Search Markers

Miami, TX

Oran Milo Roberts presided over the 1861 convention that carried Texas out of the Union—prompting Sam Houston's wry verdict, 'I don't know what they will do, but Roberts is honest'—then raised the 11th Texas Infantry and led a brigade in Louisiana. He served as chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court under the Confederacy, was removed by federal Reconstruction authorities, and later won two terms as governor. Roberts County in the Panhandle bears his name.

Stratford, TX

Sidney Sherman was a Massachusetts-born militia officer who marched a Kentucky company to Texas and commanded the cavalry at San Jacinto in 1836, the battle that won Texas its independence. He went on to serve the Republic of Texas as major-general and congressman and to build one of the first railroads in the West, whose first locomotive bore his name. When the Civil War came he was placed in charge of fortifying Galveston, the state's most vital seaport, and lost his eldest son in the fighting to hold it.

Eldorado, TX

Schleicher County takes its name from Gustav Schleicher (1823–1879), who served the Confederacy as chief purchasing agent and army engineer west of the Mississippi. He procured scarce entrenching tools, iron, steel, and lead — much of it imported from Europe through Mexico in exchange for cotton, the "life blood" of the Southern war economy — and established engineer depots and fortifications in Texas. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1963 as a memorial to Texans who served the Confederate cause.

Van Horn, TX

David B. Culberson (1830–1900), a Georgia native who came to Texas in 1856, opposed secession yet helped raise the 18th Texas Infantry and rose to command it before broken health ended his field service after Vicksburg. As Adjutant and Inspector General of Texas in 1863–64 he was responsible for defending the frontier against both Union incursion and the Indian raids that intensified during the war, when Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, and Kickapoo bands plundered a thinly guarded borderland. Culberson County was named in his honor as a memorial to Texans who served the Confederacy.

Vega, TX

Williamson Simpson Oldham left a career as a legislator, judge, and newspaperman in Arkansas to settle in Texas, arriving just as the sectional crisis reached its breaking point. He sat in the 1861 Secession Convention, served in the provisional Confederate Congress at Montgomery, and then represented Texas in the Confederate Senate through 1865, where he argued forcefully for states' rights and for granting the president power to suspend habeas corpus. The Panhandle county seated at Vega was later named in his honor as a memorial to Texans who fought for the Confederacy.

Snyder, TX

A delegate to the Texas Secession Convention, William R. Scurry rose from lieutenant colonel of the 4th Texas Cavalry to brigadier general, commanding troops at Val Verde and Glorieta Pass in the 1861-62 New Mexico Campaign and helping retake Galveston in 1863. In the 1864 Red River Campaign he led his brigade through Mansfield and Pleasant Hill before falling at Jenkins' Ferry, Arkansas. The county that bears his name and this state marker stand as memorials to Texans who fought for the Confederacy.

Wills Point, TX

A surveyor's error in 1850 placed Van Zandt County's seat on private land, and by 1877 discontent boiled over into a full-blown "county seat war." When Judge Cadwell Walton Raines ordered the records moved from Canton to Wills Point, some 200 armed men marched in protest, and Governor R. B. Hubbard had to send militia to keep the peace. Bloodshed was averted, the records went back to Canton in 1878, and the seat stayed there for good.

Snyder, TX

When Scurry County organized in 1884, W. W. 'Uncle Billy' Nelson became its first sheriff and authorized a tiny 8-by-10-foot frame 'calaboose' for a jail — but he resigned after six months, worn down by unruly cowboys. His successor, T. J. Faught, won the cowhands' respect by quieting a rowdy saloon crowd with a wooden pool cue and, though he never wore a gun, served three terms from 1886 to 1892. A street in the original Snyder town plat was named for him, now 27th Street.

Ft. Stockton, TX

In far West Texas, this native-sandstone courthouse and jail went up in 1883 to bring law and administration to Pecos County. Close by stands the Zero Stone, set in 1859 as the first reference point for local land surveys. Together they mark how order was measured and enforced across the vast, arid frontier.

Brownwood, TX

Brown County was created in 1856 and has been served by four courthouses in succession—beginning with a donated log cabin that was physically moved twice as the county seat shifted, once to settle an 1868 townsite dispute. A combined courthouse and jail built in 1876 burned after only four years, and a Waco firm designed its 1884 replacement. The current Classical Revival courthouse, raised in 1917–18, folded in interior walls and vaults salvaged from the earlier building.

