John Smith Davenport Byrom (1798-1837)

    John S. D. Byrom, early settler, son of Henry and Catherine Smith (Davenport) Byrom, was born in Hancock, Georgia, on September 24, 1798. In 1806 he moved with his uncle and guardian, John Byrom, to Jasper County, Georgia. There on March 17, 1818, he married Nancy Fitzpatrick; they had three children. Byrom later moved to Heard County, Georgia, and later still to Florida. After his divorce from his first wife, he married Mary Anne Knott; they had a son and a daughter. In 1830 Byrom came to Texas and settled in what is now Brazoria County. He participated in the battle of Velasco on June 26, 1832. In 1835 he represented Brazoria at the Consultation, and the General Council appointed him one of three commissioners to organize the militia in the Municipality of Brazoria. Byrom was one of the four representatives from the municipality to the Convention of 1836 at Washington-on-the-Brazos and there signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. He died on July 10, 1837. Source

Columbia Cemetery
West Columbia

COORDINATES

29° 08.394, -095° 38.853

Richard Joseph "Turk" Farrell (1934-1977)

    Turk Farrell was an American right-handed pitcher in Major League Baseball from 1956 to 1969. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, he played for the Philadelphia Phillies, Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Colt .45s and Astros, all of the National League. Before the 1953 season, Farrell was signed by the Philadelphia Phillies as an amateur free agent. The 19-year-old was assigned to the class A Schenectady Blue Jays, where over a two-year span (1953-54), he would build an 18-18 record and a 3.30 ERA. He spent 1955 in the IL with the Syracuse Chiefs, going 12-12 with a 3.94 ERA, and in 1956 he played for the Miami Marlins, going 12-6 with a 2.50 ERA. He would get a late-season look in 1956 by the Phillies and would lose his only decision, but set the groundwork for a 14-year run in the major leagues. Farrell was one of the young Phillies pitchers of the late 1950s, along with Jack Meyer and Jim Owens, dubbed the "Dalton Gang" for their fun-loving late-hour escapades. 

    Phillies fans liked what they saw of the 6 ft 4 in hard-throwing rookie right-hander in 1957 when he was 10-2 plus 10 saves and a 2.38 ERA in 52 appearances out of the bullpen. On September 3, 1957, Farrell was the winning pitcher for the Phillies in the last of fifteen home games the Dodgers played at the Jersey City Roosevelt Stadium, 3-2 in twelve innings. After four more seasons of relief work with the Phillies, Farrell was traded to the Dodgers early in 1961. He was selected in the 1961 MLB expansion draft by the Houston Colt .45s. In 1962, Farrell finished with the seventh best ERA at 3.02, but with a poor 10-20 record. A starter in Houston, Farrell was used almost exclusively in relief with Philadelphia and Los Angeles. His career totals include 590 games pitched, a won-loss record of 106-111, 83 saves, and an ERA of 3.45. He was selected to the National League All-Star team 4 times (1958, 1962, 1964 and 1965) in his career. Farrell last pitched in the major leagues on September 19, 1969 for the Phillies against the Expos in a game the Phillies lost 10-6. He would never pitch in the majors again, and would leave the US shortly thereafter for good. Farrell moved to England, where he lived and worked on an offshore oil rig just off Great Britain in the North Sea. He was killed on June 10, 1977, in an auto accident in Great Yarmouth, England, at age 43.

Section 409
Forest Park Westheimer Cemetery
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 44.493, -095° 36.623

David G. Burnet (1788-1870)

    David Gouverneur Burnet, speculator, lawyer, and politician, was born on April 14, 1788, in Newark, New Jersey, the fourteenth child of Dr. William Burnet, and the third of his second wife, widow Gertrude Gouverneur Rutgers. David was orphaned at an early age and raised by his older half-brothers. All of his life he strove to achieve the prominence of his father and brothers: Dr. Burnet served in the Continental Congress and as surgeon general. Jacob Burnet (1770-1853), lawyer, ardent federalist, and later a Whig who nominated his friend, William Henry Harrison, for president, served as a member of the territorial council of Ohio, state legislator, Supreme Court judge, and United States senator, and was honored for intellectual achievements including a history of the territory of Ohio. Another brother, Isaac, was mayor of Cincinnati during the 1820s. Burnet lived with his brothers in Cincinnati, studied law in Jacob's office, and followed the same conservative politics. He wrote proudly in 1859 that he had never been a Democrat and deplored the course of the "ignorant popular Sovereignty." His attitude and politics did not make him popular in Texas, and his entire life was a string of disappointments. After a classical education in a Newark academy, young Burnet wanted to join the navy but instead was placed by a brother as a clerk in a New York commission house in 1805, a position he disliked. On February 2, 1806, he sailed with the unsuccessful filibustering expedition to Venezuela led by Xavier Miranda. Lieutenant Burnet returned to New York at the end of 1806.

