Buddy Tinsley (1924-2011)

    Buddy Tinsley was born in Damon, Texas, and played college football at Baylor. He was drafted in 1948 by the Philadelphia Eagles, but after only one year in the AAFC with the Los Angeles Dons, he had a contract dispute with the Pittsburgh Steelers and went north to Canada. Although American, Tinsley was classified as a non-import later in his career under the rules at the time for long time players and naturalized citizens, allowing him to play on Canadian teams. He played eleven years in the Canadian Football League, all with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, from 1950 to 1960. Playing on both sides of the ball, Tinsley was an All-Star on both offense and defense; he won West All-Star honors five times at offensive tackle (1950, 1951, 1952, 1955 and 1956) and two West All-Stars at defensive tackle (1957 and 1958). He played in five Grey Cup games, winning two (1958 and 1959) and losing three (1950, 1953 and 1957), one of the losses coming from the infamous Mud Bowl, where he was rumored he nearly drowned in a mud puddle. Tinsley was elected to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 1982, the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame in 1994, as well as the Winnipeg Blue Bombers Hall of Fame and the Baylor University Hall of Fame. He passed away on September 14, 2011 in Winnipeg, Manitoba at age 87.

Columbia Cemetery
West Columbia

COORDINATES

29° 08.454, -095° 38.876

Andrew Jackson Montgomery (1801-1863)

    Andrew Jackson Montgomery, adventurer, businessman, soldier, and surveyor, was born near Maryville, Tennessee, on April 4, 1801, to William and Mary (James) Montgomery. By 1816 the family was living in Alabama. In 1819, at the age of eighteen, Montgomery took part in the filibustering expedition of James Long into Texas. His duties included scouting the territory between the camps that Long established in East Texas. Montgomery's connections among the Bidai Indians enabled him to remain in hiding in Texas after the Spanish drove out most of the rest of the expedition. Subsequently, the Mexicans successfully rebelled against their Spanish masters, making it possible for Montgomery to establish, in 1823, a trading post on the lower Coushatta Trace, an Indian trail stretching between the Brazos and Trinity rivers. Intersecting this trace from north to south at Montgomery's post was the Indian trail known as the Loma del Toro. Montgomery advertised for and welcomed settlers to the trading post and to the budding community surrounding it, which was known at first as Montgomery Prairie. By 1827 much of his family had joined him, including his father, his uncle James, and his aunt Margaret and her husband, Owen Shannon. These Montgomerys were all cousins of Gen. Richard Montgomery of Revolutionary War fame. 

    Before the construction of Fort Parker in 1835, Montgomery did surveying in the area as well as near the Brazos Falls for the Nashville Colony. During the Texas Revolution he served as a private and fought in the battle of San Jacinto. On April 21, 1860, he served as vice president of the convention that nominated his friend and former commander, Sam Houston, for president of the United States. Montgomery eventually moved a few miles west to the community now known as Stoneham. The settlement that he had established near his trading post continued to use the name Montgomery, and in 1837 Montgomery County was named after the town. At the age of forty-three Montgomery married Mary Mahulda Farris, and they had nine children. He died in 1863 and was buried in Stoneham. Source

Stoneham Cemetery
Stoneham

COORDINATES

30° 21.468, -095° 55.372

Guy Morrison Bryan (1821-1901)

    Guy Bryan, legislator, Confederate officer, and judge, son of James and Emily Austin Bryan, was born at Herculaneum, Jefferson County, Missouri, on January 12, 1821. His mother was the sister of Stephen F. Austin. James Bryan died in 1822, and Emily married James F. Perry in 1824. In 1831 the family moved to Texas and lived at San Felipe and at Pleasant Bayou until December 1832, when they located at Peach Point Plantation in Brazoria County. Bryan was boarding with Josiah H. Bell to attend a school taught by Thomas J. Pilgrim in March 1836, when he was selected as a courier to carry the William B. Travis letter written at the Alamo from Bell's Landing to Brazoria and Velasco. Bryan accompanied his mother on the Runaway Scrape and after her return home visited the battlefield at San Jacinto and enlisted in the Texas army as orderly for Alexander Somervell. Bryan attended school at Chocolate Bayou in 1836 and 1837 and in May 1837 entered Kenyon College, where he graduated in 1842. He returned to Texas and studied law in the Brazoria law office of William H. Jack until failing eyesight ended his law studies. Soon after the outbreak of the Mexican War, Bryan enlisted in a Brazoria volunteer company and was in service under John C. (Jack) Hays east of the Rio Grande until he had to return home with his brother, Stephen S. Perry, who had become ill.

