Dallas Stoudenmire (1845-1882)

    Dallas Stoudenmire was born December 11, 1845 in Aberfoil, Bullock County, Alabama. Details are often sketchy, but at the tender age of 15 the nearly six foot tall Stoudenmire enlisted in the Confederate Army. When his commanding officer learned of his age he was discharged. Apparently young Dallas didn't agree with the age limitation and he reenlisted twice more. According to the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors system there was a Private D. Stoudenmire, Co. F of the 17th Alabama Infantry and a Private D. Stowdemire, Co. C, 6th Alabama Cavalry. Stoudenmire was eventually allowed to serve in Company F, 45th Alabama Infantry Regiment and according to Civil War records was wounded several times. Following the war, Stoudenmire found himself heading west and would eventually become a member of the Texas Rangers. Stoudenmire served as a Texas Ranger in Colorado County, Texas, charged with protecting settlers from renegade Indians. Finally, after being a Ranger for three years, he would disappear for several years and finally resurface in Socorro, New Mexico as the town marshal. Stoudenmire's brother-in-law, Stanley "Doc" Cummings, persuaded him to travel to the town of El Paso, Texas to fill a vacant marshal position. El Paso was in the middle of a lawless stretch and the city council was looking for someone outside of the city with a reputation as a tough gunfighter. Dallas Stoudenmire was, perhaps, more than they counted on.

    On April 11, 1881, Stoudenmire was appointed Marshall of El Paso and tasked with the job of cleaning up the city. The Deputy Marshal was one Bill Johnson, also known as the town drunkard. Apparently, the first day on the job Marshal Stoudenmire humiliated Johnson and set the tone for the remainder of his tenure in office. Only three days into his new job, Stoudenmire was involved in one of the most famous gunfights in western history, the Four Dead in Five Seconds Gunfight. Historic details regarding the story behind the shooting are varied, but the eyewitness accounts were fairly consistent. Having heard gunfire, Marshal Stoudenmire enters the street to find George Campbell and his buddy John Hale standing over the body of (1) Constable Gus Krempkau. Apparently Campbell and Hale had been drinking heavily. Stoudenmire's first shot at Hales misses the mark and kills (2) a bystander, his second kills (3) Hale and his third shot dispatched (4) Campbell. Having seen their new Marshal in action the city Board of Aldermen upped his salary to $100 a month. Peace in El Paso would be short lived, however. Deputy Johnson, still holding a grudge from being humiliated, attacked Stoudenmire while he was walking with "Doc" Cummings. Apparently Johnson tried to ambush the Marshal but in his drunken state fired both barrels of his shotgun into the sky. Stoudenmire fired eight or nine times from his pistols to dispatch Johnson (some accounts say his shooting removed Johnson's testicles).

    It seemed that the more people Stoudenmire killed in an effort to clean up El Paso, the more people wanted him dead. Accounts of Stoudenmire's term in office were not without bad press. He would occasionally use the bell of St. Clement's Church for target practice while out on patrol and was accused of using city funds without authorization. Stoudenmire also had a drinking problem. When he caught wind the City Aldermen were meeting to discuss discharging him from his position he walked into the meeting and shouted, "I can straddle every damned alderman here." Upon sobering up the Marshal resigned on his own on May 29, 1882. The city council would eventually become afraid of him. Stoudenmire would finally lose a gunfight on September 18, 1882. Having signed a "peace treaty" with the Manning family, Stoudenmire would begin to argue with Doc Manning and both would pull their pistols. Stoudenmire's body was shipped back to Columbus, Texas for burial. The Masonic lodge No. 130 would pay for all expenses to include $4.50 for lumber and $11.55 for his burial suit. Source

Alleyton Cemetery
Alleyton

COORDINATES

29° 42.498, -096° 28.920

Charles August Albert Dellschau (1830-1923)

