Robert Francis Catterson (1835-1914)

    Catterson was born in 1835 on a farm near Beech Grove in Marion County, Indiana. He was the son of an Irish immigrant, but his father died in 1840 when Robert was only five years old. Catterson's education began at Adrian College in Michigan, and then he attended Cincinnati Medical College in Ohio, precursor to the University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center. After completing his medical studies, Catterson established a medical practice in Rockville, Indiana, just prior to the start of the American Civil War. When the American Civil War began in 1861, Catterson chose to follow the Union cause. He gave up his medical practice and volunteered to serve in the Union Army, enlisting in the 14th Indiana Infantry Regiment. On April 23 Catterson was mustered in as a private into Company A of the 14th, and on June 7 was promoted to first sergeant. Catterson was then elected as an officer, and he was commissioned a second lieutenant on July 5. The following year he was promoted to first lieutenant on March 15, 1862. In 1862 Catterson saw his first battle during the Valley Campaign, participating in the First Battle of Kernstown on March 23, and was promoted to captain on May 4.

    Catterson next fought during the Maryland Campaign and the Battle of Antietam on September 17, where he was wounded. Upon recovering, Catterson was appointed lieutenant colonel in the 97th Regiment Indiana Infantry on October 18, and its commander as colonel on November 25. Catterson and the 97th Indiana served the Battle of Memphis in Tennessee on June 6, 1862, and the subsequent occupation of the city, until late in 1862. He then took part in the Siege of Vicksburg in the spring of 1863 and the Tullahoma Campaign that summer. Catterson and his command participated in the Third Battle of Chattanooga on November 23-25, and the Atlanta Campaign throughout the summer of 1864. During Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman's March to the Sea in the winter of 1864, Catterson was part of the Army of the Tennessee, heading a brigade in its XV Corps beginning on November 22, 1864. He fought in the Carolinas Campaign of 1865, participating in the Battle of Bentonville in North Carolina on March 19-21, the fight considered the last major engagement of the American Civil War. Also during the Carolinas Campaign, Catterson served very briefly as chief of staff to Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, the commander of the XV Corps. He then returned to his brigade, leading it for the rest of the campaign and to the end of the war. Catterson was brevetted to brigadier general in the Union Army on May 31, 1865, and was mustered out of the volunteer service on January 15, 1866.

    After the war, Catterson chose not to return to practicing medicine; he moved to Arkansas, where he tried and failed at cotton speculation. He then became commander of the Arkansas Negro militia under Governor Powell Clayton, engaged in fighting against the Ku Klux Klan members operating there, and also as a United States Marshal. During Clayton's successful political run for the U.S. Senate, Catterson was removed as marshal when he lost the favor of Clayton, and replaced by Isaac Mills. He would later command the Brooks forces, during the Brooks-Baxter War. Catterson was the mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas, from 1872 to 1874. After serving as mayor, he moved to Minnesota, where he was unsuccessful as both a farmer and a farm implement merchant. He died at the age of 79 at the Veterans' Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, after suffering from a stroke and buried in the San Antonio National Cemetery.

Section A
San Antonio National Cemetery
San Antonio

COORDINATES

29° 25.290, -098° 27.997

James E. Robinson (1918-1945)

    James Robinson, Medal of Honor recipient, was born in Toledo, Ohio, on July 10, 1918. He entered military service at Waco, Texas, and at the time of his death was assigned to the 861st Field Artillery Battalion, Sixty-third Infantry Division, United States Army. On April 6, 1945, Robinson was a field-artillery observer attached to Company A, 253rd Infantry, near Untergriesheim, Germany. After eight hours of fighting over open terrain, the company had lost its commanding officer and nearly all of its key enlisted men. With only twenty-three unwounded riflemen and carrying his heavy radio equipment, Lieutenant Robinson led his men through intense fire in a charge against the objective. He killed ten of the enemy with point-blank pistol and rifle fire and with his men swept the area of all resistance. Soon afterward he was ordered to seize the town of Kressbach. After encouraging each of his remaining nineteen men, he again led them forward. In the advance he was mortally wounded in the throat, but refused medical attention and continued to direct artillery fire. After the town was taken he walked nearly two miles to an aid station, where he died. By his intrepid leadership Robinson was directly responsible for the successful mission of Company A, against tremendous odds. He is buried at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery at San Antonio. Source

CITATION

He was a field artillery forward observer attached to Company A, 253d Infantry, near Untergriesheim, Germany, on 6 April 1945. Eight hours of desperate fighting over open terrain swept by German machine gun, mortar, and small-arms fire had decimated Company A, robbing it of its commanding officer and most of its key enlisted personnel when 1st Lt. Robinson rallied the 23 remaining uninjured riflemen and a few walking wounded, and, while carrying his heavy radio for communication with American batteries, led them through intense fire in a charge against the objective. Ten German infantrymen in foxholes threatened to stop the assault, but the gallant leader killed them all at point-blank range with rifle and pistol fire and then pressed on with his men to sweep the area of all resistance. Soon afterward he was ordered to seize the defended town of Kressbach. He went to each of the 19 exhausted survivors with cheering words, instilling in them courage and fortitude, before leading the little band forward once more. In the advance he was seriously wounded in the throat by a shell fragment, but, despite great pain and loss of blood, he refused medical attention and continued the attack, directing supporting artillery fire even though he was mortally wounded. Only after the town had been taken and he could no longer speak did he leave the command he had inspired in victory and walk nearly 2 miles to an aid station where he died from his wound. By his intrepid leadership 1st Lt. Robinson was directly responsible for Company A's accomplishing its mission against tremendous odds.

Section T
Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery
San Antonio

COORDINATES

29° 28.661, -098° 25.819

Rienzi Melville Johnston (1849-1926)

    Rienzi Melville Johnston, newspaper editor, son of Freeman W. and Mary J. (Russell) Johnston, was born at Sandersville, Georgia, on September 9, 1849 (some sources say 1850). Early in his life he began work in a print shop, and at the age of twelve he became a drummer in the Confederate Army (1862-63). After discharge he reenlisted in 1864 and served until the end of the war, when he returned to newspaper work. In the early 1870s he was city editor of the Savannah Morning News. He traveled to Texas in 1878 to edit the Crockett Patron. After a year he edited the Corsicana Observer and established the Independent there. In 1880 he moved to Austin, where he was associated with the Austin Statesman. The Houston Post secured his service as correspondent to cover the state capital. Johnston was chosen editor-in-chief of the reorganized Houston paper in 1885, and later he became president of the Houston Printing Company. As an editorial writer he was quoted by the press throughout many states. For two years he was first vice president of the Associated Press. 