Sherman, TX

Since Grayson County's founding in 1846, its seat of justice has taken every shape from a $232 frame building on bald prairie to a native limestone landmark. Five courthouses came and went in the county's first forty years before the railroad reached Sherman in 1873, bringing better materials and a majestic 1876 courthouse crowned with a clock-and-bell tower. That building burned in 1930, and the Depression delayed its limestone successor until 1936.

Kountze, TX

Since Hardin County was created in 1858, its seat of government has occupied a succession of buildings, beginning with a two-story log structure that burned around 1886 and took the county's early records with it. A frame courthouse followed in 1887—famously built around its safe—then a domed 1905 masonry building of West Texas stone and imported St. Louis brick, and finally a modern facility in 1958. Remarkably, the little 1887 building still stands near the square as law offices.

Palo Pinto, TX

Created in 1856, Palo Pinto County laid out its seat at the geographic center and built a modest $300 wood-frame courthouse the following year, in a town first called Golconda and soon renamed Palo Pinto. A grand sandstone courthouse with a Second Empire clock tower rose in 1882, quarried from local stone and later joined to an annex by an iron bridge. In 1940–1942 those buildings gave way to a WPA-built reinforced-concrete courthouse clad in some of the old sandstone.

San Patricio, TX

Since the 1830s, eight buildings have served as the seat of government for San Patricio County, beginning with a 'Log Courthouse' raised for the San Patricio colony before the county itself was created in 1837. A stone courthouse begun before the Civil War was never finished—neighbors even carried off its stones for their chimneys—and later courthouses came and went by fire and by the 1894 move of the county seat to Sinton. In 1986 a replica of the 1872 courthouse was built on its original site from the old commissioners' specifications.

Houston, TX

Platted in 1907 on land once held by Houston pioneer Obedience Smith, Courtlandt Place was laid out as a gated enclave for the city's rising elite. Its roughly fifteen acres showcase homes by leading early-twentieth-century Texas architects, including Birdsall P. Briscoe, Alfred Finn, and John Staub. The neighborhood was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

Navasota, TX

Laid out beside the 1873 townsite of McAlpine Town, this cemetery was established by developer Dugald McAlpine, a Scottish-born settler who helped shape the young community of Courtney. Its oldest documented grave dates to 1873, though older unmarked burials likely predate it. Among those resting here are community founders, descendants of early settlers, and veterans reaching from the Civil War through the Korean War.

Athens, TX

When Henderson County set its permanent boundaries in 1850, voters chose Matthew Cartwright's land for the new county seat of Athens, and this square was set aside as public ground. Before any courthouse rose, judges heard cases—murder, larceny, gambling, assault—beneath a large shady oak on this spot. The first district court term in October 1850 was presided over by Oran M. Roberts, later a Texas Supreme Court justice and governor.

Cove, TX

In 1824, during the era of Mexican colonization, Joseph Lawrence of New York—reputed to have sailed with Jean Lafitte's privateers—settled on a marshland ridge that became the seed of this community. A.B.J. Winfree arrived from Louisiana in 1827 on a land grant, and the settlement around his property came to be called Winfree's Cove, later shortened to Cove. Built first on cattle and later on farming, fishing, and fur trapping, the community incorporated in 1973 to preserve its independence.

Melrose, TX

Named for three spring-fed coves nearby, this East Texas cemetery grew out of a local Methodist congregation after Daniel H. Vail deeded 30 acres for church and school in 1858. The oldest marked grave belongs to five-year-old Moses J. Davis, buried in 1866, though rough native-rock markers may hide older burials. Today the grounds hold 66 marked graves and still serve the surrounding community as a place of rest.

Jacksonville, TX

Founded in 1856 as the Sand Hill Methodist Episcopal Church, South, this East Texas congregation has worshipped continuously for well over a century, relocating twice before settling at its present site in 1911. In its early decades the one-room church doubled as the community school and raised a brush arbor for services in the summer heat. Where many rural churches faded in hard times, this one endured, rebuilding in brick in 1955.

