Albert Sidney Johnston (1803-1862)

    Albert Sidney Johnston, Confederate general, son of John and Abigail (Harris) Johnston, was born at Washington, Kentucky, on February 2, 1803. He attended Transylvania University before he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point, from which he graduated in June 1826. He served at Sackett's Harbor, New York, in 1826, with the Sixth Infantry at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, in 1827, and as regimental adjutant in the Black Hawk War. On January 20, 1829, he married Henrietta Preston. Because of his wife's illness, he resigned his commission on April 22, 1834, and farmed near St. Louis in 1835. She died on August 12, 1835. In 1836 Johnston moved to Texas and enlisted as a private in the Texas Army. 

    On August 5, 1836, he was appointed adjutant general by Thomas Jefferson Rusk and on January 31, 1837, he became senior brigadier general in command of the army to replace Felix Huston. A duel with Huston resulted; Johnston was wounded and could not immediately take the command. On December 22, 1838, he was appointed secretary of war for the Republic of Texas by President Mirabeau B. Lamar, and in December 1839 he led an expedition against the Cherokee Indians in East Texas. On March 1, 1840, Johnston returned to Kentucky, where, on October 3, 1843, he married Eliza Griffin, a cousin of his first wife. They returned to Texas to settle at China Grove Plantation in Brazoria County.

    During the Mexican War he was colonel of the First Texas Rifle Volunteers and served with W. O. Butler as inspector general at Monterrey, Mexico. On December 2, 1849, Johnston became paymaster in the United States Army and was assigned to the Texas frontier. He went with William S. Harney to the Great Plains in 1855, and on April 2, 1856, he was appointed colonel of the Second Cavalry. In 1858 Johnston received command of a Utah expedition to escort a new territorial governor and three judges to Salt Lake City and to establish a military presence, due to Mormon resistance of federal authority. He set up Camp Scott near the ruins of Fort Bridger in the fall of 1858, and later selected a site southwest of Salt Lake City for a permanent camp-Camp Floyd which was dedicated in November of 1859. Johnston remained in charge of Camp Floyd until 1860 when he was sent to the Pacific Department and stationed at San Francisco. At the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, he resigned his commission in the United States Army, refused the federal government's offer of a command, and returned overland to Texas.

    In Austin 1861 Jefferson Davis appointed Johnston a general in the Confederate Army and in September assigned him command of the Western Department. Johnston issued a call for men and formed and drilled an army, but it lacked men and organization, had a huge area to defend, and could not control the rivers that were vital to military success in the region. In February 1862, following Federal victories on the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, he moved his line of defense to the vicinity of Nashville, Tennessee, and later to Corinth, Mississippi. On April 6, 1862, he was killed while leading his forces at the battle of Shiloh. He was temporarily buried at New Orleans. By special appropriation, the Texas Legislature, in January 1867, had his remains transferred to Austin for burial in the State Cemetery. In 1905 a stone monument executed by noted sculptor Elisabet Ney was erected at the site. Source

Confederate Field

Texas State Cemetery

Austin

COORDINATES

30° 15.913, -097° 43.597

Charlotte Ganahl Walker (1878-1958)

    Charlotte Walker, actress, was born in Galveston to Edwin A. and Charlisa (De Ganahl) Walker and was the mother of character actress Sara Haden. Walker made her stage debut as a teen, when at nineteen she performed in London, England in a comedy called The Mummy. She performed with Richard Mansfield and later returned to her native Texas. She appeared as June in Trail of the Lonesome Pine in 1911 and would later reprise the role in Cecil B. DeMille's 1916 film Trail of the Lonesome Pine. David Belasco noticed her in On Parole and signed her for starring roles in plays The Warrens of Virginia, Just a Wife, and Call The Doctor. In 1923 she played with Ethel Barrymore in The School For Scandal, produced by the Player's Club.

    Walker's motion picture career began in 1915 with Kindling and Out of the Darkness. Sloth (1917) is a five-reeler which features Walker. In the third reel of this film she plays a youthful Dutch maid who is about sixteen years old. The setting is an old Dutch settlement on Staten Island, New York. The theme stresses the perils of indolence to a nation of people and cautions against permitting luxury to replace the simplistic life led by America's forebears. In her later silent film work Walker can be seen in The Midnight Girl (1925) starring alongside a pre-Dracula Bela Lugosi. The Midnight Girl is one of Walker's few silents that survives. As a film actress she continued to perform in films into the early 1930s. Her later screen performances include roles in Lightnin' (1930), Millie (1931), Salvation Nell (1931), and Hotel Variety (1933) She married her first husband, Dr. John B. Haden, on November 16, 1896 in New York City. With him she had two daughters, Beatrice Shelton  and Katherine, who later changed her name to Sara Haden. After her divorce, she returned to the stage. Her second husband, Eugene Walter, was a playwright who adapted the novel The Trail of the Lonesome Pine for Broadway; the second marriage also ended in divorce in 1930. Charlotte Walker died in 1958 at a hospital in Kerrville, Texas at age 81.

Note: Crypt is unmarked. There are several crypts inside the Haden family mausoleum, all marked with a small nameplate except for two - those of Charlotte and her daughter Sara.

Haden Mausoleum

Trinity Episcopal Cemetery

Galveston

COORDINATES

29° 17.621, -094° 48.682

John Ireland (1827-1896)

    John Ireland, governor and legislator, son of Patrick and Rachel (Newton) Ireland, was born near Millerstown, Kentucky, on January 21, 1827. He served for several years as constable and sheriff of his home county, began to study law in 1851, and was admitted to the bar in 1852. He established himself at Seguin, Texas, in 1853. Ireland, mayor of Seguin in 1858, was a delegate to the Secession Convention in 1861; he voted for secession. He volunteered as a private in the Confederate Army in 1862 and advanced to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was stationed on the Texas coast at the end of the war.

    He was a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1866 and served as district judge in 1866-67. He was removed by Philip Sheridan as an "impediment to Reconstruction." Ireland was elected to the House of the Thirteenth Legislature and to the Senate of the Fourteenth Legislature. As a legislator he opposed granting lands and subsidies to railroads, his work against the grant to the International-Great Northern Railroad winning him the sobriquet "Oxcart John." He served as associate justice of the Texas Supreme Court from 1875 until the Constitution of 1876 reduced that body from five to three judges. He was unsuccessful as a candidate against Richard Coke for the United States Senate in 1876 and against Gustav Schleicher for the United States House of Representatives in 1878.

    Ireland was elected governor of Texas in 1882 and again in 1884. As governor he continued somewhat Oran M. Roberts's economic policy, although he reversed policies for the rapid sale of public lands and the state's purchase of its own bonds at high prices. He urged a persistent enforcement of criminal laws and reduced the number of pardons. His administration was marked by the Fence-Cutting War of 1883 and strikes by the Knights of Labor in 1885 and 1886. He worked to develop state institutions and to protect state lands. During his terms the University of Texas was established, and the cornerstone for the Capitol was laid. It was Ireland who insisted that the building be made out of pink Texas granite rather than imported Indiana limestone. In 1887 Ireland lost to John H. Reagan in a contest for the United States Senate.

    He married Mrs. Matilda Wicks Faircloth in 1854. After her death in 1856, he married Anna Maria Penn in 1857. He had three daughters and later adopted his daughter's son, Patrick Ireland Carpenter. Ireland was a Mason and a Presbyterian. After his retirement from the governorship, he practiced law in Seguin until his death, on March 15, 1896. Source

Republic Hill

Texas State Cemetery

Austin

COORDINATES

30° 15.917, -097° 43.626