    Johnston was one of the leaders of the Democratic party in the South. He declined the nomination for lieutenant governor of Texas in 1898. From 1900 to 1912 he was a member of the Democratic National Committee. Early in 1913 Governor Oscar B. Colquitt appointed him United States senator to fill the unexpired term of Joseph W. Bailey. Johnston served from January 4 to February 2, 1913, when he returned to Houston and resumed his duties as active head of the Post. He retired in 1919 and served as state senator from the Houston district; he resigned when he was appointed chairman of the state prison commission by Governor William P. Hobby on January 12, 1920. Johnston married Mary E. Parsons in 1875, and they had three children. He died on February 28, 1926, and was buried in Glenwood Cemetery, Houston. Source

Section H2
Glenwood Cemetery
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 45.835, -095° 23.198

Helen Lucy Corbitt (1906–1978)

    Helen Lucy Corbitt, American chef, cookbook author, and the doyenne of food service at Neiman Marcus in Dallas, was born in Benson Mines, New York, to Henry James Corbitt and Eva (Marshall) Corbitt on January 25, 1906. Stanley Marcus called her the Balenciaga of food. Dallas author Prudence Mackintosh named her the tastemaker of the century and credited her with delivering Texans from such foods as canned fruit cocktail and overcooked, limp vegetables. Corbitt’s fame as a food legend rests primarily on her fourteen years at Neiman Marcus, but that is misleading. She had an established career in food service long before she went to Neiman’s. Helen and her younger brother, Michael, grew up in the comfortable home of a prominent lawyer and a dressmaker who had her own business. Food was a central part of family life, and they always employed good cooks, but Helen’s mother baked their bread. Helen apparently learned to cook some basic dishes as a child. She graduated from Skidmore College with a B.S. in home economics in 1928.

    One of Corbitt’s first jobs was as a dietitian at Presbyterian Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, between about 1930 and 1934, followed by a similar position at the Cornell Medical Center in New York City. But she was bored in New York. A job hunt during the Great Depression was unsuccessful until 1940 when she received an offer in Texas. Her first reaction was, “Who the hell wants to go to Texas?” She went because it was the only opportunity offered. Corbitt joined the staff of the University of Texas at Austin where she ran the University Tea Room and taught quantity cooking and restaurant management. Located in a small cottage, the tearoom was the laboratory or practice restaurant for her classes. There, she likely began experimenting with dishes she became known for, such as chicken bouillon and popovers. Asked to do a convention dinner using only Texas products, she reacted with an unprintable phrase and then came up with one of her signature dishes: Texas caviar - black-eyed peas served in a sauce of oil, vinegar, garlic, and onion.

    In 1942, discontent with Texas and homesick, she accepted an offer from the Houston Country Club but intended to work there only long enough to get the money to return east. After six months, she finally unpacked her suitcases. She enjoyed cooking fine food for the club’s appreciative members, but it was wartime, and the Houston Country Club fell on hard times. In 1948 she moved on to run the Garden Room at Joske’s, the first Houston location for a San Antonio furniture store that later became a department store. It was the only job from which Corbitt was ever fired. As she put it, she and the management differed on philosophies about food and cost. While at Joske’s she also ran her own catering service and sold sauces and dressings under a trademarked label. In 1952 construction magnate Herman Brown, an old friend, called her back to Austin to manage food service at the Driskill Hotel, where she could once again serve great food for appreciative Texans, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson among them. Mrs. Johnson particularly liked what Corbitt called her flowerpot cakes. She worked at the Driskill as their director of food service between 1952 and 1955.

    Stanley Marcus of Dallas’s famed Neiman Marcus specialty store began “courting” Corbitt in 1949 with a telegram offering her a thousand dollars a month, along with an undetermined bonus at year’s end and some participation in the profits from the catering business. He wrote that he was sure she could develop additional income from a local newspaper column and from other consultation jobs if not in conflict with the interests of Neiman Marcus. She put him off for seven years before she accepted his offer to run the Zodiac Room, the upscale restaurant on the top floor of the specialty store in downtown Dallas. Dining service at Neiman’s was neither showing a profit nor serving quality food. Periodically, Marcus called her, but each time she turned him down. That changed one night early in 1955 when, tired of the hotel business, she called to ask, “When do you want me there, Stanley?” and he replied, “Tomorrow.” She began work at Neiman’s that September. 

    During this heyday of fashion at Neiman Marcus, women wore hats and gloves to lunch and gazed at Neiman’s models who sashayed through the dining room. Corbitt’s philosophy of food matched Marcus’s fashion sense: if you please the most discriminating customer, you’ll have no trouble pleasing those who are less discriminating. Corbitt’s food pleased the palate and filled the restaurant. Neiman’s food soon became as famous as its fashion, but food service still lost money. Marcus did not care because all those diners had to go through his store to get to the restaurant - and they shopped, coming and going. Many celebrities, including Bob Hope, Princess Margaret, the Duke of Windsor, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, dined in the Zodiac Room, but the typical Neiman Marcus customer of that day was a middle-class housewife. Corbitt predated the revolutions sparked by Julia Child and Betty Freidan. In her view, post-World War II women still belonged in the kitchen, and Helen Corbitt served them simple, straightforward dishes that they could duplicate in their kitchens. Among her signature dishes were fruit salad with poppy seed dressing, individual baked Alaska, and the Duke of Windsor Sandwich (chicken breast, mango, chutney, and cheddar). During the late 1950s Corbitt also produced the syndicated food column suggested by Marcus in his telegram offering employment.

    A plaque in her kitchen read, “This is the kitchen of Helen Corbitt. I am the Boss! If you don’t believe it...Start Something!” Marcus liked to wander unannounced into various departments in his store. She would have none of it. Once, exasperated with her employees, she fired the entire crew. As they made their way to the elevators, it occurred to her she had a restaurant full of hungry people. She called security, had her staff blocked from exiting, and they returned to work. On another occasion, she made opera diva Maria Callas and a party of thirty go to the end of the line when they were late for a reservation. Helen Corbitt was at Neiman Marcus only fourteen years. While there, she gave lectures and conducted occasional cooking classes, notably one for select businessmen that met in her apartment. She proved that Texas men wanted more than steak and potatoes. Corbitt also taught classes to benefit the Dallas Symphony and raised more than $150,000 for that institution. She retired in 1969 and began a new career as a food consultant - traveling, teaching, and speaking in public.

    Corbitt was the author of several cookbooks: Helen Corbitt’s Cookbook (1957), Helen Corbitt’s Potluck (1962), Helen Corbitt Cooks for Looks (1967, written when her doctor advised her to lose weight), Helen Corbitt Cooks for Company (1974), and Helen Corbitt’s Greenhouse Cookbook (1979, recipes from the spa jointly operated by Neiman’s and Charles of the Ritz). She also edited and wrote the preface for a cookbook, Mexico Through My Kitchen Window (1961) by Maria A. DeCarbia, home economics consultant for the giant J. Walter Thompson Agency. In her cookbooks, Corbitt adapted the recipes for the housewife cooking at home.

