James Frank Dobie (1888-1964)

    J. Frank Dobie, folklorist, was born on a ranch in Live Oak County, Texas, on September 26, 1888, the eldest of six children of Richard J. and Ella (Byler) Dobie. His ranching heritage became an early influence on his character and personality. His fundamentalist father read the Bible to Frank and the other five children, and his mother read them Ivanhoe and introduced them to The Scottish Chiefs, Pilgrim's Progress, and Swiss Family Robinson. He left the ranch when he was sixteen and moved to Alice, where he lived with his Dubose grandparents and finished high school. In 1906 he enrolled in Southwestern University in Georgetown, where he met Bertha McKee, whom he married in 1916, and Professor Albert Shipp Pegues, his English teacher, who introduced him to English poetry, particularly the Romantics, and encouraged him as a writer. Dobie's education as a teacher and writer continued after graduation in 1910. He worked two summers as a reporter, first for the San Antonio Express and then the Galveston Tribune. He got his first teaching job in 1910 in Alpine, where he was also the principal, play director, and editor of the school paper.

    He returned to Georgetown in 1911 and taught in the Southwestern University preparatory school until 1913, when he went to Columbia to work on his master's degree. With his new M. A., he joined the University of Texas faculty in 1914. At this time he also joined the Texas Folklore Society. Dobie left the university in 1917 and served for two years in the field artillery in World War I. His outfit was sent overseas right at the war's end, and he returned to be discharged in 1919. In 1919 he published his first articles. He resigned his position at the university in 1920 to manage his uncle Jim Dobie's ranch. During this year on the Rancho de Los Olmos with the vaqueros and the stock and the land that had been part of his formation, Dobie discovered his calling - to transmute all the richness of this life and land and culture into literature. The Texas Folklore Society was the main avenue for his new mission, and the University of Texas library with all its Texas resources was his vehicle. Dobie returned to Austin and the university in 1921. The Texas Folklore Society had been formed in 1909 by Leonidas W. Payne and others, but had recessed during the war years.

    On April 1, 1922, Dobie became secretary of the society and immediately began a publication program. Legends of Texas (1924) carried the seeds of many of his later publications. Dobie served as the society's secretary-editor for twenty-one years and built the society into a permanent professional organization. When the university would not promote him without a Ph.D., Dobie accepted the chairmanship of the English department at Oklahoma A&M, where he stayed from 1923 to 1925. During these two years he began writing for Country Gentleman. With considerable help from his friends on the UT campus, he was able to return in 1925 with a token promotion. He began writing articles on Texas history, culture, and folklore for magazines and periodicals and soon started to work on his first book, A Vaquero of the Brush Country.

    Dobie's purpose in life from the time of his return to the university in 1921 was to show the people of Texas and the Southwest the richness of their culture and their traditions, particularly in their legends. John A. Lomax, another founder of the Texas Folklore Society, had done this with his collecting and publishing cowboy songs; Dobie intended to do this with the tales of old-time Texas and through the publications of the society and his own writing. His Vaquero of the Brush Country, published in 1929, established him as a spokesman of Texas and southwestern culture. It was based on John Young the Vaquero's autobiographical notes and articulated the struggle of the individual against social forces, in this case the battle of the open-range vaquero against barbed wire. Two years later Dobie published Coronado's Children (1931), the tales of those free spirits who abandoned society in the search for gold, lost mines, and various other grails. It won the Literary Guild Award for 1931 and, combined with his continuing success as a popular writer in Country Gentleman, made Dobie a nationally known literary figure. He was also promoted in 1933 to the rank of full professor, the first Texan non-Ph.D. to be so honored at the university. In 1942 he published the Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest, an annotated reading list. It was published again in 1952. As head of the Texas Folklore Society and author of On the Open Range (1931), Tales of the Mustang (1936), The Flavor of Texas (1936), Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver (1939), and Tongues of the Monte (1947), Dobie was the state's leading spokesman and literary and cultural figure during the Texas Centennial decade, the 1930s. His first period of writing ended with the publication of The Longhorns in 1941.

