Stephen Heard Darden (1816-1902)

    Stephen Heard Darden, public official and soldier, son of Washington Lee and Ann (Sharkey) Darden, was born in Fayette County, Mississippi, on November 19, 1816. He traveled to Texas in 1836 as a volunteer under Capt. David M. Fulton for service in the Texas Revolution. Darden served as clerk in the office of the comptroller in September 1836. He returned to Madison County, Mississippi, in the early 1840s but was back in Texas in 1841 and purchased land on the Guadalupe River in Gonzales County. He represented the county for two terms in the state House of Representatives and once in the state Senate. In 1861, as a state senator, he initially opposed secession but finally voted with the majority; at the coming of the Civil War he was elected first lieutenant of Company A of the Fourth Texas Infantry in Hood's Texas Brigade. He served under colonels Robert T. P. Allen, John Bell Hood, and John F. Marshall. He was elected captain of his company on May 20, 1862, but after the battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg) that September he resigned due to ill health. Darden was the appointed colonel in command of the Fifth Infantry regiment of state troops on the Texas Gulf Coast in 1863 and, upon the death of John A. Wilcox, was elected to fill the unexpired term in the Second Confederate Congress, where he took his seat on November 21, 1864.

    As a Confederate congressman Darden served on the Naval Affairs Committee. As a firm states'-rights advocate he opposed the growth of the central government of the Confederate States of America and thus generally voted against the Jefferson Davis administration. While he supported higher taxation, a larger army, and a powerful commander-in-chief, he fought against taxation in kind, centralized control over transportation and production, and the confiscation of slaves for public works. Darden was financially ruined by the war and apparently returned to his Gonzales County farm. When Reconstruction ended he was appointed comptroller of public accounts and served from 1873 to 1879. He recommended that the school money be invested in state bonds and thus raised the bonds to par. Although he retired from office in January 1881 because of his age, he accepted the chief clerkship in his old department. He was appointed superintendent of public buildings and grounds on February 9, 1884, and chief clerk of the comptroller's department in January 1887. He assisted in organizing the state Democratic party in 1871 and was secretary of the Texas Veterans Association from 1886 until his death. Darden may have been married four times; the last time to Catherine Mays in March 1862. He died at Wharton on May 16, 1902, and was buried in the State Cemetery, Austin. Source 

Note: The birth date on his stone is incorrect.

Republic Hill
Texas State Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 15.920, -097° 43.651

Julissa D'anne Gomez (1972-1991)

    Julissa D'anne Gomez was born in San Antonio, Texas, the younger of two daughters born to a pair of former migrant farm workers from Laredo. Her parents, Otilia and Ramiro, worked their way up from their farm working days to become a teacher and a welder, respectively, and struggled to keep their family together while giving 10-year-old budding gymnast Julissa a chance to train with renowned gymnastics coach Béla Károlyi in Houston. At the 1986 U.S. Championships, she placed fourth in the all-around in the junior division and won a place on the U.S. National Team. By 1987 she was representing the United States in international meets. Especially strong on the uneven bars and balance beam, Gomez was considered a legitimate contender for the 1988 U.S. Olympic team.

    In mid-1987, Gomez, wanting to move further up the rankings and reportedly frustrated with Károlyi's sometimes abusive training methods, decided to leave the Károlyis. After briefly training at US Acrosports in Webster, Texas, Gomez's search for a new coach led her to select Al Fong, who was the trainer of another up-and-coming gymnast eager to make the 1988 Olympic team, Christy Henrich. Though her parents had vowed to keep the family together no matter where Julissa's career took her, they decided that Ramiro would move with Julissa to Blue Springs, Missouri, where Fong's gymnastics club, Great American Gymnastics Express, was located, while Otilla would remain behind until Julissa's older sister Kristy finished school for the year. In May 1988, several months before the Olympics, she traveled with her coach to Tokyo, Japan, to compete in the World Sports Fair. During the all-around competition, Gomez qualified for the vault finals. However, observers had noticed her struggle with the apparatus over the months leading up to the competition, including her former coach Béla Károlyi, past and present teammates, and even her present coach Al Fong. Gomez's technique on the extremely difficult Yurchenko vault had been described as shaky at best, and Gomez was unable to perform the vault with any consistency during practices, sometimes missing her feet on the springboard. However, Julissa's coaches insisted that she needed to continue training and competing the Yurchenko vault in order to achieve high scores.