    Several honors were bestowed upon Helen Corbitt during her lifetime. According to Patricia Vineyard MacDonald, who compiled The Best from Helen Corbitt’s Kitchens in 2000, the professional honor she most treasured was the Golden Plate Award from the Institutional Food Service Manufacturers Association, received in 1961. In 1968 she received the solid gold Escoffier plaque from the Confrérie de la Chaine des Rôtisseurs, the world’s oldest gourmet society. In 1969 she was presented the Outstanding Service Award by the Texas Restaurant Association. She received an honorary doctor of letters from Skidmore College as a distinguished alumna and trustee, and the University of Dallas awarded her its Athena Award for “indomitable spirit and impeccable character.” Helen Corbitt died of cancer on January 16, 1978, in Dallas. She never married. Source

Patio Mausoleum
Calvary Hill Cemetery and Mausoleum
Dallas

COORDINATES

32° 86.674, -096° 87.471

Homer Hill Norton (1896-1965)

    Homer Hill Norton, athlete and football coach, was born on December 30, 1896, in Carrollton, Alabama, the son of Rev. and Mrs. John W. Norton. He grew up and was educated in Birmingham, where his father served as a Methodist minister. Norton excelled in athletics at Birmingham Southern College, where he lettered in four sports. After graduation in 1916 he played with professional baseball teams in Alabama, North Carolina, and Florida. On December 2, 1917, he married Mabel Telton; they had four daughters. Norton ended his baseball career in 1920, when he took a football coaching position at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana. There he served with Alvin Nugent (Bo) McMillin and Earl Davis before taking over as head coach in 1926 and compiling a record of sixty wins, nineteen losses, and nine ties.

    Norton moved to Texas A&M in 1934 and by 1939 had brought football glory to the Texas Aggies. With All-Americans Joe Boyd and John Kimbrough, he led the Aggies in 1939 to an unbeaten season, a national championship, and victory over Tulane in the Sugar Bowl. Defeat by the University of Texas in 1940 prevented a second unbeaten season and an invitation to the Rose Bowl. Trips to the Cotton Bowl in 1941 and 1942 and to the Orange Bowl in 1944 highlighted Norton's later years at A&M. When his tenure ended in 1947, he had served longer than any other Aggieland coach at that time. His overall record there was eighty-two wins, fifty-two losses, nine ties, and three Southwest Conference championships. His coaching career spanned three decades (1920-47). He developed four All-Americans: guard Joe Eugene Routt, 1936 and 1937; tackle Joe Boyd, 1939; back "Jarrin'" John Kimbrough, 1939 and 1940; and guard Marshall Robnet, 1940. Norton was elected to the Helms Athletic Foundation Hall of Fame, the A&M Athletic Hall of Fame, and the Texas Sports Hall of Fame. After he retired, Norton became a sports columnist for the Houston Post and owned and operated several restaurants and a motel. In 1953, after his wife's death, he married Christine Sheppard, and they had one daughter. Norton died on May 26, 1965, and was buried in Forest Park Lawndale Cemetery, Houston. Source

Section L
Forest Park Lawndale
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 43.475, -095° 18.257

Owen Ozwin Wilcox (1809-1879)

    Owen Wilcox was born in Connecticut in 1809 and came to Texas in early 1836. He soon enlisted in the Texian revolutionary army on March 1, 1836 and assigned to Captain William H. Patton's Company, who he served with during the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21st. On July 1, he was transferred to Captain Benjamin F. Reavill's Company, then transferred again on October 1 to Captain William D. Burnett's Company. He left the service on December 1, 1836 and settled in Travis County. For his overall military service he received 960 acres bounty land, plus another 640 acres for participating in the Battle of Jacinto. He married Philippine Bothmer in 1848 and by 1870 was working as a carpenter and living in Austin. Wilcox died in Austin on April 5, 1879 with only one dollar to his name; but instead of the pauper's grave he feared, he was buried in Oakwood Cemetery with honors.

Section 1
Oakwood Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 16.488, -097° 43.673

Howard Robard Hughes (1905-1976)

    Howard Hughes, aviator, movie producer, and billionaire, was born in Houston, Texas, on Christmas Eve 1905 to Allene (Gano) and Howard Robard Hughes, Sr. Sonny, as the family called him, grew up in the upper crust of Houston society. Like his father, he enjoyed tinkering with mechanical things, and as a youth he built a shortwave radio set and started the Radio Relay League for amateurs. Because of his father's traveling, Hughes became close to his mother, who constantly worried about her son's health. At the slightest hint of an epidemic, she would take him out of town. In 1919 Hughes was paralyzed for a short time by an unexplained illness. The young man developed a lifetime phobic regard for his health. He also grew up a loner whose only solid friend was Dudley Sharp, son of his father's partner, Walter B. Sharp. His father sent him to a private school in Boston, where he did fairly well in classwork and excelled in golf. On a visit to Harvard, his father took him on a plane ride, an experience that stimulated a life-long love of aviation. While Howard was attending the Thacher School in California, his mother died, on March 29, 1922. In California, Hughes spent time with his father's brother Rupert, a writer for Samuel Goldwyn's movie studios.

    Although Howard had no high school degree, through his father's intercession (and donation), he sat in on classes at Cal Tech, then returned to Houston and enrolled at Rice Institute. On January 14, 1924, the elder Hughes died suddenly in Houston. At age eighteen Howard received access to a large part of the family estate and dropped out of Rice. Rupert Hughes agreed to supervise Howard's part of the estate and interests in the Hughes Tool Company until he was twenty-one. Howard quarreled with the family and had company lawyers buy out his relatives. Through the decision by a Houston judge, who had been a friend of his father's, Howard was granted legal adulthood on December 26, 1924, and took control of the tool company. On June 1, 1925, he married Houston socialite Ella Rice. After a summer of tinkering with a steam-powered car, Howard and Ella headed for Hollywood. Howard wanted to make movies. After a first effort that flopped, he hired Noah Dietrich to head his movie subsidiary of the tool company and Lewis Mileston as director. In 1928 Mileston directed Two Arabian Nights and won an Academy Award. Hughes worked next on his epic movie Hell's Angels, a story about air warfare in World War I. He wrote the script and directed it himself. He acquired eighty-seven World War I airplanes, hired ace pilots, took flying lessons and obtained a pilot's license. He crashed and injured his face. As he spent little time at home, Ella divorced him in December 1929.

    Since talkies had become popular, Hughes added dialogue scenes to Hell's Angels that included actress Jean Harlow. The movie, released in June 1930, had cost $3.8 million, the most expensive movie to that date. Though Hell's Angels was a box-office smash, Hughes actually lost $1.5 million on it. He was now accepted by the Hollywood establishment, however, and went on to produce Scarface (1932), which was decensored after he sued the censorship agency. His later film The Outlaw (1941) also was controversial because of promotional publicity. In 1932, Hughes acquired a military plane through the Department of Commerce and converted it for racing. When the costs rose, he formed the Hughes Aircraft Company as a division of Hughes Tool Company. Since Charles Lindbergh's license number had been 69, Hughes (whose number was 4223) badgered the Department of Commerce to lower his number to 80 in 1933. He signed on with American Airways as a co-pilot under the name Charles W. Howard to gain experience. The deception was immediately discovered and Hughes resigned, thus leaving the only job he ever had. In 1934 he entered his converted Boeing in the All-America Air Meet in Miami and won. Afterward, he gathered a group of engineers and technicians to work on the H-1, the most advanced plane of its time. He personally test-flew the plane himself and precipitated a power struggle in the Hughes empire when he placed Vice President Dietrich in control of his holdings. Meanwhile, on September 13, 1935, Hughes set a new land-speed record of 352 miles per hour with his H-1 (he called it Winged Bullet).