    He spent World War II teaching American literature in Cambridge. After the war he returned to Europe to teach in England, Germany, and Austria. He said of his Cambridge experience in A Texan in England that it gave him a broader perspective, that it was his beginning of his acceptance of civilization, an enlightened civilization free of social and political rigidities and with full respect for individuality. In Texas the University of Texas regents, critical of the university's liberal professors, had fired President Homer P. Rainey in November 1944. Dobie, a liberal Democrat, was outraged and vociferous, and Governor Coke Stevenson said that he was a troublemaker and should be summarily dismissed. Dobie's request for a continuation of his leave of absence after his European tour in 1947 was denied by the regents, and he was dismissed from the UT faculty under what became known as the "Dobie rule," which restricted faculty leaves of absence to two years except in emergencies. After this separation Dobie devoted all of his time to writing and anthologizing. The next decade saw the publication of The Voice of the Coyote (1949), The Ben Lilly Legend (1950), The Mustangs (1952), Tales of Old Time Texas (1955), Up the Trail From Texas (1955), and I'll Tell You a Tale (1960). Before he died he published Cow People (1964) and almost finished the manuscript for Rattlesnakes, which Bertha McKee Dobie later edited and published in 1965. Dobie began writing for the Southwest Review in 1919, when it was the Texas Review, and continued the association throughout his life. The Southwest Review published his John C. Duval: First Texas Man of Letters in 1939.

    Dobie also wrote a Sunday newspaper column from 1939 until his death, and as an outspoken critic of the Texas scene he was a popular subject of newspaper stories. His most celebrated targets were professional educationists ("unctuous elaborators of the obvious"); state politicians ("When I get ready to explain homemade fascism in America, I can take my example from the state capitol of Texas"); Pompeo Coppini's Alamo cenotaph ("From a distance it looks like a grain elevator or one of those swimming pool slides"); and inappropriate architecture (a friend reports his saying that the University Tower, into which he refused to move, "looked like a toothpick in a pie, ought to be laid on its side and have galleries put around it"). His war against bragging Texans, political, social, and religious restraints on individual liberty, and the mechanized world's erosion of the human spirit was continual. Dobie died on September 18, 1964. He had been feted by the Southwestern Writers and the Texas Folklore Society. Special editions of the Texas Observer and the Austin American-Statesman had been devoted to his praise by his many admirers, and President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the nation's highest civil award, the Medal of Freedom, on September 14, 1964. His funeral was held in Hogg Auditorium on the UT campus, and he was buried in the State Cemetery. Source

Republic Hill
Texas State Cemetery
Austin

30° 15.918, -097° 43.616

Samuel Hamilton Walker (1817-1847)

    Samuel H. Walker, Texas Ranger and Mexican War veteran, son of Nathan and Elizabeth (Thomas) Walker, was born at Toaping Castle, Prince George County, Maryland, on February 24, 1817, the fifth of seven children. He attended the common country school and afterward worked as a carpenter's apprentice. In May 1836 Walker enlisted in the Washington City Volunteers for the Creek Indian campaign in Alabama. He was stationed in Florida and apparently saw no combat. After his enlistment ended in 1837, Walker remained in Florida as a scout until 1841. He may also have been a railroad superintendent. He traveled to Galveston in January 1842, where he served in Capt. Jesse Billingsley's company during the Adrián Woll invasion. He then enlisted in the Somervell expedition and took part in the actions around Laredo and Guerrero. He also joined William S. Fisher's Mier expedition. Walker escaped at Salado, was recaptured, and survived the Black Bean Episode. In 1844 Walker joined John C. Hays's company of Texas Rangers and participated in the battle of Walker's Creek near the junction of Walker's Creek and West Sister Creek northwest of present-day Sisterdale in Kendall County. During the engagement the rangers, using new Colt revolvers, successfully defeated about eighty Comanches. 

    When Gen. Zachary Taylor requested volunteers to act as scouts and spies for his regular army, Walker enlisted as a private and was mustered into federal service in September 1845. In April 1846 he formed his own company for duty under Taylor. On April 28 Walker was ambushed with his company en route to join Taylor at Port Isabel. He reached Taylor's camp on April 29; his reports caused Taylor to move his encampment. Walker performed exemplary duty as a scout and courier on numerous other occasions. His company was the only Texas unit at the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. He was presented a horse by the grateful citizens of New Orleans in the spring of 1846 for his numerous exploits with Taylor's army. Walker served as captain of the inactive Company C of the United States Mounted Rifles until the outbreak of the Mexican War. 