    C. A. A. Dellschau, inventor, scientist, and artist, was born on June 4, 1830, in Germany. Dellschau arrived in the United States in the 1850s and lived in Sonora and Columbia, California, among German scientists. He joined the Sonora Aero Club, a secret society of sixty-two members committed to designing and assembling aircraft, and served as their primary draftsman. In 1886 Dellschau moved to Houston, Texas. Although no clear evidence points to how Dellschau spent his years in between his time in California and Houston, there is some speculation that he may have served as a Civil War spy. Regardless, once in Houston, Dellschau worked for the Stelzig Saddlery Shop as a salesman until 1900, when he retired. Upon retirement Dellschau spent his time drawing imaginary airships, focusing on his interests in new inventions and aviation. Some of these drawings were his original inventions, while others were drawn from designs of his former colleagues. Dellschau collected extensive scrapbooks of his drawings. On April 20, 1923, he died, without recognition of his artistic contributions. Not until the 1960s were his scrapbooks discovered by art students in a Houston antique shop. The University of St. Thomas exhibited selections from Dellschau's work in a 1969 art show. The works rose in public prominence in 1977, when they were featured in a Rice University exhibition, and in 1979, when four of his scrapbooks were purchased by the San Antonio Museum Association. Source

Note: His last name is misspelled on his stone.

Section A
Washington Cemetery
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 45.945, -095° 23.327

David Bennes Barkley (1899?-1918)

    David Bennes Barkley, Medal of Honor recipient, was born, probably in 1899, to Josef and Antonia (Cantú) Barkley in Laredo, Texas. When the United States entered World War I, Barkley enlisted as a private in the Army. Family records indicate he did not want to be known as of Mexican descent, for fear he would not see action at the front. He was assigned to Company A, 356th Infantry, Eighty-ninth Division. In France he was given the mission of swimming the Meuse River near Pouilly, in order to infiltrate German lines and gather information about the strength and deployment of German formations. Despite enemy resistance to any allied crossing of the Meuse, Barkley and another volunteer accomplished the mission. While returning with the information, Barkley developed cramps and drowned, on November 9, 1918, just two days before the armistice went into effect. His sacrifice earned praise from Gen. John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force. 

    Barkley was one of three Texans awarded the nation's highest military honor, the Congressional Medal of Honor, for service in World War I. He was also awarded the Croix de Guerre (France) and the Croce Merito (Italy). In 1921 an elementary school in San Antonio was named for him. He lay in state at the Alamo, the second person to be so honored. He was buried at San Antonio National Cemetery. On January 10, 1941, the War Department named Camp Barkley for the Texas hero. Source

CITATION

When information was desired as to the enemy's position on the opposite side of the Meuse River, Pvt. Barkley, with another soldier, volunteered without hesitation and swam the river to reconnoiter the exact location. He succeeded in reaching the opposite bank, despite the evident determination of the enemy to prevent a crossing. Having obtained his information, he again entered the water for his return, but before his goal was reached, he was seized with cramps and drowned.

Section G
San Antonio National Cemetery
San Antonio

COORDINATES

29° 25.303, -098° 28.037

William B. Bridges (?-1871)

    William B. Bridges (Bridgers), early Texas farmer and public official and one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred, immigrated from Arkansas to Texas as early as April 1824 and received a sitio of land now in Jackson County on July 21 of that year. In April 1831 Mexican officials filed a character certificate and a land application under his name, listing him as a single farmer from Arkansas who was twenty-three years of age. In 1838 Bridges received a headright certificate for a labor of land in Gonzales County. W. B. Bridges was listed in the July 17, 1841, issue of the Austin Texas Sentinel as being delinquent in paying his 1840 taxes in Gonzales County. Bridges may have served as justice of the peace in Fayette County in 1843. On September 17, 1871, the Columbus Citizen reported the burial of a William Bridge, who had come to Texas "around 1825." Source

Note: The exact location of  Bridges' grave is unknown, but most historians believe that he was buried in the Lyons Family Cemetery, which is shown within the borders below in its entirety. It is now completely surrounded by Schulenburg's City Cemetery.

Schulenburg City Cemetery
Schulenburg

COORDINATES

29° 41.121, -096° 55.164

Jack St. Clair Kilby (1923-2005)

    Jack St. Clair Kilby, Nobel Prize-winning engineer and inventor of the first integrated circuit (or microchip), was born on November 8, 1923, in Jefferson City, Missouri. He was the eldest child of Hubert St. Clair Kilby and Melvina (Freitag) Kilby. His father soon became president of the Kansas Power Company, prompting the family to move, first to Salina, Kansas, and then to Great Bend, Kansas, the latter of which Jack Kilby regarded as his hometown. During a blizzard in 1937, Jack Kilby saw his father use a ham radio to assess the extent of power outages and damage caused by the storm. This event stimulated his interest in radios and electronics. About the time Kilby entered Great Bend High School, he earned his amateur radio license. In high school he competed in football and basketball. He also developed a lifelong interest in photography. He built a darkroom at home and snapped photos for his high school and later college yearbooks.