    In 1936 he set a new transcontinental record, and the next year he shortened the record to seven hours and twenty-eight minutes. Hughes was now immensely popular and was hosted by the president at the White House. He next converted a special Lockheed 14 for an around-the-world flight. He studied weather patterns and installed an autopilot and four radios to make contacts along his route. He and a four-man crew left New York on July 10, 1938, and cut Lindbergh's record in half in his flight to Paris. He personally piloted the plane on the flight. Hughes landed in New York on July 14, 1938, having circled the globe in three days, nineteen hours, and seventeen minutes. He was honored with parades all over America. Houston briefly renamed its airport (now William P. Hobby Airport) in his honor. He now decided to invest in military aircraft, and sought to sell his planes and ideas to the government. But he veiled his plans in secrecy and ignored regulations and protocol. He also insisted on building planes out of plywood using a "duramold" process, when the industry standard was aluminum. When the Army Material Command declared that the airplanes could not be made combat ready, Hughes used friends in Washington in an attempt to go over their heads. At last, shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser got Hughes a contract. Kaiser convinced the government that a fleet of gigantic flying boats was needed to ferry men and supplies across the ocean. On November 16, 1942, Hughes Aircraft won a contract to build three flying boats at a cost of up to $18 million in ten months. Hughes declared the goal impossible to meet, and the contract was canceled.

    On March 27, 1944, after Hughes's lobbying in Washington, he received a contract for one flying boat. Only one HK-1, which the public called the Spruce Goose (a name Hughes hated), was built. He successfully flew the craft on November 2, 1947. On October 11, 1943, Hughes also received a contract for 101 of his D-2 (XF-11 reconnaissance) planes. The XF-11 was an aluminum redesign of the wooden D-2. At the end of World War II in 1945, Hughes won permission to complete the two prototypes under construction. In 1946, in his first flight of the XF-11, he crashed in Beverly Hills. This was his fourth crash (in November 1943 he had hit Lake Mead in a crash that killed two people). He successfully flew the second prototype on April 5, 1946. In 1947 a Senate war investigating committee questioned him at length about his failure to deliver on wartime contracts. Hughes remained active in the 1950s. In 1948 he had purchased the movie studio RKO, and in 1955 he sold it to the General Tire Company for profit. Hughes also invested in Trans World Airlines, and in 1956 pushed the company into the jet age by purchasing sixty-three jets. He quarreled with engineers at Hughes Aircraft in 1953, causing a shakeup that imperiled contracts with the Pentagon. That same year, he founded the Hughes Medical Institute in Delaware, thus funding the Medical Center he earlier had designated as the main recipient of his will. In 1957 he again shook the Hughes empire by firing his long-time associate Noah Dietrich. During the 1930s in Hollywood Hughes had squired many actresses and socialites, particularly Katherine Hepburn.

    In 1957 he married actress Jean Peters; the marriage ended in divorce in 1970. Hughes remained in Los Angeles until 1966, then began traveling and eventually rented a penthouse in the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. When lawsuits were filed against TWA, he sold his stock in 1966 for $546 million. The next year he began buying properties to build a business empire in Nevada. In 1970 he took over Air West. By this time he was becoming increasingly reclusive and conducted most of his business through memos. He now had little control over his empire. Chester Davis, Raymond Holliday, and Bill Gay, Hughes Tool Company executives, ran his Nevada properties. In 1972, Hughes sold Hughes Tool Company stock to the public and renamed his holdings company Summa Corporation. This ended his role as a businessman and entrepreneur. In poor health and accompanied by a squadron of personal aides, he went to Panama, Canada, and London, then to Acapulco. He was indicted in a case relating to the Air West takeover, but it was dismissed. Hughes allowed a CIA ship, the Glomar Explorer, to work through one of his companies to recover a sunken Soviet sub. In Los Angeles a break-in occurred at the Hughes headquarters, and many of his personal papers were stolen. With his health rapidly deteriorating, he boarded a plane en route to a hospital in Houston on April 5, 1976, but died on the way. The Treasury Department made fingerprints to confirm his identity. More than forty alleged wills and 400 prospective heirs emerged to try to inherit part of Hughes's estimated $2 billion estate. In 1983 the estate was settled among twenty-two cousins on both sides of his family. For eight years Texas and California pursued inheritance-tax claims, although Hughes executives insisted that Nevada (which has no estate taxes) was Hughes's home. The United States Supreme Court reviewed the case three times before it was settled. Howard Hughes Medical Institute was given ownership of Hughes Aircraft and sold it to General Motors in 1985 for $5 billion. Hughes' Summa Corporation emerged with four hotels and six casinos in Las Vegas and Reno. Howard Hughes has been the subject of many books; The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977), a television film with actor Tommy Lee Jones; and three feature films, The Carpetbaggers (1964), Melvin and Howard (1980), and The Aviator (2004). Source

Oakdale Section
Glenwood Cemetery
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 45.799, -095° 23.231

William Sparks (1761-1848)

    William Sparks was born on April 3, 1761 in Rowan County, North Carolina. During the American Revolution, he served in the North Carolina Militia under Capt. John Cleveland and later under Colonel Benjamin Cleveland, fighting Cherokee Indians and Tories when he was just 17 years old. At the close of the war, he moved to Franklin County, then Jackson and later Clark County in the state of Georgia, where Sparks married Mary Polly Fielder. The two had five children, Richard, John, James, Sarah and Edith, before moving to Lawrence County, Mississippi, in 1811 and then to Holmes County, Mississippi, where they lived until March 1834. There they had three more children, Levi, Nathan and William Matthew. 

    Sometime in 1834-36, the Sparks family migrated to the Old North Church Community in Nacogdoches County, Texas where he obtained 2,200 acres of land. William served as a deacon in the church for about four years before asking to be relieved of his duties due to the infirmities of old age. He died in 1848 and was buried in the Old North Church Cemetery.


Old North Church Cemetery
Nacogdoches

COORDINATES

31° 40.053, -094° 39.468

Lloyd Herbert Hughes (1921-1943)

    Lloyd Hughes, Jr., Medal of Honor recipient, was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, on July 12, 1921, the son of Lloyd Herbert Hughes, Sr., and Mildred Mae (Rainey) Hughes. Hughes’s parents divorced sometime after his birth. Mildred Hughes found employment as a postmaster in Onalaska in Polk County, Texas, in November 1923. In 1924 his mother married John Raymond Jordan. Between 1927 and 1931 the Jordan family lived in Oak Hurst in San Jacinto County, Huntsville, Josserand, and Refugio, Texas. By 1931 the Jordan family added four sons in addition to young Lloyd who was called “Pete” by family and friends. Lloyd Hughes experienced success in academics and athletics in school. After beginning school in Oak Hurst in 1927, he spent most of his early years in the Refugio school system. Hughes was valedictorian of his seventh-grade graduation class. In high school, he served as the captain on both the football and basketball teams. He also found employment as a roughneck in the oil industry and with a newspaper and ice route during the summers and after school. After graduating from Refugio High School in the spring of 1939, Hughes enrolled at Texas A&M in the fall as a petroleum engineering major. Assigned to the infantry in the Corps of Cadets, Hughes experienced academic problems during his first semester and withdrew at the end of the term.