    When the First Regiment, Texas Mounted Riflemen, was organized in June 1846, Walker was elected lieutenant colonel. He fought in the battle of Monterrey in September and on October 2, 1846, mustered out of federal service, activated his commission as captain of the mounted rifles, and proceeded to Washington, D.C., to begin recruiting for his company. During his recruitment excursion Walker visited Samuel Colt. Colt credited Walker with proposed improvements, including a stationary trigger and guard, to the existing revolver. The new six-shooter was named the Walker Colt. After arriving with his new company at Vera Cruz, Mexico, Walker was detailed on May 27, 1847, to the First Pennsylvania Volunteers, stationed at Castle San Carlos de Perote to counter Mexican guerrilla activities between Perote and Jalapa. On October 5, 1847, Walker left Perote with Gen. Joseph P. Lane to escort a supply train to Mexico City. En route, Lane was informed of a sizable enemy force at Huamantla and ordered an attack. With Walker's mounted rifles in the lead, the assault force reached Huamantla on October 9. During the spirited contest that followed, Walker was either shot in the back or killed by a man on foot carrying a lance. Following his death his unit took revenge on the community of Huamantla. Walker was buried at Hacienda Tamaris. In 1848 his remains were moved to San Antonio. On April 21, 1856, as part of a battle of San Jacinto celebration, he was reburied in the Odd Fellows' Cemetery in San Antonio. Source

Odd Fellows Cemetery
San Antonio

29° 25.277, -098° 28.182

Joseph Sovereign (1810-1877)

    Joseph Sovereign was born in Portugal in 1790. Nothing else is known of him until the age of 45. In December 1835, he arrived in Texas for the first time before moving to New Orleans, where he joined Captain John M. Allen's volunteer company in late February, 1836. A few days later, upon arrival in Texas, the company was reorganized and Sovereign was assigned to Captain William S. Fisher's Company with the rank of private. He officially enlisted in the Texian Army on March 16. It was with Fisher's company that he fought at the Battle of San Jacinto. Evidently he was an excellent soldier, because on August 1st he was already commanding a company in Colonel C. L. Harrison's regiment. Sovereign remained in the Army until June 16, 1838. Over the next two decades, Sovereign moved between New Orleans and Texas. In April 1860, a San Antonio newspaper reported that a man known as "Portuguese Joe" (Sovereign) was shot twice with a revolver in the house of a Mexican by someone called Printer. Shortly after this nearly fatal incident, Sovereign may have gone to New Orleans for better medical treatment for his wounds. He was living in Galveston when he applied for his pension on August 13, 1870. After his arrest in New Orleans for violating a city ordinance against illegal gambling. He moved back to Texas for the final time and settled in Houston. On May 23, 1873, Sovereign attended the first annual reunion of the Texas Veterans Association, held in Houston. He died on January 16, 1877 of what was referred to as "exhaustion due to a lack of food or water" on his death certificate.

Note: Unmarked. 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. Joseph Sovereign's is one of them.

Founders Memorial Park
Houston

N/A

Horton Foote (1916-2009)

    Horton Foote, Jr., distinguished Texas dramatist, was born Albert Horton Foote, Jr., on March 14, 1916, in Wharton, Texas. Horton Foote was the son of Albert Horton Foote and Harriet Gautier Brooks Foote and a descendent of the first lieutenant governor of Texas, Albert Horton. He grew up in Wharton with his two brothers Tom Brooks and John Speed. Foote finished high school at age sixteen, then lived a year in Dallas with his grandmother while working as an usher at the Majestic Theater and taking elocution lessons. Foote had dreams of being an actor, so he moved to California and enrolled in acting school at Pasadena Playhouse in 1933. After completing acting school, Foote lived in New York City as a struggling thespian while taking acting classes from Tamara Daykarhanova, Andrius Jilinsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, and Vera Soloviova. Jilinsky, Soloviova, and Daykarhanova had studied with Constantin Stanislavsky and taught his "system" called "method acting." Foote’s classmate Mary Hunter Wolf formed the American Actors Company to promote American talent in the theater and he joined in 1939. He began writing plays, the first of which was a one-act entitled Wharton Dance. His first three-act play was Texas Town. Only the Heart was Foote’s first play on Broadway at the Bijou Theatre in 1944. While working at Doubleday Book Store in Penn Station, he fell in love with Lillian Vallish and they married in 1945. After the American Actors Company disbanded in 1945, Foote became disappointed by the commercialism in post-World War II New York theater, so he and Lillian moved to Washington, D.C., and together they managed the acting school and theater productions at King-Smith School for the next four years.