    In 1847 Bryan was elected to the Texas legislature. He served six years in the House (1847-53) and four years in the Senate (1853-57). On October 20, 1858, he married Laura H. Jack, daughter of William H. Jack. She accompanied him to Washington, D.C., where he represented the Western District of Texas in the Thirty-fifth Congress, 1857-59. His testimony before the House probably caused the collapse of the impeachment case against John C. Watrous. Bryan moved to Galveston in 1860 and operated ranches in Galveston and Brazoria counties. He was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1860, and as chairman and spokesman for the delegation led in the split from the convention. A leader in the movement for secession, Bryan associated himself with Oran M. Roberts. George M. Flournoy, John F. Marshall, and Williamson S. Oldham in calling for the election of delegates to the Secession Convention. 

    During the Civil War, early in 1862, Jefferson Davis sent Bryan to visit the governors of the Trans-Mississippi Department to reconcile the clash between civil and military authorities. When Bryan requested active field duty in May 1863, General Edmund Kirby Smith made him confidential adjutant general. Later Bryan helped organize the Texas Cotton Bureau. He was offered a place on Davis's staff and was later appointed by Pendleton Murrah as Texas representative at the headquarters of the Trans-Mississippi Department. After the war, Bryan lived at Galveston except for a time spent in Hot Springs, Arkansas. He was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1873, 1879, and 1887, serving as speaker of the Fourteenth Legislature in 1874. In May 1873 he was a charter member of the Texas Veterans Association and from 1892 until his death served as its president. He was also a charter member and vice president of the Texas State Historical Association. He moved to Austin in 1898 and died there on June 4, 1901. He was buried in the State Cemetery. Source

Republic Hill
Texas State Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 15.914, -097° 45.627

Margaret Virginia "Margo" Jones (1911-1955)

    Margo Jones, theater director-producer and pioneer of the American resident theater movement, was born on December 12, 1911, in Livingston, Texas, the second child of Richard Harper and Martha Pearl (Collins) Jones. After graduating from Livingston High School at the age of fifteen, she entered the Girls' Industrial College of Texas in Denton (now Texas Woman's University), where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in speech in 1932 and a master of arts in psychology and education in 1933. Her thesis was about Henrik Ibsen. In 1933 and 1934 she worked and studied at the Southwestern School of the Theatre in Dallas with John William Rogers, Frank Harting, and Louis Veda Quince. In the summer of 1934 she enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse Summer School to study with the director and founder, Gilmor Brown.

    After a directing stint at the Ojai Community Theatre, in 1935 Margo Jones traveled around the world seeing theater in Japan, China, India, Africa, England, France, and New York. She returned to Texas and became assistant director of the Houston Federal Theatre Project. In 1936 she attended the Moscow Art Theatre Festival, and on the boat home she met Brooks Atkinson, an influential New York Times theater critic, who championed her work throughout her career. Margo Jones founded the Houston Community Players in 1936 and directed the theater until 1942; during this time she discovered such talent as actors Ray Walston and Larry Blyden and writers Charles William Goyen and Cy Howard. She earned national attention as a member of the National Theatre Conference and in 1939 was named by Stage magazine as one of twelve outstanding theater directors outside of New York, the only woman selected. From 1942 until 1944 Jones taught theater and directed plays at the University of Texas. In early 1942 she met playwright Tennessee Williams, and they began their personal and professional association. She directed his play You Touched Me (co-written with Donald Windham) at the Pasadena Playhouse and at the Cleveland Playhouse in 1943, thus bringing Williams to the attention of national theater critics. In 1944 she directed Williams's The Purification at the Pasadena Playhouse.

    During this time she had been formulating an idea that would change the shape of theater in America. She wanted to establish a network of nonprofit professional resident theaters outside of New York-theaters presenting new plays and the classics. In early 1944 she met with John Rosenfield, Jr., Dallas theater critic and arts maven, who encouraged her to apply for a Rockefeller fellowship and establish her prototype theater in Dallas. She began her fellowship in 1944 studying theater around the country, but interrupted it to codirect Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. With the commercial success of this play Jones and Rosenfield had the impetus they needed to found the first nonprofit resident theater supported by the Dallas community and such wealthy and prominent Dallasites as board members Eugene B. McDermott (who later founded Texas Instruments) and oil geologist Everett L. DeGolyer (later the publisher of Saturday Review), as well as board members Tennessee Williams and noted theatrical designer Jo Mielziner. The theater, incorporated in 1945 as Dallas Civic Theatre, did not open until the summer of 1947. In the interim Margo Jones raised money, looked for a suitable theater space, and directed Maxine Wood's On Whitman Avenue and Maxwell Anderson's Joan of Lorraine, starring Ingrid Bergman, on Broadway.