    He then moved to Corpus Christi (where the Jordan family had moved in early 1939) and attended Corpus Christi Junior College (now Del Mar College) for two terms where his grades improved. He enrolled at Texas A&M in September 1941 and remained there until leaving school on December 3, 1941, due to his desire to assist his family and ailing stepfather. On January 28, 1942, Hughes enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps as an aviation cadet in San Antonio. After completing his primary pilot training in Tulsa and his basic pilot training at Enid, Oklahoma, he finished the advanced pilot training at Lubbock, Texas. On November 8, Hughes married Hazel Dean Ewing in San Antonio. He was assigned to the Four Engine Transition School, Combat Crew School at Tarrant Air Base in Fort Worth and finished his training and received his pilot’s wings and his commission as a second lieutenant on November 10, 1942. In early 1943 Hughes was assigned as a pilot to the newly-formed 389th Heavy Bombardment Group at Biggs Army Air Field, Texas. This group was designated as part of Operation Tidal Wave (a low level bombing attack by B-24 heavy bombers on the Nazi-held oil refineries at Ploesti, Romania). After final instruction at Lowry Field, Colorado, and receiving crew formations and assignments to a B-24, the group arrived in England in June for flight training at treetop level. The group departed for Benghazi, Libya, on June 30, and in July Hughes’s unit flew four combat missions over Italy and the Mediterranean and spent ten days of intense low-level training for the raid on Ploesti.

    In the early morning of August 1, Hughes’s plane Ole Kickapoo departed Benghazi as part of the 179 loaded B-24 Liberators (divided into five groups) for the 2,400-mile roundtrip to Ploesti. The 389th (nicknamed the “Sky Scorpions”) flew in the rear with two other groups. With Hughes as the pilot, Ole Kickapoo in the last formation approached its target region with enemy defenders fully alerted. Flying through intense anti-aircraft fire, Hughes’s plane took several direct hits that caused gasoline leaks in the bomb bay and the left wing. Aware of the danger and unwilling to leave the formation, Hughes piloted the plane to his assigned target in a blazing area where the bomb load was dropped. Flying away from the target with the left wing aflame, Hughes sought to land the aircraft in a dry riverbed, but the plane “crashed and was consumed.” Only three men of the ten-man crew survived the crash, and one died from burns two days later. The two survivors remained prisoners of war until the end of the conflict. Romanian authorities retrieved the bodies of Hughes and the other crewmen and buried them in Bolovan Cemetery. Fifty-four B-24s did not make it back to Benghazi. Military reports indicated that Hughes’s target area was so damaged that it did not resume production during the war. For his “heroic decision to complete his mission regardless of the consequences in utter disregard of his own life,” the twenty-two-year-old Texan was recommended for the Medal of Honor; four other airmen also received the medal for their performance in Operation Tidal Wave. On April 18, 1944, Hazel Ewing Hughes was presented her husband’s posthumous Medal of Honor by Lt. Gen. Barton Yount in a ceremony at Kelly Field. Second Lieutenant Lloyd Herbert Hughes, Jr., was honored in a number of ways years after his tragic death. In 1950 his body was returned to Texas, and on April 12 he was buried with full military honors at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio. Texas A&M renamed a dormitory Lloyd H. Hughes Hall in 1969. In Corpus Christi, Del Mar College added Hughes to its Wall of Honor in 1995. A portrait of Hughes hangs in the Memorial Student Center at Texas A&M. The Sam Houston Sanders Corps of Cadets Center at Texas A&M also displays his original Medal of Honor beneath a bronze plaque of the former cadet. Hughes was the first Texas Aggie to receive the Medal of Honor. Source 

CITATION

For conspicuous gallantry in action and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. On August 1943, 2d Lt. Hughes served in the capacity of pilot of a heavy bombardment aircraft participating in a long and hazardous minimum-altitude attack against the Axis oil refineries of Ploesti, Rumania, launched from the northern shores of Africa. Flying in the last formation to attack the target, he arrived in the target area after previous flights had thoroughly alerted the enemy defenses. Approaching the target through intense and accurate antiaircraft fire and dense balloon barrages at dangerously low altitude, his plane received several direct hits from both large and small caliber antiaircraft guns which seriously damaged his aircraft, causing sheets of escaping gasoline to stream from the bomb bay and from the left wing. This damage was inflicted at a time prior to reaching the target when 2d Lt. Hughes could have made a forced landing in any of the grain fields readily available at that time. The target area was blazing with burning oil tanks and damaged refinery installations from which flames leaped high above the bombing level of the formation. With full knowledge of the consequences of entering this blazing inferno when his airplane was profusely leaking gasoline in two separate locations, 2d Lt. Hughes, motivated only by his high conception of duty which called for the destruction of his assigned target at any cost, did not elect to make a forced landing or turn back from the attack. Instead, rather than jeopardize the formation and the success of the attack, he unhesitatingly entered the blazing area and dropped his bomb load with great precision. After successfully bombing the objective, his aircraft emerged from the conflagration with the left wing aflame. Only then did he attempt a forced landing, but because of the advanced stage of the fire enveloping his aircraft the plane crashed and was consumed. By 2d Lt. Hughes' heroic decision to complete his mission regardless of the consequences in utter disregard of his own life, and by his gallant and valorous execution of this decision, he has rendered a service to our country in the defeat of our enemies which will everlastingly be outstanding in the annals of our Nation's history. 

Section U
Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery
San Antonio

COORDINATES 

29° 28.688, -098° 25.822

Charlotte Ganahl Walker (1878-1958)

    Charlotte Walker, actress, was born in Galveston to Edwin A. and Charlisa (De Ganahl) Walker and was the mother of character actress Sara Haden. Walker made her stage debut as a teen, when at nineteen she performed in London, England in a comedy called The Mummy. She performed with Richard Mansfield and later returned to her native Texas. She appeared as June in Trail of the Lonesome Pine in 1911 and would later reprise the role in Cecil B. DeMille's 1916 film Trail of the Lonesome Pine. David Belasco noticed her in On Parole and signed her for starring roles in plays The Warrens of Virginia, Just a Wife, and Call The Doctor. In 1923 she played with Ethel Barrymore in The School For Scandal, produced by the Player's Club.

    Walker's motion picture career began in 1915 with Kindling and Out of the Darkness. Sloth (1917) is a five-reeler which features Walker. In the third reel of this film she plays a youthful Dutch maid who is about sixteen years old. The setting is an old Dutch settlement on Staten Island, New York. The theme stresses the perils of indolence to a nation of people and cautions against permitting luxury to replace the simplistic life led by America's forebears. In her later silent film work Walker can be seen in The Midnight Girl (1925) starring alongside a pre-Dracula Bela Lugosi. The Midnight Girl is one of Walker's few silents that survives. As a film actress she continued to perform in films into the early 1930s. Her later screen performances include roles in Lightnin' (1930), Millie (1931), Salvation Nell (1931), and Hotel Variety (1933) She married her first husband, Dr. John B. Haden, on November 16, 1896 in New York City. With him she had two daughters, Beatrice Shelton  and Katherine, who later changed her name to Sara Haden. After her divorce, she returned to the stage. Her second husband, Eugene Walter, was a playwright who adapted the novel The Trail of the Lonesome Pine for Broadway; the second marriage also ended in divorce in 1930. Charlotte Walker died in 1958 at a hospital in Kerrville, Texas at age 81.