    Foote returned to New York City in 1949 and was hired as a television writer for the children’s program The Quaker Oats Show, which debuted October 15, 1950. After fifty-four episodes, Foote focused on writing television plays. The Trip to Bountiful aired in 1953 on Goodyear Television Playhouse and was so well-received that it moved to Broadway and has been the most produced play of Horton Foote’s work. Twenty-four television plays written by Horton Foote aired between 1951 and 1964. In 1955 Foote moved to Nyack, New York, and began raising a family with Lillian. Although he was brought up in the Methodist Church, he and Lillian converted to Christian Science shortly after his mother and sister converted in Texas. That same year Foote’s first screenwriting credit was the Cornel Wilde film, Storm Fear. The Chase, Foote’s only novel, was published in 1956 and was based on an earlier play. In 1961 Alan Pakula asked Foote to write the screenplay for Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. The film was released a year later, and Foote won an Oscar for the screenplay. Baby the Rain Must Fall, starring Steve McQueen and Lee Remick, premiered in 1965 and was filmed entirely in Columbia and Wharton, Texas. In the mid-1960s, Foote moved to New Boston, New Hampshire. He continued to write for Hollywood. His screenplay Tomorrow, based on a short story by William Faulkner, premiered to critical acclaim in 1972 and starred Robert Duvall. Next, Foote wrote the book for the musical adaptation of Gone With the Wind, which was produced in Los Angeles, London, and Dallas from 1973 to 1976.

    After Foote’s parents passed away in the mid-1970s, he gathered all the family papers from Wharton and poured over them in his New Hampshire home. The various stories and conflicts of his family inspired him to write The Orphans’ Home Cycle, a collection of nine plays about three families in fictional Harrison, Texas. The plays in chronological order are Roots in a Parched Ground (1902); Convicts (1904); Lily Dale (1910); The Widow Claire (1912); Courtship (1915); Valentine’s Day (1917); 1918 (1918); Cousins (1925); and The Death of Papa (1928). HB Playhouse began producing the The Orphans’ Home Cycle plays in the late 1970s, and Foote moved back to New York City. HB Playhouse did not pay for plays, so Foote supported himself by writing for television again. Titles included Flannery O’Connor’s The Displaced Person; William Faulkner’s Barn Burning; and Keeping On. Foote continued to write and direct for the theater, but he also continued to make films. During the 1980s, Foote lived in his childhood Wharton home and filmed three of the The Orphans’ Home Cycle works (1918, Courtship, and Valentine’s Day), as well as The Trip to Bountiful, Tender Mercies, and The Habitation of Dragons in Texas. Convicts, the second work in The Orphans’ Home Cycle, was released as a film in 1990 and Foote’s screen adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was released in 1992. After his wife Lillian passed away in 1992, Foote lived with his daughter Hallie, and her husband in Pacific Palisades, California. Foote continued to write for theater, television, and film for almost two decades while receiving critical acclaim for his body of work. Most notable are the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Young Man From Atlanta (1995) and the Emmy-winning Old Man, based on a story by William Faulkner. In early 2009, Horton stayed in Hartford, Connecticut, with his daughter Hallie and her husband, Devon Abner, while he worked on completing the scripts for The Orphans’ Home Cycle for the Hartford Stage Company.

