William Houston Jack (1806-1844)

    William Houston Jack, Texas revolutionary soldier and leader and Republic of Texas congressman, was born in Wilkes County, Georgia, on April 12, 1806, the son of Patrick and Harriet (Spencer) Jack. Upon graduation from the University of Georgia in 1827 he was admitted to the bar, and in 1828 he began the practice of law in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. On May 15, 1828, he married Laura Harrison, the sister of Confederate generals Thomas and James E. Harrison. The same year he was elected to the Alabama state legislature. Jack immigrated to Texas in 1830. He arrived in San Felipe de Austin on June 2 with his seventeen-year-old bride and their infant daughter and his two younger brothers, Spencer H. and Patrick Churchill Jack. In the spring of 1832 Jack became a leader in the resistance to Mexican authority precipitated by the arrest of his brother Patrick, Monroe Edwards, and William B. Travis in the Anahuac Disturbances. On July 18, 1832, Jack and others wrote the revolutionary Turtle Bayou Resolutions stating the colonists' grievances against Col. John Davis Bradburn and Anastasio Bustamante's administration. At a mass meeting held at Brazoria on July 18 the resolutions were presented to Col. José Antonio Mexía as justification for taking arms against the Mexican government. In 1834 Jack moved to Brazoria County, where, on June 28, 1835, he was elected a member of the local committee of safety and correspondence. On August 9, 1835, he prepared a resolution presented to the jurisdiction of Columbia calling for a general consultation of non-Hispanic colonists, but the resolution was defeated. 

    Jack participated in the capture of Goliad, after which, although he expressed considerable misgivings about the wisdom of attacking Gen. Martín Perfecto de Cos, Stephen F. Austin appointed Jack "Brigade Inspector" of the Texas army with the rank of major and ordered him to Bexar. With James Bowie, Jack commanded the Texas troops at the Grass Fight on November 26, 1835. In this engagement, Jack wrote to Gen. Edward Burleson, "the first division flanked to the right and the second to the left and in a few moments the ditch and field were cleared of every Mexican except their dead & wounded." When Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna marched into Texas, Jack sent his family to the Neches River for safety while he joined Sam Houston's army. At the battle of San Jacinto, Jack was a private in Capt. William Hester Patton's Fourth Company-the so-called Columbia Company-of Col. Sidney Sherman's Second Regiment, Texas Volunteers. He was discharged on May 30, 1836. 

    On April 2 Jack was appointed secretary of state in the administration of David G. Burnet. As a cabinet member he objected strongly to the release of Santa Anna, not wishing to see him "turned loose upon the world to seek for other opportunities to glut his cannibal thirst." His health being, he wrote to Burnet, "extremely bad," Jack tendered his resignation on August 9, 1836, but remained in the cabinet until October 22, 1836, when he was elected judge of the Brazoria district court. According to Henry Millard, Stephen F. Austin was going to appoint Jack chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court if Austin had been elected president of the republic in 1836. Jack served as compiler of the laws during the administration of Mirabeau B. Lamar but resigned at the end of 1838. He was elected to the House of Representatives of the Fourth Congress of the Republic of Texas from Brazoria County and served on the State of the Republic and the Judiciary committees, 1839-40. By 1840 he owned 2,574 acres in Brazoria County, plus seventeen town lots in Velasco and two more in Brazoria, thirty-one slaves, six horses, seventy-five cattle, two gold watches, and a silver watch. At the resignation of Timothy Pilsbury, Jack was elected to the Senate of the second term of the Sixth Congress; he was reelected to the Seventh and Eighth congresses and served until 1844. 

    In response to Rafael Vásquez's raid of 1842, Jack volunteered for service in Capt. John Porter Gill's company of Col. Clark L. Owen's regiment and served from March 20 until June 20, 1842. He drafted a series of resolutions favoring war with Mexico that were adopted at a public meeting in Galveston on April 24, 1842, but in July he voted against Sam Houston's war bill in the Senate because he thought the use of militia for offensive purposes to be unconstitutional. Politically, he was a member of the party of Mirabeau Lamar and was generally opposed to the policies of Sam Houston.