Note: Crypt is unmarked. There are several crypts inside the Haden family mausoleum, all marked with a small nameplate except for two - those of Charlotte and her daughter Sara.

Haden Mausoleum

Trinity Episcopal Cemetery

Galveston

COORDINATES

29° 17.621, -094° 48.682

Marvin Ivan "Buck" Barrow (1903-1933)

    Buck Barrow was born in Jones Prairie, Marion County, Texas, the third child of Henry and Cumie Barrow. He got the nickname Buck from an aunt, who said he ran around like a horse. In the early 1920s, Marvin went to Dallas, ostensibly to work for his brother Clyde repairing cars, but he quickly became part of the West Dallas petty-criminal underworld. He began his criminal career as a cockfighter, but moved up quickly; just before Christmas 1926, Marvin and Clyde were arrested with a truck full of stolen turkeys they intended to sell. Marvin took the rap for himself and his brother and went to jail for a week. He met his future wife, Blanche, on November 11, 1929 in West Dallas and she soon became part of the loose Barrow gang. He was shot and captured two weeks later after a burglary and given four years in the state prison. He escaped from the Ferguson Prison Farm on March 8, 1930 by simply walking out and stealing a guard's car. 

    He and Blanche married on July 3, 1931 in Oklahoma. Blanche convinced him to return to prison and serve the rest of his term, which he did. After two years, he was issued a pardon by the governor, mostly due to the lobbying done by his wife and mother, partly due to the effort to reduce prison overcrowding. Upon his release on March 22, 1933, he and Blanche joined Clyde, his girlfriend Bonnie and W. D. Jones and began the crime spree the Barrow gang became notorious for. A few robberies and murders later, Buck was mortally wounded during a shootout with the police at the Red Crown Tourist Court in Platte City, Missouri. He hung on for a few days in a delirium until July 29, 1933, when he died of pneumonia aggravated by his head injury.

Note: Marvin's year of birth on his stone is incorrect. His mother gave the engravers her daughter Nell's birth year by mistake.


Western Heights Cemetery
Dallas

COORDINATES

32° 45.957, -096° 84.663

Theron Eugene "Ted" Daffan (1912-1996)

    Early steel guitarist and songwriter Ted Daffan was born in Beauregard Parish, Louisiana, on September 21, 1912, the son of Carl and Della Daffan. Ted Daffan pioneered in the electrification of instruments and was an active figure in the Houston-area country-dance-band scene of the 1930s. His most lasting contribution to country music was in songwriting. The Daffans moved from Louisiana to Houston, where Ted graduated from high school in 1930. Having developed a fascination with electronics at an early age, he opened a repair shop for radios and electric musical instruments. The shop served as a center of experimentation with pickups and amplifiers. Daffan also developed an early interest in Hawaiian guitar and played in a Hawaiian music group called the Blue Islanders that performed on Houston radio station KTRH in 1933. Drawn to country music mainly through the influence of Milton Brown, in 1934 Daffan joined the Blue Ridge Playboys, an influential group whose membership included two other legendary early honky-tonk figures, Floyd Tillman and Moon Mullican. He also performed with several other Houston-area bands, including the Bar-X Cowboys and Shelly Lee Alley's Alley Cats, before starting his own band, the Texans, in 1940. The Texans leaned more toward honky-tonk than swing.

    Daffan is generally credited with writing the first truck-driving song, Truck Driver's Blues, in 1939; the song became a hit for Cliff Bruner's Texas Wanderers, and its success led to Daffan's Texans being signed by Columbia Records in 1940. Three of the songs he wrote and recorded in the early 1940s became honky-tonk classics: Worried Mind, Born to Lose, and Headin' Down the Wrong Highway. Daffan was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Association Hall of Fame as a charter member in 1970. Among the artists who recorded his songs were Ray Charles, who performed versions of Born to Lose and No Letter Today, and Les Paul and Mary Ford, who recorded I'm A Fool to Care. Daffan moved to California in 1944 and led a band at the Venice Pier Ballroom for a short time before returning to Texas in 1946. After leading a band in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, he returned to Houston by the early 1950s. Although his recording career slowed after World War II, he continued a successful career as a songwriter and stayed involved in the music business. From 1955 to 1971 he ran his own record label, Daffan Records, which featured releases by Floyd Tillman, Jerry Irby, and Dickie McBride, among others. Daffan moved to Nashville in 1958 to form a music publishing company with Hank Snow but returned in 1961 to Houston, where he formed his own music-publishing business and continued to live until his death on October 6, 1996.  Daffan was married to Lela Bell McGuire; they had one daughter, Dorothy Jean. He later married Fannie Lee “Bobbie” Martin; they had no children. Daffan was inducted into the Texas Western Swing Hall of Fame in 1995. His song Born to Lose received a BMI "one million air play" award in 1992. Source

Section 20
Forest Park Lawndale Cemetery
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 43.108, -095° 18.238

Ira Ingram (1788-1837)

    Ira Ingram, soldier, legislator, and member of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred, was born in Brookfield, Vermont, on August 19, 1788, the son of Phillip and Rachael (Burton) Ingram. After sojourning for a time in Tennessee he seems to have moved to New Orleans, where he married Emily B. Holt of Tennessee on March 13, 1823; she died in October 1824. They had one daughter. At the instigation of his brother Seth Ingram, Ira moved to Texas in January 1826 and settled in the Austin colony in the area that became Waller County. In 1828 he and his brother were partners in a merchandising establishment in San Felipe de Austin. Although defeated by Thomas M. Duke in the election for alcalde in 1832, Ingram represented the Mina District at the Convention of 1832 and San Felipe in the Convention of 1833. He also served as secretary of the local committee of public safety, organized to resist Mexican Centralist authority. 

    In 1834 he was elected the first alcalde of Matagorda and wrote the Goliad Declaration of Independence, signed on December 22, 1835. During the Texas Revolution Ingram participated in the capture of Goliad as commissary and secretary to commandant Philip Dimmitt. In November 1835 he requested a transfer from Stephen F. Austin. He served in Capt. Thomas Stewart's company of Matagorda Volunteers in 1836. On April 5, 1836, Gen. Sam Houston ordered Ingram, then commissioned as a major, to return to East Texas and the United States to recruit volunteers for the Texas army. Ingram was Matagorda representative in the First Congress of the Republic of Texas and was elected speaker of the House. He resigned from the legislature on May 1, 1837, possibly because of the disclosure that he had once been convicted of forgery and imprisoned in New York. He was again elected mayor of Matagorda, but died on September 22, 1837, before his inauguration. Ingram was present at the first meeting of the Masonic fraternity in Texas on January 11, 1828. In his will he left $70,000 to the Matagorda schools. Source

Section E
Matagorda Cemetery
Matagorda

COORDINATES

28° 42.030, -095° 57.282

DeWitt Clinton Giddings (1827-1903)

    Dewitt Clinton Giddings, Democratic politician and early Texas businessman, the youngest of eight children of James and Lucy (Demming) Giddings, was born on July 18, 1827, in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania. His father, a farmer, had been a sea captain. Giddings financed his education as a civil engineer in New York by teaching school part-time. In 1847 he was employed as a railroad engineer, and in 1850 he began legal studies in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. In 1852 he joined his brother Jabez D. Giddings in Brenham, Texas. In 1853 Dewitt Giddings was admitted to the Texas bar, received license to practice before the state district and supreme courts, and became his brother's junior partner in Brenham. Giddings specialized in civil and probate cases and developed a lucrative legal practice and statewide reputation in state and federal courts before the Civil War. In 1859 he was construction superintendent of the Washington County Railroad. The Giddings brothers arranged a county school-fund loan and contributed financially to make possible completion of the railroad in 1860. In 1862, despite Unionist sentiment, D. C. Giddings enlisted as a private in the Confederate Twenty-first Texas Cavalry (First Texas Lancers). He was elected captain and then lieutenant colonel. In absence of Col. William Carter, Giddings was actual commander of this regiment during the war. He was briefly captured and exchanged in 1862. He participated in Arkansas and Louisiana campaigns and John S. Marmaduke's Missouri raid.