    His movements between 1806 and 1817 are obscure; he probably lived with relatives seeking success. About 1817 he moved to Natchitoches, Louisiana, and for the next two years traded with the Comanches near the headwaters of the Brazos with John Cotton. He suffered some sort of pulmonary illness at this time, and living a simple, natural life was supposed to be a cure. His health improved but not his finances, and he returned to Ohio, where he studied law. In May 1826 Burnet passed through San Felipe on his way to Saltillo to petition for an empresario grant, which he received on December 22. The grant authorized him to settle 300 families north of the Old Spanish Road and around Nacogdoches, part of the area recently replevined from Haden Edwards, within six years. He was to receive 23,000 acres from the state of Coahuila and Texas for every 100 families settled. Burnet spent 1827 in Texas and then returned to Ohio, where he fruitlessly sought colonists and financial backing from prominent men to develop his grant. In desperation he and refugee Lorenzo de Zavala sold the rights to their colonization contracts in October 1830 to a group of northeastern investors, the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company. Burnet received an undisclosed sum of money and certificates for four leagues of land from the new company. Unfortunately, he was not allowed to locate the leagues because of the Law of April 6, 1830. He used the money to buy a fifteen-horsepower steam sawmill and move his bride to Texas. They left New York on the seventy-ton schooner Cull on March 4, 1831, and arrived in Galveston Bay on April 4.

    Burnet bought seventeen acres on the San Jacinto River from Nathaniel Lynch for the mill and an additional 279 acres east of Lynch facing Burnet Bay, where he built a simple four-room home called Oakland. Between 1831 and 1835 Burnet unsuccessfully petitioned the state for eleven leagues of land because of the mill; the mill, however, lost money, and he sold it in June 1835. The articulate Burnet impressed local residents, and though he took no part in the events at Anahuac in 1832, they chose him to represent the Liberty neighborhood at the convention at San Felipe in 1833. He helped draft the plea to sever Texas from Coahuila and made an earnest statement against the African slave trade. He hoped to become chief justice of the newly established Texas Supreme Court in 1834 but was only named to head the Brazos District Court. Instead of his $1,000 per annum allotment, Burnet wanted a handsome stipend in land like that which Chief Justice Thomas J. Chambers received. Burnet was against independence for Texas in 1835, although he deplored the tendency of the national government toward a dictatorship. Thus his more radical neighbors did not choose him as a delegate to either the Consultation or the Convention of 1836. Nevertheless, he attended the session on March 10, where he successfully gained clemency for a client sentenced to hang. The delegates, who were opposed to electing one of their number president of the new republic, elected Burnet by a majority of seven votes.

    His ad interim presidency of the Republic of Texas lasted from March 17 to October 22, 1836, and was very difficult. His actions angered Sam Houston, the army, the vice president, many cabinet members, and the public, and he left office embittered, intending never to return home, where a number of neighbors had turned against him. He lacked legal clients and was forced to turn to subsistence farming. In 1838 he entered the race for vice president and rode Mirabeau B. Lamar's coattails to victory. Forced to serve part of the time as secretary of state and acting president, Burnet became more out of step with public opinion. His bid for the presidency in 1841 against his old enemy, Sam Houston, resulted in defeat after a vitriolic campaign of name-calling. Burnet was against annexation to the United States in 1845 but nevertheless applied for the position of United States district judge in 1846. Even with the Whig influence of his brothers, however, he lacked enough political influence. He was named secretary of state by Governor James P. Henderson in 1846 and served one term. An application to the Whig administration in 1849 for a position as Galveston customs collector also failed. His only other public office was largely symbolic, a reward for an elder statesman.

    In 1866 the Texas legislature named Burnet and Oran M. Roberts United States senators, but upon arrival in Washington they were not seated because Texas had failed to meet Republican political demands. Although intellectually opposed to secession, Burnet had embraced the Southern cause when his only son, William, resigned his commission in the United States Army and volunteered for Confederate service. The son was killed in a battle at Spanish Fort, Alabama, in 1865, a crushing blow to Burnet, who had lost his wife in 1858. Burnet had married Hannah Este in Morristown, New Jersey, on December 8, 1830. She bore four children, but only William survived, and the doting parents sacrificed for his education. After Hannah's death Burnet had to hire out his slaves and rent his farm in order to have income to pay his room and board in Galveston. He and Lamar intended to publish a history of the republic to expose Sam Houston, and though Burnet furnished Lamar with many articles, Lamar was unable to find a publisher. Burnet burned his manuscript shortly before his death. He was a Mason and a Presbyterian. He outlived all of his immediate family, died without money in Galveston on December 5, 1870, and was buried by friends. His remains were moved from the Episcopal Cemetery to the new Magnolia Cemetery and finally to Lakeview Cemetery in Galveston, where the Daughters of the Republic of Texas erected a monument to him and his friend Sidney Sherman in 1894. Burnet County was named for him in 1852, and in 1936 the state erected a statue of him on the grounds of the high school in Clarksville. Source

Section C
Lakeview Cemetery
Galveston

COORDINATES

29° 16.392, -094° 49.566

Washington Hampton Secrest (1809-1854)