    After graduating from high school in 1941, Kilby applied to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) but barely failed the entrance exam. He then enrolled in the University of Illinois, from which both of his parents had graduated. In June 1943, after completing his sophomore year, he joined the U. S. Army Signal Corps. During his training, he was recruited and assigned to Detachment 101 of the Office of Strategic Services, which was deployed to East Asia to carry out guerilla operations that they coordinated by using portable radios. Upon his discharge in December 1945, his rank was T-4 Radio Operator, the equivalent of an army sergeant. He returned to the University of Illinois and earned his bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering in August 1947. In his last two years at the university, he began dating Barbara Louis Annegers. The two married on June 27, 1948, in Galesburg, Illinois. After his graduation, Kilby was hired by Centralab, a division of Globe-Union, Inc., in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He earned a master of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin in 1950 while working at Centralab. He was awarded his first patent on May 5, 1953.

    In the 1950s the greatest challenge facing electronic engineers was called the interconnections problem (or “the tyranny of numbers”). Theoretically possible, complex circuits could not be built due to problems of size, weight, and cost raised by the enormous number of interconnections such circuits would require. In 1958 Kilby was hired by Willis Adcock to work on miniaturization for Texas Instruments (TI) in Dallas. However, Kilby disliked the army-backed Micro-Module approach to microminiaturization on which TI was working, as it did not address the fundamental limits posed by the interconnections problem. During the company’s summer break in July 1958, Kilby, who had joined TI in May and had not earned any vacation time, was left to work in the lab alone. During this time, he struck upon a revolutionary solution, known as the “monolithic idea,” to the interconnections problem. Rather than creating individual circuit components from various materials and then wiring them together onto a non-conductive base, the components and the base could all be made out of a single piece of semiconductor material, an integrated circuit. Kilby showed his notes to Adcock when the latter returned from vacation. Although Adcock was initially skeptical, he agreed to allow Kilby to build a prototype. It was successfully tested on September 12, 1958. The components of Kilby’s rushed prototype were crudely wired together by hand. Kilby then proposed printing conductive tracks on a thin material bonded to the semiconductor chip, connecting the circuit components without the need for hand-wiring. These two innovations working in tandem would solve the “tyranny of numbers.” However, another inventor independently arrived at the same conclusions and beat Kilby to the patent.

    In 1958 the electronics firm Fairchild developed the planar process, in which a non-conductive coating was bonded to a silicon chip to prevent contamination during production of silicon transistors. Fairchild engineer Robert “Bob” Noyce first came to Kilby’s conclusion about placing conductive tracks on this coating and then to the realization that the rest of the circuit components could all be built out of the same material. Noyce independently developed the monolithic idea in January 1959, only six months after Kilby. In this time, little had been done to further develop Kilby’s integrated circuit at TI. When TI learned of a rumor that another firm had developed an integrated circuit (a rumor which was false and unrelated to the developments at Fairchild), the company rushed to secure a patent, filed on February 6, 1959. Not having yet designed a production model integrated circuit, the diagram of Kilby’s crude prototype was the only design that TI had to submit to the United States Patent Office. Known as the “flying wire” drawing, due to its impractical, arching wiring, Kilby’s preliminary design was far less accurate to what integrated circuits would look like than the design included in Fairchild’s patent request, filed in July. On April 26, 1961, the patent for the integrated circuit was awarded to Noyce. The decision was contested. After two reversals upon appeals, the U. S. Supreme Court, in 1970, declined to hear Kilby v. Noyce, thereby settling the case in favor of Noyce and Fairchild. By then, however, TI and Fairchild had already agreed to share the licensing rights to the integrated circuit. The agreement resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties to TI, Fairchild, and Fairchild’s successor companies in the years that followed. Kilby and Noyce also shared credit as “co-inventors.” They were both awarded the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology for their invention. Following Noyce’s death in 1990, Kilby was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology in 1993 and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for the integrated circuit. He credited Noyce for his contributions upon the reception of both awards.

