William Gorham

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.

Muldoon, TX

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.

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.

Flatonia, TX

This grave marker, set with the Star and Wreath of the Texas Revolution, honors a man who fought through the pivotal campaigns of Texas independence. Robert Hancock Hunter stood at Gonzales — where the "Come and Take It" defiance sparked the revolt — through the Siege of Bexar, and finally at San Jacinto in April 1836, the eighteen-minute battle that won the Republic of Texas. The State of Texas placed this memorial in 1962.