Kaufman, TX

Organized in July 1854 by the Reverend Richard O. Watkins as a Cumberland Presbyterian congregation, this Kaufman church raised its first building the following year, and its first pastor helped found Trinity University. The present sanctuary dates to 1877, and the congregation's name changed with the times — becoming "First Presbyterian" after an 1906 denominational merger and later "Covenant" as it absorbed neighboring congregations. Its long history is written into the town's religious life.

San Antonio, TX

John B. Cover and his wife Virginia donated land in the late 1800s for this family cemetery, where the oldest marked grave dates to 1896. Family members, friends, and veterans rest here, including a man said to have lived to 107. Dr. Ellen C. Cover — a physician and surgeon — later added land and endowed a youth center and scholarship, and Cover descendants still maintain the grounds and records.

Covington, TX

Covington Cemetery grew alongside the plantations of brothers James and Philip Gathings, who moved from Mississippi in the early 1850s with their families and enslaved workers and amassed thousands of acres on the Blackland Prairie. James platted the town of Covington and, with his brother, donated land for a church and the Gathings Male and Female College. The earliest marked grave is a son-in-law killed at the Battle of Yellow Bayou in 1864, whose body James had brought home for reburial.

Bridge City, TX

Completed in 1940, the Cow Bayou Swing Bridge is one of only a few center-bearing swing bridges still standing on Texas highways. Built as the final link in State Highway 87 — the 'Hug-the-Coast Highway' from Orange to Brownsville — its 806-foot span pivots on a central concrete pier, opening for boats in about ten minutes by electric motor. The bridge gave its name to Bridge City, and in the 2000s citizens rallied to preserve rather than replace it.

Hondo, TX

In January 1866 the Texas Hill Country was still contested ground between settlers and Native Americans resisting the loss of their hunting grounds. Three young men from near D'Hanis — August Rothe, George Miller, and twelve-year-old Hubert Weynand — camped on Hondo Creek to gather stray livestock when they were attacked. Miller was killed, Weynand was captured and never seen again, and Rothe escaped to tell the story, later recorded by frontier chronicler A.J. Sowell.

Dublin, TX

In 1871 Jesse Van donated land for a community cemetery serving the Cow Creek settlement, which supported a school and two churches. Its most notable burial was William Carroll Crawford, the last surviving signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, whose remains the state reinterred in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin in 1936. Among some sixty-five unidentified graves, the earliest recorded burial dates to 1874.

Brady, TX

Legend gives this burial ground its name from a cowboy who died passing through and may have been its first grave, but the record begins with four-year-old William Hughes in 1882. His parents, W.G.S. and Sarah Hughes, donated the land — and an additional acre for a school — that year, with Sarah and family deeding nearly five more acres to a cemetery association in 1932. The grounds preserve the heritage of the Deep Creek community on the Central Texas frontier.

Anson, TX

In 1885 a dance for cowboys and ladies at the Star Hotel in Anson so inspired visiting writer Larry Chittenden that he penned "The Cowboys' Christmas Ball," a poem naming real people and ranches of 1880s Jones County. Revived in the 1930s, the tradition drew national fame, even reaching the White House lawn, and settled into Pioneer Hall built with WPA help. Held every year with grand marches, waltzes, and period dress, it keeps a piece of frontier Texas alive.

Cherokee County, SC

On this rolling South Carolina pastureland in January 1781, Continental and militia forces under Brigadier General Daniel Morgan sprang a masterful double envelopment on the feared British cavalry commander Banastre Tarleton. Morgan's plan turned his least-reliable militia into bait and shattered Tarleton's command in under an hour. The victory came at a low point in the southern campaign and helped set the stage for the war's end at Yorktown.

Dallas, TX

Cox Cemetery holds more than 400 marked graves and perhaps 100 unmarked burials, its oldest stone from 1848 marking a two-month-old child. Absalom Humbard, who came to Texas after being wounded and imprisoned during the Civil War, permanently set the ground aside for burials near White Rock Lake, where it served pioneer families—Glovers, Lavenders, Coxes, Donagheys and others who had arrived from across the United States and from Germany. It also served the vanished railroad communities of Fisher (later Calhoun) and Reinhardt before they were absorbed into Dallas.

Canton, TX

Robert K. Gibbs and his family settled this Van Zandt County land in the early 1850s, and the earliest documented grave — an infant Gibbs daughter — dates to 1853. When Robert Daniel Cox acquired the property in 1880, he opened the small family plot as a community cemetery, which grew through later land additions. Some of the unmarked graves are believed to hold enslaved people, and five generations of the Cox family rest here.

