Mathias Amend Cooper (?-1836)

    As is often the case with early Texas settlers, little is known of Mathias Cooper's history. According to legal papers filed by his father in order to claim his son's military service land grants, Cooper left Natchez, Mississippi in either late 1835 or early 1836. He enlisted in the Texian army for three months as a private in Captain Thomas H. McIntire's Company, and mortally wounded during the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836.

Note: This is a cenotaph. In 1881, a decision was made to place permanent memorials at the graves of those men who had been killed in the Battle of San Jacinto and buried on the battlefield. It was discovered, however, that all of the original wooden grave markers, except for Benjamin Brigham's, had rotted away and no one could remember exactly where the others rested. As a compromise, since the soldiers had been buried closely together, it was decided to place a cenotaph over Brigham's grave as a memorial to all of them.

San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site
La Porte

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29° 45.232, -095° 05.363