    In 1867 Giddings aided yellow fever victims in Brenham; the same year, he was elected foreman of Hook and Ladder Company No. 1, which, despite its name, was organized to resist the actions of Union troops. Giddings was a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1866. He served on the Resolutions Committee of the conservative state convention in 1868. As a Democrat, he won the 1871 special election for United States congressman from the Third Texas District, in part because of his efforts to gain broad ethnic support. After Republican governor Edmund J. Davis certified the reelection of his opponent, William T. Clark, Giddings won his appeal to the United States House of Representatives, which unanimously seated him in 1872 . He was the first Southern Democrat to enter Congress during Reconstruction. He was reelected to the Forty-third Congress and as an advocate of silver defeated independent candidate George Washington Jones to serve in the Forty-fifth Congress (1877-79). After the Civil War Giddings and his brother J. D. became land agents and owners of holdings throughout Texas. They founded the Giddings and Giddings bank at Brenham in 1866. Dewitt Giddings earned a large commission during Governor Richard Coke's term when he successively recovered $339,000 in proceeds from state-owned bonds sold in Europe during the war.

    After his brother's death, Giddings managed bank operations and in 1884 became sole owner of the Giddings bank. By 1874 he was a large stockholder in Texas Mutual Life Insurance of Galveston. He chartered the short-lived Brazos Valley, Brenham and Gulf Railway Company in 1888 to promote lower railroad rates. His activities focused on banking after 1875. Giddings was a Texas presidential elector at large in 1876, a member of the Platforms and Resolutions Committee at Texas Democratic conventions in 1884, 1888, 1892, and 1894, and a Texas delegate to the national Democratic convention in 1884, 1888, and 1892. In 1886 he ran unsuccessfully against Lawrence Sullivan (Sul) Ross for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Giddings campaigned against a proposed state prohibition amendment and was chairman of the Anti-Prohibition State Convention in May 1887. As an opponent of Governor James S. Hogg's reelection, Giddings was chairman of the June 1892 state Democratic platform committee, coauthor of the committee's minority report opposing free silver at the Car-Stable Convention (August 1892), and member of the Turner Hall Convention platform committee. In August 1894 he supported the national Democratic party platform as chairman of the state Democratic platform committee. He was a delegate of the Texas Gold Democratic Conference to the Memphis Convention (1895) and delegate at large of Texas Gold Democrats to the Indianapolis Convention. He also served on the state Deep Water Convention Resolutions Committee to promote federal appropriations for a Gulf of Mexico port in 1888. In the 1880s he supported Populists within Washington County to destroy Republican domination of county politics. Giddings was the leading proponent of the establishment in Brenham of the state's first public schools. In 1860 he married Malinda C. Lusk, the daughter of Samuel C. Lusk. They had five children. Mrs. Giddings died in 1869. Giddings died of heart disease in Brenham on August 19, 1903, and was buried in Prairie Lea cemetery. Source 

Section 3
Prairie Lea Cemetery
Brenham

COORDINATES

30° 09.329, -096° 24.559

Corwin "Amazing Grace" Hawkins (1965-1994)

    Corwin Hawkins attended St. Peter's Catholic School in Houston, and, after graduation, decided he wanted to be an entertainer. He was fascinated by the drag culture and began competing - and quickly started winning - female impersonator competitions. In 1991, his favorite and most popular character "Amazing Grace" was crowned Miss Gay Texas; the next year he took the title of Texas Entertainer of the Year and went on to capture the 1992 National Entertainer of the Year title in Louisville, Kentucky. He was also awarded an invitational tryout at the L. A. Improv. After appearing on Def Comedy Jam, BET and HBO Comedy specials, he was discovered by Keenan Ivory Wayans and hired for the role of "Wayman" in the film A Low Down Dirty Shame, a part originally written for RuPaul. Sadly, he was unable to capitalize on his new-found fame; he passed away on August 5, 1994 at Baylor Hospital in Dallas of pneumonia. He was 29 years old.

Section 18
Houston Memorial Gardens
Pearland

COORDINATES

29° 33.780, -095° 21.116

David Thomas (1801?-1836)

    David Thomas, signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, ad interim attorney general, and acting secretary of war for the Republic of Texas, was born in Tennessee about 1801, came to Texas in 1835, and he joined the United States Independent Volunteer Cavalry company, organized at Nacogdoches on December 10, 1835. At the request of Francis W. Johnson, the Military Affairs Committee of the General Council recommended a volunteer Matamoros expedition in January 1836, and Thomas was commissioned first lieutenant for the expedition. He was one of the four representatives of Refugio Municipality at the Convention of 1836 at Washington-on-the-Brazos and there signed the Declaration of Independence. Apparently he was a lawyer, for on March 17 the convention elected him ad interim attorney general of the republic. Later, when Secretary of War Thomas J. Rusk left the cabinet to join Sam Houston's army, Thomas was named acting secretary of war. He thus held two government positions at the same time. ]

    On or about April 16, 1836, Thomas was mortally wounded by the accidental discharge of a firearm while aboard the steamship Cayuga en route from Lynch's Ferry to Galveston. Settler John J. Linn, who was at Galveston when the ship arrived, implied that Thomas died there three days after being shot. According to other claims, however, he remained on board the Cayuga and arrived at the San Jacinto battlefield about April 22. In a third version he died on board the Cayuga and was buried near the home of Vice President Lorenzo de Zavala on Buffalo Bayou, but it was also reported that he was taken off the ship and died in Zavala's home. In 1932 the state of Texas erected a monument to the memory of Thomas at a spot designated by Adina de Zavala, granddaughter of Lorenzo de Zavala, as the gravesite in the old Zavala cemetery. In 1936 Thomas's name was also included on a monument in Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site to the memory of "those courageous souls, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention held here on March 1-17, 1836, who declared Texas free, organized a republic, and framed a constitution." Source 

Note: This is a cenotaph. The Zavala family cemetery, where Lorenzo was laid to rest, was originally located on a curve of Buffalo Bayou, directly across from the San Jacinto battlefield. In the early 1900s, it was discovered that due to natural erosion the graves were slowly sliding into the water. The Zavala family decided against exhuming and relocating the bodies for religious reasons, so as a compromise the remaining headstones were transferred to the battlefield. No bodies were recovered.