    During warmups for the final, held on May 5, 1988, Gomez continued to practice the Yurchenko. As she raced toward the vault on one of her practice runs, her foot slipped off the springboard and her head hit the vaulting horse at high speed. The resulting impact instantly paralyzed her from the neck down. A subsequent accident at a Japanese hospital, in which she became disconnected from her ventilator, resulted in severe brain damage and left her in a catatonic state. Her family cared for her for three years before she succumbed to an infection and died in August 1991 in Houston, just three months shy of her nineteenth birthday. The tragedy stands as one of the most serious accidents ever to occur in artistic gymnastics, and helped prompt changes in the sport. In 1989, the International Gymnastics Federation decided to increase vaulting safety by allowing U-shaped springboard mats, traditionally utilized in practice to give all gymnasts a greater margin of error in preflight, to be used during competitions. The mat is now mandatory: as of the 2006 Code of Points, performing a Yurchenko-style vault without the safety mat results in an automatic score of zero. In 2001, the traditional horse was completely phased out and replaced by a larger, more stable vaulting table to provide gymnasts with additional safety.

Block 1
Woodlawn Garden of Memories
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 47.283, -095° 28.755

Wyly Martin (1776-1842)

    Wyly (Wiley) Martin, soldier, judge, and legislator, was born in Georgia in 1776. As a young man he worked as a clerk, as a teacher, and at a variety of other occupations. During the War of 1812 he was commissioned a third lieutenant in the Ninth United States Infantry on August 9, 1813. He served as a scout for Gen. William Henry Harrison and fought under Gen. Andrew Jackson at the battle of Horseshoe Bend, Alabama. He was promoted to first lieutenant in the Thirty-ninth Infantry on July 29, 1813, and to captain of the Third Rifle Regiment on March 17, 1814. He was honorably discharged on June 15, 1815, and reinstated on December 2. On June 1, 1821, he transferred to the Sixth Infantry. He resigned his commission on July 21, 1823, reputedly because he killed a man in a duel.

    In 1825 he immigrated to Texas, where he was appointed alcalde of Stephen F. Austin's colony. In 1835 he was acting jefe político of the Department of the Brazos. He was a delegate from San Felipe de Austin to the conventions of 1832, 1833, and 1835. As a member of the so-called "Peace party," Martin disavowed the actions of William B. Travis and others of the "War party" at Anahuac and was opposed to Texas independence from Mexico; but with the coming of the Texas Revolution he signed the declaration of war against Antonio López de Santa Anna's Centralist regime, on November 7, 1835. At Bexar in December he drew a pen-and-ink sketch of Travis, the only known portrait of the man done from life. Martin raised a company that joined Sam Houston's army at Columbus. He was promoted to major and detached to guard the crossings of the lower Brazos River, then flanked out of his position at Fort Bend when the Mexican army crossed at the site of present Richmond. Although both Houston and secretary of war Thomas J. Rusk approved his action in falling back before superior numbers of the enemy, Martin was irate because he had been given an inadequate command - forty-six men - to observe the four fords and ferries he was responsible for holding. When he was ordered on April 13 to rejoin the main army at the Donaho plantation, he marched his force back to Houston's headquarters and relinquished his command. Subsequently, he was an outspoken opponent of Houston and his political policies.

    Martin saw little service for the remainder of the war, and on May 15 Rusk regretfully accepted his resignation. After independence Martin made his home in Fort Bend County, where he was appointed chief justice of the county on December 29, 1837, and was elected to the post on September 6, 1841. He was admitted to the bar in 1838. He was elected to represent Austin, Colorado, and Fort Bend counties in Congress. At age sixty-five, he was the oldest senator in the Sixth Congress of the Republic of Texas. He died at the home of Randal Jones in the Fort Bend settlement on April 26, 1842, in the interval between sessions. Martin County is named for him. Source


Dyer Cemetery
Richmond

COORDINATES

29° 34.659, -095° 45.420

Henry Tierwester (?-1859)

    Born Heinrich Thurwachter in France, he became Henry Tierwester after an immigrations clerk misspelled his name and he decided to keep it. He came to Texas from Ohio in 1828 and applied for land in Austin's Second Colony, which he received in October, 1832. His grant was located in present-day Harris County, and he settled in a small town nearby named Frost Town. On March 1, 1836, he enlisted in the Texas Army as a private in Captain William S. Fisher's Company of Velasco Blues until June 7. During the battle of San Jacinto, he was shot through a powder horn that he had slung around his neck. Fortunately, the bullet had been spent before it penetrated fully and he was unharmed. He married Anne White on April 12, 1838, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1842; he later married Phillipine Pugh, and remained so until his death in 1859. His grave in Houston's City Cemetery was once marked and fenced, but is now lost.

Note: Unmarked. Founders Memorial Park, originally founded in 1836 as Houston's first city cemetery, was rapidly filled due to a yellow fever epidemic and closed to further burials around 1840. The cemetery became neglected over a period of time, often vandalized and was heavily damaged by the 1900 hurricane. In 1936, despite a massive clean up effort, a century of neglect had taken its toll. The vast majority of grave markers were either destroyed or missing and poor record keeping prevented locating individual graves. Several cenotaphs were placed in random areas throughout the park in honor of the more high-profile citizens buried there, but a great number of graves go unmarked to this day. Henry Tierwester's is one of them.

Founders Memorial Park
Houston

COORDINATES

N/A