    Jack died of yellow fever on August 20, 1844, at the Brazoria County plantation of Hiram George Runnels. His brother Patrick had died of the same illness only sixteen days earlier, on August 4, in Houston. William H. Jack was buried on his Brazoria County plantation. Later, however, his remains were removed to Galveston and reinterred in Lakeview Cemetery. He was the father of Thomas McKinney Jack and the father-in-law of William Pitt Ballinger and Guy Morrison Bryan. Jack County was named in honor of William Houston and Patrick C. Jack. Laura Jack died at Galveston on February 24, 1877. Source

Republic Hill
Texas State Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 15.915, -097° 43.620

Chloe Jones (1975-2005)

    Melinda Dee Jones was born June 17, 1975, and grew up in Silsbee, Texas. After graduating from Silsbee High School in 1994, she turned to modeling and appeared in various mainstream periodicals like Vanity Fair before moving on to softcore adult magazines like Playboy, Hustler, and Swank. In April 1998, Penthouse named her their Pet of the Month and crossed over into adult movies in 2001, adopting the pseudonym Chloe Jones. After some plastic surgery to emphasize her figure, she was signed to an exclusive short-term contract with the adult film company New Sensations. Two years later, she signed another exclusive contract, this time with porn giant Vivid Entertainment. 

    She was wildly popular with her audience, on par with Jenna Jameson and Janine Lindemulder, the two biggest female stars at the time. Despite her enormous fan base, she only performed in eighteen films in her three year career, retiring immediately after her final film wrapped production. She began working as an escort in Hollywood and claimed in a March 2005 National Enquirer interview that actor Charlie Sheen was among her clients and had paid her $15,000 for her services. Sheen, through his agent, disputed this, stating that he had not seen her since 1996; she responded by claiming he was trying to have her killed to keep his television contract intact. A month after the interview, two weeks before her 30th birthday, Jones died of liver failure from years of abusing Vicodin and other prescription drugs, leaving behind a husband and two children.

Block 10

Woodlawn Garden of Memories

Houston

COORDINATES

29° 47.447, -095° 28.591

Hersal Thomas (1910-1926)

    Hersal Thomas, child prodigy pianist, was born in Houston in 1910. Hersal was one of thirteen children of George and Fanny Thomas. George, Sr., was a deacon at Shiloh Baptist Church, where his children often sang in the choir and played the piano and organ. The Thomas family was exceptionally talented musically. Hersal's older brother George Washington Thomas Jr. was a publisher and composer whose tunes included "New Orleans Hop Scop Blues" and "Muscle Shoals Blues." In addition to composing, George was an accomplished pianist who taught Hersal to play. Although George was twenty-five years older than his youngest brother, Hersal's skills were so exceptional that he quickly surpassed his brother in musical accomplishment. The most famous member of the Thomas family, however, was Hersal's older sister, the sensational blues singer Beulah "Sippie" Wallace.

    Hersal's life was intertwined with Sippie's. When he was a small child, he performed with her on Houston street corners for tips. In 1915 Hersal and Sippie moved to New Orleans to live with their brother George. They performed in New Orleans clubs and worked theaters throughout the South. In 1923 the two moved to Chicago to work with their brother George and their niece, blues singer Hociel Thomas. Although Hersal was still a teenager, his musical talents quickly became much in demand around the city. His performances of “The Fives,” the groundbreaking boogie-woogie song that Hersal and his brother George had published in 1922, inspired such Chicago pianists as Jimmy Yancey, Meade “Lux” Lewis, and Albert Ammons. In addition to playing in local venues, he toured with Louis Armstrong, Joe "King" Oliver, and Sippie. Hersal also backed his niece, Hociel, on most of her recordings. In 1925, at the age of fifteen, he recorded "Hersal Blues" and the piano classic "Suitcase Blues." At the age of sixteen, while performing at Penny's Pleasure Inn in Detroit, he contracted food poisoning and died on July 3, 1926. His body was returned to Houston and buried in the Evergreen Cemetery there, but the exact burial location is lost. Source


Evergreen Negro Cemetery
Houston

COORDINATES

N/A

Edward Miles (1816-1889)

    Edward Miles, Texas army soldier and clerk, son of Edward Miles, was born in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1816. The family moved to Texas in 1829 and settled at Old River, at the head of Galveston Bay. Miles took part in the Anahuac Disturbances in 1832. After his father's death in 1833 he went back to Natchez for a time, but at the outbreak of the Texas Revolution he returned to Texas; he served in the battle of San Jacinto under Capt. William Wood. He continued in the army and on September 10, 1836, was transferred to the company of Capt. Thomas Pratt.