Sidney vicinity, TX

William Driscol Cox brought his family from Tennessee to Texas in 1872 and settled a 300-acre ranch here, teaching the first school in nearby Sidney and serving as Comanche County sheriff. The cemetery began with the 1876 burial of his infant daughter Mary Jane, and in 1886 Cox donated the ground to a Methodist mission as a public burial place. Generations of the Cox family and their kin have tended it ever since.

Groesbeck, TX

Arkansas native Obediah Cox came home from the Civil War in 1864 and settled with his wife Angeline in the Ferguson Prairie community of Limestone County. When Angeline died in 1870 he buried her here, the cemetery's earliest marked grave, later marrying her sister Eliza and adding to the family lands. The burial ground grew to hold Civil War veterans, Masons, and members of the Order of the Eastern Star among the Cox, Glover, Yarbrough, and other pioneer families, and since the 1880s their descendants have gathered here each year for a memorial reunion.

Orange, TX

Orange grew from an 1820s settlement on a bend of the Sabine River into a booming lumber town, and this shingle-style Victorian home reflects that early-20th-century prosperity. Thomas C.B. Cox, an Alabama-born civil engineer for the Lutcher and Moore Lumber Company, hired noted local builder Daniel Webster Howell to raise the house around 1910, complete with fish-scale skirting, twelve-foot ceilings, and white-oak floors. Later families, including a postwar Chamber of Commerce president, added a second story and other rooms as the home passed through generations.

Dallas, TX

Farmers Howard and Mary Jane Cox bought 189 acres of this Dallas-area land in 1878 and put up a first house here before 1884. Around 1900 they built the surviving home — family tradition holds the older structure was folded into it — a Queen Anne blend of tall windows and dormers under a dominant hipped roof. Two of their sons ran the Cox Brothers Dairy on the property from 1931 into the early 1950s.

Selinsgrove, PA · est. 1966

Jacob Coxey was born in this Snyder County town in 1854 and grew into a reform-minded businessman with a bold idea. In 1894, amid a crushing economic depression, he led a march of jobless men—"Coxey's Army"—from the Midwest to Washington, demanding that the government create jobs through public works. Though he was arrested for walking on the Capitol lawn, his protest thrust the plight of the unemployed into the national spotlight.

Needmore, TX

On the vast, dry expanse of the Staked Plains, this brackish salt lake was a rare and welcome source of water for Comanche bands, buffalo hunters, and cattle drives alike. Artifacts along its shore mark it as a favored Comanche camp, and after the 1874 Battle of Adobe Walls broke Comanche resistance, hide hunters swept the region and all but exterminated the southern buffalo herd. From the 1880s the lake watered stock on the immense XIT Ranch and, later, cattle bound for the railroad at Bovina and the markets to the north.

Weslaco, TX

In February 1945, U.S. Marines fought to seize the small but strategic Pacific island of Iwo Jima, and Weslaco's own Corporal Harlon Block was among the six men who raised the American flag atop Mount Suribachi—an act frozen into one of the most famous photographs of World War II. Days later, after his squad leader was killed, Block took command but was himself killed within hours. His remains came home to Weslaco in 1949 and were later moved to the Iwo Jima monument in Harlingen.

Newmarket, NH

This memorial in Newmarket, New Hampshire honors Corporal Robert F. White, a United States Marine from the town who was killed in Vietnam on August 17, 1967, at the age of 27. He served during one of the war's most intense years, when American troop levels in Vietnam were climbing past 400,000 and combat losses were mounting across the country's provinces. Small New England mill towns like Newmarket felt these losses personally, and the community set this marker so that a native son's name would remain part of the place he came from.

Fredericksburg, TX

German immigrants who reached Fredericksburg in the late 1840s spread into the surrounding hills and, in 1878, raised a sturdy native-limestone schoolhouse that opened to about forty children. The land came from farmer Mathias Schmidt, who by local tradition won the privilege in a foot race. Over the years the building did double and triple duty, sheltering a teacherage, a post office, a Lutheran congregation, and the community band before merging into the Fredericksburg school district in 1957.

