Luke O. Bryan (1807-1869)

    Born at Berwick Bay, Louisiana, October 7, 1807, Luke O. Bryan came to Texas with his parents in 1834 and settled in Liberty Municipality. On March 6, 1836, he was mustered into the service of the Texian army at Liberty for a four month stint. He was first assigned as Second Lieutenant in Captain S.C. Hirom's company of Liberty Volunteers before transferring to Captain William Logan's Company, with whom he fought at San Jacinto. He re-enlisted on July 7, a few days after his initial term expired, as First Lieutenant in Captain Franklin Hardin's company until October 7, 1836, when he left the service permanently. He died October 7, 1869, and was buried in the Bryan family cemetery.

Bryan-Neyland Cemetery
Liberty

COORDINATES

30° 04.273, -094° 48.181

Jerry Denny (1859-1927)

    Jeremiah Dennis Eldridge was born in New York City on March 16, 1859, to Irish immigrants who moved the family to the Bay area of California in 1861. Shortly after the relocation, Eldridge’s parents died leaving him and his sister Mary to be raised in orphanages. He attended St Mary's College in San Francisco in the late 1870s, and played semi-professional baseball during the summer months (changing his name to Jerry Denny to hide his professional play from the college), when he wasn't playing for the college as an amateur. He started playing in the minor leagues for the San Francisco Eagles in 1878, and the Stars and Athletics teams from 1879-1880. On May 2, 1881, he went pro and began playing with the Providence Grays of the National League. In 1884, the Providence Grays won the NL pennant and played in the first-ever World Series against the New York Metropolitans. In the second game of the series, Denny hit a three-run homer, the first-ever hit in World Series play, enabling the Grays to win the game, 3-1. He was one of the few ambidextrous major league players in the game; although he threw primarily with his right arm, he could also toss with his left. This gave him a defensive advantage at his customary field position - in ranging to his left on a ground ball, if he saw a play at second base, instead of having to transfer the ball to his right hand while pivoting and repositioning his body (as third basemen would customarily do), Denny could dispatch the ball to second with his left hand. This skill contributed to his refusal to wear a glove in the field, long after most players considered gloves essential.

    He holds the distinction of being the last Major League position player (non-pitcher) to play his entire career on the diamond without wearing a fielding glove. When attendance dropped off in 1885, the Providence team became cash short and left the National League, Jerry Denny signed with the St. Louis Maroons, a new NL team. When the Maroons ballpark burned to the ground in 1886, the team folded. Denny then played three years for the Indianapolis Hoosiers. The Hoosiers, never ending higher than 7th place, folded in 1889. From this point, Denny bounced from team to team; playing for the New York Giants in 1890, the Cleveland Spiders in 1891, the Philadelphia Phillies in 1892 and finally the Louisville Colonels from 1893-94. Denny's last major league appearance was on July 10, 1894 for the Louisville Colonels. His career totals are 1,237 Games and 4,946 At Bats, 714 Runs, 1,286 Hits, 74 Home runs, and a Batting average of .260. He still holds the Major League record for most chances by a third baseman in a single game, handling 16 chances during an 18-inning match on August 17, 1882. He led the National League in games (85) in 1881 and strikeouts (79) in 1888. Following his baseball career, he travelled to Connecticut and took over a men’s furnishing store. He became quite a businessman, his gentlemen’s stores prospered, and he went into the hotel business in Derby and Bridgeport, Connecticut. Lured back into baseball, he played in the Connecticut State League from 1897-1902 and also served as manager for the Derby franchise from 1897-1901. After that he contented himself with family life, working at his hotel business and as a city inspector for Bridgeport, Connecticut. He also occasionally appeared at old-timers get-togethers. During a visit to his daughter in Houston, Texas, during the summer of 1927, he was stricken with a heart attack and died at the age of 68 on August 16, 1927.

Section N
Holy Cross Cemetery
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 47.309, -095° 22.139

John W. Moore (1797?-1846)

    John W. Moore, signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and early Texas official, was born in Pennsylvania about 1797. He traveled to Texas from Tennessee in 1830 and settled in Harrisburg Municipality. In December 1831 the ayuntamiento of San Felipe de Austin announced his election as comisario of the precinct of San Jacinto. Moore was a friend of William B. Travis and was with him on July 30, 1835, when a company of volunteers under Travis forced the capitulation of Antonio Tenorio at the fort at Anahuac. Moore was a delegate from Harrisburg to the Consultation and was elected contractor for the army by the General Council on November 18, 1835. He was one of the three representatives from Harrisburg at the Convention of 1836 at Washington-on-the-Brazos and signed the Declaration of Independence. On October 3, 1836, Moore was seated in the House of the First Congress of the Republic of Texas as a member from Harrisburg County, but his election was contested and Jesse H. Cartwright was seated in his stead on October 11. In January 1837 Moore was elected captain of the Second Militia District and sheriff of Harrisburg County; he held the latter post at least until November 30, 1840. In 1839 he served as a trustee for the newly formed Harrisburg Town Company. On January 6, 1840, he was elected an alderman of the city of Houston. He was a charter member of the first Independent Order of Odd Fellows lodge of Texas, organized at Houston on July 25, 1838. Moore's first wife died sometime after April 28, 1831. On February 21, 1839, he married Eliza Belknap in Houston. He died in Houston in 1846 and was buried there. In 1936 the Texas Centennial Commission placed a monument in the cemetery in his honor. Source

Note: This is a cenotaph. Founders Memorial Park, originally founded in 1836 as Houston's first city cemetery, was rapidly filled due to a yellow fever epidemic and closed to further burials around 1840. The cemetery became neglected over a period of time, often vandalized and was heavily damaged by the 1900 hurricane. In 1936, despite a massive clean up effort, a century of neglect had taken its toll. The vast majority of grave markers were either destroyed or missing and poor record keeping prevented locating individual graves. Several cenotaphs were placed in random areas throughout the park in honor of the more high-profile citizens buried there, but a great number of graves go unmarked to this day.


