Mexican-American War

Fredericksburg, TX

Edmund Kirby Smith, born in Florida in 1824, graduated from West Point, fought in the Mexican War, and commanded frontier camps in 1850s Texas. Resigning from the U.S. Army in 1861, he rose to lead the Confederacy's vast Trans-Mississippi Department, where Texas cotton financed his army and sheltered his family amid threats from Union forces and the French in Mexico. After the war he taught mathematics to young Texans at the University of the South until his death in 1893.

Kermit, TX

When Texas joined the United States in 1846 it claimed some 98,300 square miles reaching into five future states. After the Mexican War, anti-slavery forces sought to shrink the slave state of Texas, and in the Compromise of 1850 Texas gave up a third of its area for $10 million, using the money to pay Republic debts and seed a public school fund. A corner post four miles east marks the resulting boundary at the 103rd meridian and 32nd parallel, where Texas meets New Mexico's southeast corner.

Brownsville, TX

On May 8, 1846, the opening battle of the Mexican-American War was fought on this coastal prairie, where General Zachary Taylor's outnumbered U.S. army used its "flying artillery" to defeat Mexican forces. The victory helped launch a conflict that would redraw the map of North America.

Brownsville, TX

On May 9, 1846, U.S. forces under General Zachary Taylor defeated the Mexican army of General Mariano Arista in the Battle of Resaca de la Palma. Coming at the very outset of the Mexican-American War, the victory drove Mexican troops back across the Rio Grande and secured the American claim to the contested land between the Nueces and the river.

Austin, TX

Albert C. Horton, a veteran of the Texas Revolution, owned this property in the 1840s and lived here as Texas's first elected lieutenant governor. When Governor J. Pinckney Henderson left to fight in the Mexican War in 1846, Horton served as acting chief of state from this house for several months.

Los Indios, TX

On April 25, 1846, a company of U.S. dragoons under Captain Thornton was attacked by Mexican troops in the disputed territory north of the Rio Grande. The clash left several Americans dead and gave President Polk the claim that "American blood" had been shed "on American soil." Within weeks Congress declared war, and the skirmish here became the opening act of the Mexican-American War.

Brownsville, TX

These weathered pilings mark two separate military supply roads a generation apart. The cypress piles are remnants of a floating bridge Gen. Zachary Taylor threw across Boca Chica Inlet in 1846 during the Mexican-American War; the palmetto pilings are what remains of a railroad crossing begun by Gen. Francis Herron in 1864 and finished by Gen. Philip Sheridan in 1865 to move Union supplies at the close of the Civil War.

Leming, TX

Born in Missouri in 1824 and raised in Bastrop County, Thomas Ransdell Brite came of age amid the conflicts of early Texas. He volunteered against Mexican incursions in the 1842 Vasquez, Woll, and Somervell campaigns, served in the Mexican War under Captain McCulloch in 1846, and joined the Texas Rangers in 1855 to counter frontier raids. Settling in what became Atascosa County, he was elected its first tax assessor-collector and later county treasurer before his death in 1859.

Corpus Christi, TX

Philadelphia-born Thomas S. Parker came to Texas at twenty, and in 1839 he and his parents received large land grants near present-day Corpus Christi, where they raised cattle. He allied with trader Henry L. Kinney, and when Zachary Taylor's army camped near Kinney's post in 1845 — the staging ground for the war with Mexico — Parker won the contract to supply the soldiers' beef. "Col. Tom" went on to become the first sheriff of Nueces County, later a Texas Ranger and Confederate soldier, and finally Corpus Christi's city marshal, shaping the young city's commerce and law until his death in 1886.

Alamo, TX

After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War in 1848 and set the Rio Grande as the international boundary, Major William Emory led a survey to map that new border. Thomas W. Jones, a young surveyor from Washington, D.C., joined the effort at El Paso in 1850 and worked as an assistant surveyor on the Lower Rio Grande. In July 1853 he drowned nearby and was buried on a local ranch, one of many who gave their lives to the exacting work of charting the frontier.

San Angelo, TX

Thomas Green came to Texas from Tennessee in 1833 and fought at San Jacinto in 1836, helping man the celebrated "Twin Sisters" cannons that won Texas independence. He built a long public career as a court clerk and legislator, served in frontier Indian campaigns and the Mexican War, then rose to prominence as a Confederate cavalry commander. Leading the 5th Texas Cavalry and later his own division, he fought at Val Verde and in the campaigns to hold Louisiana before he was killed in 1864 at Blair's Landing during the Red River Campaign. The West Texas county where this marker stands bears his name.

La Feria, TX

This land was surveyed in 1777 as part of Spanish grants to Don Juan Hinojosa and José María Balli, ancestors of the priest for whom Padre Island is named, and by the 1790s the ranch hosted a fairground—giving La Feria its name—for fiestas, horse racing, and sport. After the Mexican War of 1846–48, the Balli heirs had their Texas title confirmed, and in 1850 cattleman Nathaniel White opened Anglo ranching here. The town of La Feria was platted under its old name in 1906 and grew into a trade center for the farming country of the Rio Grande Valley.

City of Rensselaer, NY

This memorial in Rensselaer, across the Hudson from the city of Albany, honors the sailors who served aboard the succession of U.S. Navy warships to carry the name USS Albany. The dates trace a long naval lineage: a mid-19th-century sailing sloop-of-war from the age of the Mexican-American War, followed by later steam and ironclad-era vessels, and on through the cruisers of the World War II and Cold War Navy. Each ship passed its name to the next, so the honor roll of "Albany" shipmates spans nearly a century and a half of American sea power.

Huntsville, TX

Walker County was carved from Montgomery County in 1846, the year Texas joined the Union, and first honored Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, a leading advocate of annexation. In 1863 the county was pointedly rededicated to Captain Samuel H. Walker, the daring Texas Ranger who fell fighting in Mexico during the U.S.-Mexico War. Huntsville has served as its county seat throughout.

Marshall, TX

Walter Paye Lane's life traced the whole arc of nineteenth-century Texas at war. He fought as a soldier in the Texas War for Independence, rose to major in the Mexican War, and served as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. The State of Texas erected this marker in his honor in 1962.

Dallas, TX

Wheatland Cemetery grew out of land donated in the mid-1800s by Ohio-born farmers Tom Branson and H.K. Brotherton, and it became intertwined with the local Methodist congregation of Wesley Chapel, which moved to the renamed community of Wheatland in 1864. Formally established in 1872, the grounds hold earlier burials, some reinterred from the chapel's original yard, along with pioneers, community leaders, and veterans reaching back to the Mexican-American War. Its fraternal gravestones and curbing, and graves of victims of flu, malaria, and diphtheria epidemics, record the joys and hardships of an early Dallas-area farming community.

Baird, TX

Born in Illinois in 1829, William Jeff Maltby lived one of the great frontier lives of 19th-century Texas—soldier in the Mexican War and the Civil War, Texas Ranger, and builder of frontier forts for the U.S. Army beginning around 1850. Retiring to Callahan County in 1878, he reinvented himself as a nationally recognized horticulturist and nurseryman, and in 1906 co-authored a partial memoir titled 'Captain Jeff.' His story spanned the sweep of the Texas frontier from open-range danger to settled cultivation.

Quitman, TX

Wood County was created in February 1850 and organized that August, taking its name from George T. Wood — a member of the Congress of the Republic of Texas, an officer in the Mexican War, and governor of the young state from 1847 to 1849. Quitman was designated its seat.