Douglas County, NV

Built in 1861 by William Cradlebaugh, this bridge across the Carson River shortened the road from Carson City south to Aurora and the booming Esmeralda Mining District. Travelers converged here from two routes—one hugging the river's west side, the other winding through Jacks Valley—before crossing and striking out across the desert past waystations like Desert Station and the Twelve Mile House. Douglas County bought the road and bridge in 1895 for $5,000.

Medford, MA

This spot marks one of the oldest crossings of the Mystic River, first bridged in 1638 in the early years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The name honors Matthew Cradock, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, who backed a plantation here at Medford though he never crossed the Atlantic himself. For generations the Cradock Bridge carried the main road north out of Boston, and the 1638-1880 span on the marker traces the working life of the early wooden and timber structures before they gave way to later reconstructions. A modest crossing by modern eyes, it was a vital artery of colonial New England commerce and travel.

Jacksonville, TX

Founded in 1891 at the Shiloh Schoolhouse by members of a nearby Baptist congregation, this East Texas church cycled through several names before settling on Craft Baptist Church of Christ in 1899. For decades its members met only once or twice a month — a rhythm dictated by the hard task of keeping full-time pastors in rural communities — before expanding to weekly worship in the 1950s. Unusually tied to education, the church hosted preaching students from nearby Jacksonville College and sent its own pastors into seminaries, mission fields, and denominational leadership.

Avery County, NC

The rich iron ore deposits near this Avery County site were worked from around 1826 into the early 20th century, making Cranberry one of the most important iron mines in the southern Appalachians. During the Civil War the mine supplied desperately needed iron to the Confederacy, whose limited industrial base made every ore source strategically valuable. Mining continued until about 1930, and a narrow-gauge railroad was eventually built to haul the ore out of the rugged mountains.

Crane, TX

Carved from Tom Green County in 1887 and formally organized in 1927, Crane County honors William Carey Crane, a Baptist minister who served as president of Baylor University from 1863 to 1885. The long gap between creation and organization reflects how sparsely settled far West Texas remained until the oil era. The county seat, Crane, carries his name as well.

Conroe, TX

Nickolas Crane came to Texas from Alabama in 1848 and, after Confederate service in the Civil War, built this large cabin in 1867 on his land claim, hand-adzing split pine logs smooth on the interior and topping it with a cypress-board roof. The Tharp family moved and restored the cabin in the 1970s, preserving a rare example of post-war frontier homebuilding.

Crane, TX

Facing a booming West Texas oil town, the Crane Board of Trustees in 1947 proposed more than a million dollars to build a modern high school campus. They hired architect Sylvan Blum Haynes—known for schools, homes, and the Lubbock County Courthouse—whose firm designed a horizontal buff-brick building crowned by a crenellated entrance tower. Opened in 1949, it stands as Haynes' final Art Deco design.

Catasauqua, PA · est. 1997

On the Fourth of July, 1840, Welsh ironmaster David Thomas fired up a furnace in Catasauqua that finally proved anthracite coal could smelt iron on a commercial scale. Earlier attempts had failed, but Thomas's hot-blast furnace for the Lehigh Crane Iron Company soon turned out 50 to 60 tons of pig iron a week, and the works grew to six furnaces before closing in 1930. The success helped shift American iron production away from charcoal and toward the hard coal of Pennsylvania's mountains.

Crane, TX

William Carey Crane was a Virginia-born Baptist minister and educator who came to Confederate Texas in 1863 to lead Baylor University—a post he held for 22 years, spending his own money to keep its doors open while many Texas colleges closed. He also helped found the Texas State Teachers Association and championed public-school reform. Crane County was later named in his honor.

Austin, TX

Completed in 1960, this three-unit building was commissioned by University of Texas English professor Thomas Cranfill as a home and studio for his partner, photographer and author Hans Beacham. It was designed by Harwell Hamilton Harris, a leading figure in American regional modernism who had directed UT's School of Architecture in the early 1950s. Its board-and-batten redwood siding, exposed concrete block, and light-filled open plan reflect Harris's belief in honest materials and a close bond between a building and its landscape.