    Miles enlisted in the United States Army in 1846 and was in charge of ammunition at the battle of Palo Alto during the Mexican War. He was in the Confederate service in some capacity during the entire Civil War, first as clerk to the secession commissioners at San Antonio, then as clerk in the ordnance department, as chief clerk in the quartermaster's department in Arkansas, and as agent's clerk for receiving and shipping cotton on the Rio Grande. On October 31, 1850, Miles married Mary Ann Soye, a ward of John McMullen; they had one daughter. Miles held various official positions in San Antonio and Bexar County and was a member of the Texas Veterans Association. He died in San Antonio on April 1, 1889. Source

St Mary's Cemetery
San Antonio

COORDINATES

29° 24.988, -098° 27.899

Kenneth Lewis Anderson (1805-1845)

    Kenneth Lewis Anderson, lawyer and vice president of the republic, son of Kennith and Nancy (Thompson) Anderson, was born on September 11, 1805, in Hillsborough, North Carolina. His early education consisted of self-learning, but he reportedly also attended William Bingham's school. He worked as a shoemaker at an early age. By 1824 he was living in Bedford County, Tennessee, where he became deputy sheriff in 1826 and sheriff in 1830. From 1830 to 1837, Anderson worked as a local activist and regular correspondent with James K. Polk. Anderson was a disappointed applicant to become a U.S. Marshall in 1830 and 1834, but he was elected a colonel in the militia by 1833. About 1825 Anderson married Patience Burditt; the couple had three children. Two sons, Theophiles and Malcolm became prosecutors in San Antonio, while a grandson, William, became a state district judge in San Antonio.

    In 1837 the family moved to San Augustine, Texas, where Mrs. Anderson's brother-in-law Joseph Rowe had lived for five years. In 1838 Anderson served successively as deputy sheriff and sheriff. It was probably after he arrived in Texas that he studied to become a lawyer. President Mirabeau B. Lamar appointed him collector of customs for the district of San Augustine, and he was confirmed on November 21, 1839. He served until he became a candidate from San Augustine County for the House of Representatives of the Sixth Congress in 1841; he won with the largest majority in the county's history at that time. As a partisan of Sam Houston, Anderson was elected speaker of the House on November 1, 1841. He immediately led an unsuccessful attempt to impeach Lamar and Vice President David G. Burnet. Anderson declined a nomination for secretary of the treasury to spend more time with his family in San Augustine, and the post went to William Henry Daingerfield. In 1842 he helped convince Houston to veto the popular but dangerous war bill, which sought to force an invasion of Mexico.

    After one term, and despite President Houston's pleas, Anderson retired in 1842 to practice law in San Augustine with Royal T. Wheeler; he eventually formed a partnership with J. Pinckney Henderson and Thomas J. Rusk. In December 1842 Anderson became district attorney of the Fifth Judicial District. In 1844 Anderson was frequently mentioned as a candidate for president, but eventually he became the Houston party candidate for vice president, on a ticket headed by Anson Jones. Anderson's opponent, Patrick Jack, died before the election, and Anderson won nearly unanimously. He presided over the Senate at Washington-on-the-Brazos in June 1845, when the Texas Congress approved annexation. After adjournment he immediately left for home despite being sick. After only twenty miles, he was forced to stop at the Fanthorp Inn, where his bilious fever flared. He died of malaria on July 3, 1845, and was buried in the Fanthorp cemetery. The vice president had been considered the leading candidate to become the first governor of the state. His law partner, Pinckney Henderson, was instead elected governor in December. Anderson was a Mason. Fanthorp was renamed for him in 1846, and on March 24, 1846, Anderson County was established and named in his honor. Source

Fanthorp Cemetery
Anderson

COORDINATES

30° 28.948, -095° 59.130