Zavala Plaza   
San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site
La Porte

COORDINATES

29° 45.215, -095° 05.387

Jesse Billingsley (1810-1880)

    Jesse Billingsley, San Jacinto soldier, ranger, and legislator, was born on October 10, 1810, in Rutherford County, Tennessee, the son of Jeptha and Miriam (Randolph) Billingsley. In 1834 he moved to Mina, Texas. On November 17, 1835, he joined Capt. Robert M. Coleman's company of Mina Volunteers - forty-nine Bastrop County men, including George B. Erath. Billingsley served until December 17. When this unit mustered into Sam Houston's army at the beginning of the Texas Revolution, it was designated Company B of Col. Edward Burleson's First Regiment, and on March 1, 1836, Billingsley was elected its captain. He commanded the company at the battle of San Jacinto, where he received a wound that crippled his left hand for life. The company disbanded at Mina on June 1. Billingsley thereafter served as a private in John C. Hunt's ranger company, from July 1 through October 1, 1836. 

    He was elected from Bastrop County to the House of Representatives of the First Congress of the Republic of Texas and is said to have "furnished his own grub, slept on his own blanket, and wor[n] a buckskin suit that he took from a Comanche Indian whom he killed in battle". Billingsley was reelected to the House of the Second Congress in 1837. In February 1839 he commanded a company of volunteers under Edward Burleson that pursued and engaged the band of Comanche raiders who had killed the widow of Robert Coleman and their son Albert and kidnapped their five-year-old son, Thomas. In 1842 Billingsley recruited volunteers to aid in the repulse of the invasion of Adrián Woll and fought with John C. Hays at the battle of Salado Creek. After annexation he served as a senator in the Fifth (1853-54) and Eighth (1859-61) legislatures. Billingsley died on October 1, 1880, and was buried in the front yard of his house near McDade. On September 3, 1929, he was reinterred in the State Cemetery at Austin. Source 

Republic Hill
Texas State Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 15.914, -097° 43.627

Frank Everson Vandiver (1925-2005)

    Frank Vandiver, noted military historian, professor, and university president, was born on December 9, 1925, in Austin, Texas. He was the son of Harry S. Vandiver, a mathematics professor who taught at the University of Texas, Princeton, and Cornell. Initially Frank Vandiver attended public schools but was eventually pulled out of the school system for private tutorship. At an early age he displayed a great interest in Confederate history, and while still a teenager, he published an article on the subject in a scholarly journal. Vandiver did not receive a high school diploma or a bachelor’s degree, but through examinations he was admitted to graduate school at the University of Texas and received a Master of Arts in 1949. He received his Ph. D. from Tulane University in 1951 and an M.A. by decree from Oxford University.

    Vandiver received recognition as a prominent young scholar when, at the age of twenty-four, his biography was included in Who’s Who in America. His early accolades included two Rockefeller Fellowships in 1946 and 1948 and a Fulbright Fellowship in 1951. His first book, Ploughshares into Swords: Josiah Gorgas and Confederate Ordnance, was published in 1952. Vandiver taught at Louisiana State University and Washington University before joining the history faculty at Rice University in 1955. He filled many positions at Rice University including chairman of the history and political science department, provost and vice president, and acting president from 1969 to 1970. From 1979 to 1981 Vandiver served as president of North Texas State University (now University of North Texas), and he was president of Texas A&M University from 1981 to 1988. After stepping down as president, he became founder and director of the Mosher Institute for International Policy Studies, a defense think tank at Texas A&M. Vandiver was active in numerous organizations and served as president of the Southern Historical Association, the Texas Institute of Letters, the Philosophical Society of Texas, Association of American Colleges, White House Historical Society, and the American Council on Education. He taught at Oxford as the Harmsworth Professor of American History from 1963 to 1964. One of his main focuses was on the papers of Jefferson Davis for which he was chief advisory editor from 1963 until his death.

    His many works include Mighty Stonewall (1957), Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy (1970), Black Jack: The Life and Times of John J. Pershing (1977), Blood Brothers: A Short History of the Civil War (1992), Shadows of Vietnam: Lyndon Johnson's Wars (1997), 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the Civil War (2000), and 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About World War II (2002). He contributed to numerous other books about American military history. Frank Vandiver married Susie Smith on April 19, 1952. They had three children. After her death in 1979, he married Renee Carmody in 1980. He died on January 7, 2005, in College Station, Texas. He was buried at Memorial Oaks Cemetery in Houston. Source

Section 12
Memorial Oaks Cemetery
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 46.856, -095° 36.898

Robert Rankin (1753-1837)

    Revolutionary War veteran Robert Rankin was born in the colony of Virginia in 1753. He entered the service of the Continental Army in 1776 with the Third Regiment of the Virginia line and participated in the battles of Germantown, Brandywine, and Stony Point, as well as the siege of Charleston, where he was captured; he remained a prisoner of war until exchanged, at which time he received a promotion to lieutenant. On October 1, 1781, during a furlough, he married Margaret (Peggy) Berry in Frederick County, Virginia. He returned to active duty on October 15 and served until the war's end. Robert and Margaret Rankin had three daughters and seven sons, one of whom was Frederick Harrison Rankin. The family moved to Kentucky in 1784. In 1786 Rankin was named by the Virginia legislature as one of nine trustees for the newly established town of Washington, in Bourbon County (later Mason County), Kentucky. In 1792 he served as a delegate from Mason County to the Danville Convention, which drafted the first constitution of Kentucky. He also became an elector of the Kentucky Senate of 1792. The last mention of Rankin in Mason County, Kentucky, is in the 1800 census. The Rankins moved to Logan County, Kentucky, in 1802 and to the Tombigbee River in Mississippi Territory in 1811; the area of their home eventually became Washington County, Alabama. Four of the Rankin sons fought in the War of 1812. The family suffered a severe financial reversal around 1819-20, probably in conjunction with land speculation and the panic of 1819. In July 1828 Rankin first made an application for a pension for his Revolutionary War service.

    In 1832 the Rankins moved to Joseph Vehlein's colony in Texas, along with the William Butler and Peter Cartwright families. Rankin was issued a certificate of character by Jesse Grimes on November 3, 1834, as required by the Mexican government. He applied for a land grant in Vehlein's colony on November 13 of the same year and received a league and labor in October 1835. The town of Coldspring, San Jacinto County, is located on Rankin's original grant. Rankin had the reputation of being a just and diplomatic man. He was a friend of Sam Houston, and his influence with the Indians in the region was well known. Houston reputedly called upon him in the spring of 1836 to encourage neutrality among the Indians during the crucial Texan retreat toward San Jacinto. Toward the end of 1836 Rankin became ill, and he and his wife moved to St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, where he died on November 13, 1837. His body was brought back to the family home near Coldspring, in the new Republic of Texas, and buried in the old Butler Cemetery. In 1936 he was reinterred at the State Cemetery in Austin. His widow lived in Texas with her sons, William and Frederick, in Polk, Montgomery, and Liberty counties until her death sometime after December 1852. Source

Note: His stone is incorrect on his place of death. He was originally buried in Coldspring, but he died in Louisiana.

Republic Hill
Texas State Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 15.921, -097° 43.649