    W. H. Secrest, soldier, moved to Texas with his brother Felix in 1835. During the Texas Revolution he enlisted as a private in Capt. Henry W. Karnes's company of Mirabeau B. Lamar's cavalry corps but most often was on detached service as a scout with Erastus (Deaf) Smith. In this capacity he was with Moseley Baker at the time of the evacuation and burning of San Felipe, and, when Baker authorized the troops to loot the town before it was put to the torch, Secrest chose a small Bible belonging to Sumner Bacon as his part of the spoils. Years later he joined the Methodist Church at Rutersville; he claimed that he had read the Bible every day since the fall of San Felipe. According to the recollections of pioneer memoirist Dilue Rose Harris, Secrest was one of the men who captured General Santa Anna after the battle of San Jacinto. After that battle Secrest was elected captain of the Washington Cavalry Company, a post he held from June until the company was disbanded on October 23, 1836. For his services he was granted a headright in Colorado County in 1838. By 1841 he was living in Fort Bend County, where he was authorized a league and a labor of land on January 16, 1850. On September 22, 1842, Sam Houston commissioned Secrest to raise a company of rangers in response to Rafael Vásquez' raid on San Antonio. Secrest was characterized as something of a daredevil, and Houston wrote to him, "Your characteristic activity, caution and valor will be of great use, and contribute much to the success of our arms." On July 10, 1852, the Texas State Gazette erroneously reported that Secrest had been shot and killed at Columbus, Texas, during an altercation with a man named Taylor on June 21. On July 17 the newspaper rescinded that report and stated that Secrest had been stabbed but was recovering. He died of natural causes at his home at Columbus on February 3, 1854. Source


Navidad Baptist Cemetery
Schulenburg

COORDINATES

29° 38.496, -096° 53.264

George Washington Petty (1812-1901)

    Born April 7, 1812 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Petty emigrated to Texas in the fall of 1835 and settled at Cole's Settlement (now Independence). As the Texas Independence movement took hold in early 1836, he was sworn into the Texican militia by Captain Joseph P. Lynch on March 1 as a soldier in Captain William W. Hill's Company. He remained in the service for just three months, during which time he fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, before being discharged from the army on June 1. Petty died during services at a revival meeting at Alexander Camp Grounds at Kenny, Austin County, on July 27, 1901.

Section 3
Prairie Lea Cemetery
Brenham

COORDINATES

30° 09.331, -096° 24.526

Albert Clinton Horton (1798-1865)

    Albert Horton, the first lieutenant governor of Texas, son of William and Mary (Thomas) Horton, was born in Hancock County, Georgia, on September 4, 1798. In 1829 he married Eliza Holliday. Before moving to Texas he served as a representative in the Alabama state legislature (1829-30, 1833-34), representing Greensboro district. He arrived in Texas in April 1835 and became an early and active supporter of the Texas Revolution. He traveled to Alabama to recruit volunteers; the company became known as the Mobile Grays and were outfitted at Horton's own expense. He also organized a company of cavalry volunteers in Matagorda in February 1836. Colonel Horton's company joined Col. James Walker Fannin, Jr.'s command in South Texas in early March. On March 19 Horton advanced with a small detachment on a scouting patrol of Coleto Creek. Turning to find the remainder of Fannin's army surrounded by hostile forces, Horton and his patrol fled, an action that saved his life but haunted his later political career. His military service ended on May 1, 1836. From 1836 to 1838 Horton, a Democrat, served as senator in the First and Second congresses of the republic, representing Matagorda, Jackson, and Victoria counties. He campaigned unsuccessfully for the vice presidency in 1838.

    In January 1839 he was chosen by the Republic of Texas Congress to chair the committee to select the site of the new capital. On March 7, 1842, Horton was recruited to serve as captain under Colonel Owen, to defend against Rafael Vásquez, and his force of 500-700 Mexican soldiers, who had seized San Antonio. Horton served as a delegate to the Convention of 1845 and subsequently consented to run for lieutenant governor. Voting returns initially awarded the victory to his opponent, Nicholas Henry Darnell, but late returns from several South Texas counties were sufficient to alter the results. On May 1, 1846, Horton was declared the first lieutenant governor of the new state. When Governor James Pinckney Henderson left to assume command of Texas volunteers assembled to deal with troubles with Mexico, Horton served as governor pro tem from May 19, 1846 until Henderson returned on November 13, 1846. He was never elected to another public office, and he emerged from retirement only to attend the Democratic national convention in Charleston in 1860 and the state Secession Congress in 1861. Horton moved to his plantation on Caney Creek in what is now Wharton County, near Wharton, by 1843 and maintained a large home on a plantation in Matagorda County, near the town of Matagorda. On the eve of the Civil War he owned more than 150 slaves and was one of the wealthiest men in the state. During the war, however, he lost most of his money. He was a lifelong Baptist and an original member of the board of trustees that established Baylor University. Of the six children born during his marriage, only a son and a daughter survived him. Horton died on September 1, 1865, at Matagorda, where he is buried. Source

Section D
Matagorda Cemetery
Matagorda

COORDINATES

28° 42.008, -095° 57.333