enough. He was one of the several hundred men whose charge that afternoon decided the future of Texas.
Ford lived another sixty years. He watched Texas become a republic, then a state, and then change almost beyond recognition. He died in 1896 in Flatonia, one of a shrinking group of men who could say they had been at San Jacinto.
In 1962 the State of Texas placed this marker bearing the star and wreath, the emblem it used to honor veterans of the Revolution.
Its place in the American story
San Jacinto is one of the most consequential battles ever fought on the North American continent. It created the Republic of Texas. That set up the annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War, and in the end brought a huge stretch of the West into the United States.
Battles like that are won by people like Simon Peter Ford: young settlers, many of them immigrants to Mexican Texas, who were farmers one month and soldiers the next. Honoring them one by one keeps the story from shrinking down to a few famous commanders.
The marker itself is part of that story too. Texas has spent more than a century deliberately remembering its revolutionary generation, and memorials like this helped shape how the state sees itself.
If you visit
Look for the star and wreath. It's the state's way of saying that the person remembered here served Texas in its founding fight. Seeing it on a small memorial in the countryside is part of the charm.
Muldoon is in Fayette County, a landscape of rolling hills, old farms and small communities between Houston and Austin. The back roads are well worth a slow drive, especially in spring.
Flatonia, where Ford died, is close by, and La Grange, the county seat, has more history to explore. If you are tracing the Revolution, you can pair this stop with a visit to the San Jacinto battleground near Houston to stand where Ford once stood.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Simon Peter Ford
- · William Wood
Related events
- · Battle of San Jacinto
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Pitman Cemetery
Muldoon, TX
The Muldoon area traces its name to Father Miguel Muldoon, who held a Spanish land grant here in the 1830s, and settlers steadily filled the county through the century. In 1871 Methodist trustees bought land for a church and burial ground, and the graves that followed hold a cross-section of frontier Texas—San Jacinto veteran Simon Peter Ford, Civil War soldiers, pioneer families, and James Chambers Coulson, the English stonemason whose "Muldoon Blue" sandstone went into the Galveston Seawall and buildings across the state. An old Baptist church moved to the grounds in the 1940s still serves for funerals and meetings.
Pin Oak Cemetery
Flatonia, TX
Pin Oak Cemetery's first, now-unmarked, burials were two soldiers who died here after the 1842 Battle of Salado Creek near San Antonio, and its oldest marked grave is that of Lee F.T. Cottle, who died in 1845. Set on land once held by the Routh family, the ground served the neighboring Black Jack Springs and Pin Oak communities and carries both names. A cemetery association more than a century old has cared for graves that include Republic of Texas-era settlers, enslaved people, and veterans of the War of 1812, the Texas Revolution, and the Civil War.
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.
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.