    Horton Foote passed away in his sleep on March 4, 2009 at the age of ninety-two. Unfortunately, he did not get to see his last two works completed. The Orphans’ Home Cycle was staged in its entirety at Hartford Stage Company in the 2009-10 season and moved to Signature Theater in New York in 2010. Foote’s screenplay for Main Street, a film starring Colin Firth and Orlando Bloom, was completed in 2010 and released in the fall of 2011. Frank Rich, the New York Times chief theater critic in the 1980s, described Foote as “a major American dramatist whose epic body of work recalls Chekhov in its quotidian comedy and heartbreak and Faulkner in its ability to make his own corner of America stand for the whole.” Foote’s theatrical honors include a Pulitzer Prize for The Young Man From Atlanta (1995); Lucille Lortel Awards for The Orphans Home Cycle (2010) and The Trip to Bountiful (2006); and an OBIE award for Dividing the Estate (2008). His screenwriting honors include Oscars for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Tender Mercies (1983); an Emmy for Old Man (1997); an Independent Spirit Award for The Trip to Bountiful (1986); and the Writers Guild of America awards for To Kill a Mockingbird (1963) and Tender Mercies (1984). Foote was also a member of the Theatre Hall of Fame, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 2000 by President Bill Clinton. Horton and Lillian Foote had four children: Barbara Hallie, Albert Horton Foote III, Walter, and Daisy. In 1992, DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University acquired Horton Foote’s extensive personal papers. The library held an exhibition on Foote’s career during the 2011 Horton Foote Festival in Dallas, Texas, which presented seventeen works by Horton Foote. Source 


Wharton City Cemetery
Wharton

29° 18.689, -096° 05.556

William Harris Wharton (1802-1839)

    William Harris Wharton, orator and leader in the Texas Revolution, son of William and Judith (Harris) Wharton, was born in 1802 in Virginia. His parents died when he was a child, and he and his brother, John A. Wharton, were reared by an uncle, Jesse Wharton, in Nashville, Tennessee. William H. Wharton was graduated with the first class from the University of Nashville and was admitted to the bar in 1826. He was in Texas by December 5, 1827, when he married Sarah Ann Groce, daughter of Jared Ellison Groce. They had one child, John Austin Wharton. William Wharton returned to Nashville until April 1829, when he returned to Texas and established Eagle Island Plantation on land given to the couple by Jared Groce as an inducement to stay in Texas. Wharton early identified himself with the party of the colonists agitating for a more energetic policy toward Mexico. Sources conflict, but many believe Wharton served at the battle of Velasco and was one of those who signed the document of final surrender. He was a delegate from Victoria to the Convention of 1832, which asked for separate statehood for Texas and drew up a provisional constitution for a state government. Wharton wrote the petition to Mexico asking for statehood, a document which has become a political classic in Texas.

    At the Convention of 1833, he held the office of president. By 1835 Wharton and others were openly agitating for complete independence from Mexico, in opposition to the conservative policy of Stephen F. Austin. Wharton was elected a delegate to the Consultation, where the majority of the members were still in favor of a moderate policy; so the group merely stated loyalty to the Republican Constitution of 1824 as the reason for the war. Austin was elected to command the army, and Wharton was chosen judge advocate. He went with the army in the siege of Bexar, then resigned his commission a few days before he was notified of his appointment as a commissioner to the United States with Austin and Branch T. Archer to secure aid for the Texans. United by common bonds of patriotism and common responsibilities, Wharton and Austin forgot their enmity of the preceding years and cooperated in the cause to which they were both devoted. Upon completing their mission, Wharton and Archer urged Austin to be a candidate for president of Texas, and they supported him in the campaign in which he was defeated by Sam Houston.

    In November of 1836 President Houston appointed Austin Secretary of State and Wharton first minister to the United States, hoping to secure recognition by and possibly annexation to the United States. The appointment necessitated Wharton's resignation from his seat as senator in the First Congress from the Brazoria District. Recognition was won on March 3, 1837, but annexation at that time was hopeless in spite of Wharton's persuasive pleas. After he resigned as minister in early 1837, Wharton was captured at sea by a Mexican ship and carried to Matamoros, where he was imprisoned. He succeeded in escaping and making his way back to Texas in time to be elected to the Texas Senate in 1838. Though he resigned before the beginning of the Adjourned Session in May 1838, he was reelected the same year. In December 1838 he introduced a bill to modify the flag and the seal of the republic. Wharton was killed on March 14, 1839, when he accidentally discharged a pistol as he was dismounting at the home of his brother-in-law, Leonard W. Groce, near Hempstead. He was buried in the family cemetery at Eagle Island Plantation near Brazoria. The addresses and political documents that Wharton wrote reveal that he had rare ability as a diplomat and statesman. Wharton County was named in his honor. Source

Wharton Lawn Crypt Garden
Restwood Memorial Park
Clute

29° 01.306, -095° 25.071