    Kilby was promoted to several management positions at TI and was eventually named assistant vice president in 1968. In the 1960s he developed the pocket calculator, the first consumer product built using integrated circuits. Dissatisfied with the restrictions that working for a large corporation placed on him as an inventor, Kilby left TI in November 1970 to work as a freelance inventor, although he continued to act as a part-time consultant at TI. In the mid-1970s Kilby partnered with TI to develop solar energy technology, but the project was cancelled in 1983. He was a Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M’s Institute of Solid-State Electronics from 1978 to 1984. In 1967 he joined the Dallas Camera Club, continuing his life-long passion for photography. Kilby’s wife died of cancer in November 1981. The couple raised two daughters, Ann and Janet.

    Kilby was known for his modesty. In interviews, he often downplayed his own contributions and emphasized the work of others. He was also famously laconic. For his speech at the 1982 ceremony inducting him into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, Kilby said only “Thank you.” Among Kilby’s many other awards and honors are the Franklin Institute’s Stuart Ballantine Medal, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Holley Medal, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers’ Medal of Honor. He held six honorary doctorates. The Kilby International Award Foundation, which is based in Dallas and grants awards for scientific advancements, was named after Kilby. In 1997 TI opened a research facility named for him: the Kilby Center. Jack St. Clair Kilby died of cancer at his Dallas home on June 20, 2005. He was eighty-one. At the time of his death he held more than sixty patents. He was buried at Sparkman Hillcrest Memorial Park in Dallas. Source

Hillcrest Mausoleum
Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park Cemetery
Dallas

COORDINATES

32° 52.100, -096° 46.832

Benjamin Cromwell Franklin (1805-1873)

    Benjamin C. Franklin, judge and legislator, the eldest son of Abednego and Mary Graves Franklin, was born in Georgia on April 25, 1805. He was educated at Franklin College in Athens, Georgia, and admitted to the bar in 1827. In 1835, he traveled to Velasco, Texas, and at a public meeting at Columbia he was among those who favored immediate declaration of war against Mexico. On April 7, 1836, he was commissioned a captain in the Texas army by President David G. Burnet, but since he was not assigned to the command of a company at San Jacinto, he fought there as a private in Capt. Robert J. Calder's company. On April 23, 1836, Secretary of War Thomas J. Rusk directed Franklin to proceed to Galveston Island and inform President Burnet and his cabinet of the victory at San Jacinto. Franklin later received a bounty warrant for 320 acres for his service and was among the first to purchase land at the future site of Houston. He was the first man to hold a judicial position in the Republic of Texas. The Pocket, a brig owned by a United States citizen, was captured in March 1836 by the Invincible, a Texas armed schooner. Realizing that the affair might alienate the United States, the government of Texas took immediate steps to have the matter thoroughly investigated. The judiciary not having been organized, the government established the judicial district of Brazoria in which to try the case, and Burnet appointed Franklin district judge. The exact date of his appointment has not been ascertained, but it was before June 15, 1836. The position had been tendered to James Collinsworth on April 12, but he declined. 

    On December 20, 1836, Franklin was appointed judge of the Second or Brazoria Judicial District by President Sam Houston. The appointment automatically made Franklin a member of the Supreme Court of the republic, of which James Collinsworth was chief justice. Franklin held his first court at Brazoria on March 27, 1837. He resigned from his judgeship on November 29, 1839, and moved to Galveston to practice law. He was elected to represent Galveston County in the House of Representatives of the Third, Fifth, and Eighth state legislatures. At the outbreak of the Civil War he was too old for military service and was suffering from rheumatism. He retired to a small farm near Livingston, Polk County, and remained until 1870, when he returned to Galveston. Governor E. J. Davis appointed him commissioner to revise the laws of Texas, but he declined the appointment. Franklin's first wife was Eliza Carter Brantly, whom he married on October 31, 1837; they had two children. After her death on September 24, 1844, Judge Franklin married Estelle B. Maxwell of Illinois, on November 3, 1847. He died unexpectedly on December 25, 1873, after several weeks of illness and was buried in Galveston. The act establishing Franklin County does not state for whom the county was named, but it is generally accepted as having been named for Judge Benjamin C. Franklin. Source

New City Cemetery
Galveston

COORDINATES

29° 17.550, -094° 48.819