San Mateo County, CA · est. 2006

On the morning of October 29, 1953, a British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines DC-6B bound from Sydney to San Francisco crashed into Kings Mountain, killing all nineteen people aboard — the deadliest aviation accident in San Mateo County history. Among the dead was William Kapell, one of America's most gifted young concert pianists, returning from an Australian tour. Though the exact cause was never resolved, the disaster fed into the tightening of aviation safety practices in the years that followed.

Conroe, TX

In 1933 the Madeley wells, drilled by Standard Oil of Kansas, came in on fire and threatened to destroy the entire Conroe oil field, sending flames as high as 150 feet as crews battled for three months with water, mud, and explosives. Humble Oil finally quelled the inferno with a directional well never before tried on the Texas Gulf Coast, pumping mud into the blowout crater. Crater Lake, born of those explosions, still marks the site.

Crawford, TX

Crawford took root in the 1850s near Tonk Crossing, in country the Tonkawa had long ranged, at the meeting of two frontier trade routes. When the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad bypassed the original townsite in 1881, residents simply picked up and moved to the new line, and the relocated town flourished with churches, a cotton gin, and a grain mill before incorporating in 1897. For most of the twentieth century it was a quiet agricultural center—until 1999, when George W. Bush bought a nearby ranch that his 2000 election turned into the "Western White House."

Crawford, TX

Crawford Cemetery began with grief: a chiseled rockpile reading "H. Kee" marks the 1876 grave of an infant boy whose family had newly settled the area. Neighbor Uriah Tadlock, a Civil War veteran who bought land along the Tonk Creek Road cattle trail in 1870, offered a pasture for the burial and set aside three acres as a community cemetery, tradition holding that no one was ever to pay for a resting place. Tadlock and his wife Mary Ann helped build early Crawford—houses, the Methodist church, and a school—and are buried here among the pioneers who developed this corner of McLennan County.

Meadville, PA · est. 1982

Formed from Allegheny County in 1800 and named for Colonel William Crawford, Crawford County grew up around Meadville, which in 1788 became the first permanent settlement in northwestern Pennsylvania. The county proved a seedbed of American firsts: the nation's first direct primary election was held here in 1842, and it became a cradle of both the oil industry and the modern zipper. Meadville anchored settlement in a corner of the state that was still wild frontier when the town was founded.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2001

Opened in 1943 in Pittsburgh's Hill District, the Crawford Grill #2 became a beating heart of Black social and musical life, where giants like Art Blakey, Mary Lou Williams, and John Coltrane played to a racially mixed and international crowd. First owned by William 'Gus' Greenlee and later by Joseph Robinson, it was the second of three clubs bearing the Crawford name. In an era of segregation, its stage and dance floor drew people across the color line.

Crawford, TX

Schooling in the Crawford area began in the 1870s at Old Crawford, or Tonk Crossing, where teachers like John H. Gouldy and Dr. J.B. Cranfill taught in a one-room house that doubled as church and meeting hall. When the town moved to follow the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe railroad in the 1880s, a schoolhouse was among its first buildings, and the merging of a free school with private Crawford College in 1886 laid the foundation for the public district formed in 1894. Over the decades rural schools consolidated in, a separate school served African-American children until integration in 1965, and long-serving superintendents gave the district lasting stability.

Grand Saline, TX

Creagleville took shape in the 1840s along the Dallas-Shreveport Road, a major route across northern Van Zandt County, and was named for German immigrant Henry Creagle, who settled here about 1847. A school appeared by 1854, and the farming community soon gained a church, cotton gin, gristmill, and cemetery. As families moved away the village faded — its school consolidated in 1941, its church closed in 1991 — but the cemetery, holding more than fifty Civil War veterans, endures.

Corry, PA · est. 2008

By 1890, the forests and game of western Pennsylvania were reeling from decades of unchecked logging, development, and hunting. In Corry, businessman H.A. Penrose gathered like-minded men to found the Pennsylvania State Sportsmen's Association, an early voice for wildlife conservation and the enforcement of game laws. Their advocacy bore fruit in 1895, when the state legislature created the Board of Game Commissioners — the seed of today's Pennsylvania Game Commission.

Junction, TX

Creed Taylor took up arms in the Texas War for Independence, marching from Gonzales to Bexar in 1835 in the campaign that drove Mexican forces from San Antonio. In 1836 he served as a scout and courier during the decisive year of the revolution. His name endures in the Hill Country as one of the frontier soldiers who won Texas its independence.