Founders Memorial Park
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 45.461, -095° 22.768

Walter Prescott Webb (1888-1963)

    Walter Prescott Webb, historian and author, was born on a farm in Panola County, Texas, on April 3, 1888, the son of Casner P. and Mary Elizabeth (Kyle) Webb. His father was a schoolteacher and part time farmer. The Webb family had moved from Aberdeen, Mississippi, to Caledonia in Rusk County, Texas, then to Panola and westward past the 100th meridian to the Stephens-Eastland counties area. These moves from the woodlands to a new and arid environment made a distinct impression on the young boy, and the geographic dichotomy formed the basis for his later writing about the Great Plains. Webb found farm life on the family homestead in the Cross Timbers area near Ranger harsh and unappealing. In desperation he wrote a letter to the editor of a literary magazine, the Sunny South, asking how a farm boy could get an education and become a writer. William E. Hinds, a toy manufacturer from New York, responded to the boy's query and encouraged him to "keep his sights on lofty goals." Webb finished at Ranger High School in Eastland County and earned a teaching certificate. He taught at various small Texas schools and, with the assistance of his benefactor, William Hinds, eventually attended the University of Texas, where he received his bachelor of arts degree in 1915 at the age of twenty-seven. Webb interrupted his teaching career to work as a bookkeeper for Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos and to serve as an optometrist's assistant in San Antonio.

    He was teaching at Main High School in 1918, when he was invited to join the history faculty of the University of Texas. Webb wrote his master's thesis on the Texas Rangers in 1920 and was encouraged to pursue the Ph.D. His year of "educational outbreeding" (as he referred to it) at the University of Chicago was unsuccessful, and he returned to Texas determined to write history as he saw it. The result was the publication in 1931 of The Great Plains, acclaimed as "a new interpretation of the American West," acknowledged by the Social Science Research Council in 1939 as the outstanding contribution to American history since World War I, and winner of Columbia University's Loubat prize. On the basis of this book Webb received the Ph.D. from the University of Texas in 1932. In 1939, after a year as Harkness Lecturer at the University of London, Webb became director of the Texas State Historical Association. During his tenure (to 1946), he expanded the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and launched a project to compile an encyclopedia of Texas, published in 1952 as the Handbook of Texas. With the assistance of H. Bailey Carroll, he established a student branch of the association, the Junior Historians of Texas, in 1940 to encourage secondary school teachers and students to investigate local and regional history. Respected as a teacher both at home and abroad, Webb returned to Europe in 1942 as Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford.

    At the University of Texas he became famous for his books and seminars, especially those on the Great Plains and the Great Frontier, in which he developed two major historical concepts. He proposed in the Great Plains thesis that the westward settlement of the United States had been momentarily stalled at the ninety-eighth meridian, an institutional fault line separating the wooded environment to the east from the arid environment of the west. The pioneers were forced to pause in their westward trek while technological innovation in the form of the six-shooter, barbed wire, and the windmill allowed them to proceed. The Great Frontier thesis became the crux of a book of the same title, published in 1952, that Webb declared to be his most intellectual and thought-provoking. The Great Frontier proposed a "boom hypothesis": the new lands discovered by Columbus and other explorers in the late fifteenth century precipitated the rise of great wealth and new institutions such as democracy and capitalism. By 1900, however, the new lands disappeared, the frontier closed, and institutions were under stress, resulting in the ecological and economic problems that have plagued the twentieth century. Although not universally well-received at the time, the Second International Congress of Historians of the United States and Mexico examined the Great Frontier thesis as its sole topic during its 1958 meeting, and the concept was again an object of discussion at an international symposium in 1972.

    In all, Webb wrote or edited more than twenty books. In 1935 he published The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense, the definitive study of this frontier law enforcement agency, but regarded by Webb as being filled with "deadening facts. Divided We Stand: The Crisis of a Frontierless Democracy (1937) analyzed the practices of modern corporations, which Webb contended promoted economic sectionalism to the disadvantage of the South. More Water for Texas: The Problem and the Plan (1954) reflected Webb's interest in the conservation of natural resources. A collection of his essays, An Honest Preface and Other Essays, appeared in 1959, and at the time of his death he was working on a television series on American civilization under a grant from the Ford Foundation. Webb was one of the charter members and later a fellow of the Texas Institute of Letters. He was also a member of the Philosophical Society of Texas and president of both the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (1954-55) and the American Historical Association (1958). He received honorary degrees from the University of Chicago, Southern Methodist University, and Oxford University in England. He held two Guggenheim fellowships, acted as special advisor to Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson on water needs of the South and West, and received a $10,000 award from the American Council of Learned Societies for distinguished service to scholarship. The United States Bureau of Reclamation also gave him an award for distinguished service to conservation. Webb was married on September 16, 1916, to Jane Elizabeth Oliphant, who died on June 28, 1960. They had one daughter. On December 14, 1961, he married Terrell (Dobbs) Maverick, the widow of F. Maury Maverick of San Antonio. Webb was killed in an automobile accident near Austin on March 8, 1963, and was buried in the State Cemetery by proclamation of Governor John B. Connally. A statue of Webb and his old friends J. Frank Dobie and Roy Bedichek stands in Zilker Park in Austin. Source

Republic Hill
Texas State Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 15.920, -097° 43.613