    In June 1947 the theater opened under the name Theatre '47 (the name to change with the year), and was housed in the Gulf Oil Building, a sleek stucco-and-glass-block building designed in the International style by Swiss-born architect William Lescaze, on the grounds of Fair Park in Dallas. The theater was the first professional arena theater (theater-in-the-round) in the country and was the first modern nonprofit professional resident theater. From the beginning the resident company performed new plays and classics of world theater. The inaugural season introduced the first play of William Inge, Farther Off from Heaven, later revised as The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams. Later seasons included classics by Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov and new works by Dorothy Parker, Sean O'Casey, George Sessions Perry, and Joseph Hayes. With her personal and professional partner, Manning Gurian, Margo took new plays from her Dallas season, including Williams' Summer and Smoke, and produced them with varying degrees of success on Broadway and on tour. While running the Dallas theater, she continued to work "to create the theatre of tomorrow today" and establish resident theaters like hers around the country. She lectured widely and in 1951 published Theatre-in-the Round, which inspired other theater leaders like Zelda Fichandler and Nina Vance to follow in her path. In 1955, after it had been turned down by Broadway producers as too controversial, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's play Inherit the Wind was produced by Theatre '55 in Dallas, then moved to Broadway.

    During Margo Jones's management of the theater, from 1947 to 1955, 70 percent of the plays she produced were world premieres. Many actors, among them Jack Warden, Larry Hagman, Brenda Vaccaro, and Louise Latham, got their start at the Dallas theater. The theater closed in 1959. Margo Jones died in Dallas on July 24, 1955, accidentally poisoned by carbon tetrachloride that had been used to clean the carpet in her apartment. The Texas Historical Commission has declared her birthplace a state landmark. After her death Eugene and Margaret McDermott donated $200,000 for the founding of the Margo Jones Theatre at Southern Methodist University. In 1961 playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee established the Margo Jones Award, given annually to a producing manager whose policy of presenting new work continues in the tradition of Margo Jones. After twenty-five years the award was changed and now goes to a "theatre statesperson." Today, the commercial theater of Broadway depends on and showcases the work of more than 300 nonprofit resident theaters across the country, which constitute the national theater for America that Margo Jones envisioned and pioneered. Source

Division 7
Forest Hill Cemetery
Livingston

COORDINATES

30° 41.686, -094° 55.930

Mary Stanley Bunce Palmer Shindler (1810-1883)

    Mary Shindler was a poet of the southern United States. Her father, the Rev. B. M. Palmer, was pastor of a Congregational Church at Beaufort, and when she was three years old he moved with her to Charleston, South Carolina, where she was educated. In Charleston, she was educated by the Misses Ramsay, the daughters of David Ramsay, the historian. The summer of 1825 her parents spent in Hartford, Connecticut, and she was placed for six months at a female seminary in the neighboring town of Wethersfield. In 1826 she was placed at a young ladies’ seminary in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. She pined for her Southern home, and at the expiration of six months was allowed to return to the arms of her parents. She subsequently spent several months at a seminary in New Haven, Connecticut. In June 1835, Mary Palmer married Charles E. Dana, and moved with him first to New York City, and in 1837 to Bloomington, Iowa. During this time she occasionally wrote little pieces of poetry, but did not publish them. Before her marriage, however, she had written considerably for the Rose-Bud, a juvenile periodical published in Charleston by Mrs. Gilman. On her husband's death, she returned to her family in Charleston.

    To give herself mental occupation, she now began to indulge in literary pursuits. She had always been very fond of music, and finding very little piano music that was suitable for Sunday playing, she had for several years been in the habit of adapting sacred words to any song which particularly pleased her. To wean her from her sorrows, her parents encouraged her to continue the practice, and this was the origin of the first work she published, The Southern Harp. At first she had no idea of publishing these little effusions, but having written quite a number of them, she was advised to print a few for herself and friends. The work, however grew under her hands, until finally, becoming much interested in the design, she decided to publish, not only the words, but the music. She visited New York for this purpose in 1840, and the work appeared early in 1841. In the early 1840s, she experienced a change in her religious views, which attracted considerable attention, and led to her next publication. She had been bred a Calvinist, but during the year 1844 she began to entertain doubts about the doctrine of the Trinity, and finally, to the grief of her revered parents, and numerous friends, early in the year 1845, she avowed herself a Unitarian. Both her parents died within weeks of each other, and in 1848, she became an Episcopalian. In May of that year, she married the Rev. Robert D. Shindler, a clergyman of the Episcopal Church, who was for a time professor in Shelby College, Kentucky. She moved with her husband in 1850 to Upper Marlboro, Maryland, and in 1869 to Nacogdoches, Texas, where she passed away in 1883.


Oak Grove Cemetery
Nacogdoches

COORDINATES

31° 36.187, -094° 38.932