Hugh John Devore (1910-1992)

    Hugh Devore was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, and was a three-sport star at the city's St. Benedict's Prep. While playing on the freshman squad in 1930, Devore caught the legendary Knute Rockne's eye during an intrasquad scrimmage and recruited into Notre Dame. Unfortunately, Devore never had the opportunity to play for Rockne in an official game after the coach was killed in a plane crash on March 31, 1931. During his three years as a member of the Fighting Irish varsity, Devore played at end under Hunk Anderson, serving as co-captain during his senior year in 1933. Upon graduating from the school, Devore stayed at Notre Dame the following year as freshman football coach, then followed fellow Irish alum Jim Crowley as line coach at Fordham University in 1935. Following three seasons in that role, made famous by his coaching Fordham's iconic "Seven Blocks of Granite" a unit that included future Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Vince Lombardi, he accepted his first head coaching position when he was hired at Providence College on January 20, 1938. After his fourth season with the Friars, Devore then took an assistant coaching position with Holy Cross College on January 11, 1942. His one year at the school was marked by his expert scouting leading to a stunning 55-12 upset of the Eagles in the season finale. Devore then returned to his alma mater as ends coach the following year.

    When Irish head coach Frank Leahy entered the U.S. Navy in early 1944, Edward McKeever was named interim head coach, but when McKeever accepted the head coaching slot at Cornell University, Devore took his place. Notre Dame started that season in strong fashion with five straight wins and was ranked second in the nation, but a 48-0 thrashing by a potent Army squad ended hopes of a national title. Upon Leahy's return, Devore was under consideration for the head coaching position at the University of Arkansas, but instead signed to lead St. Bonaventure College. In his first three years, Devore led his teams to a 19-5-1 record, an effort that earned him a new three-year contract. Yet after one season, Devore announced his resignation on February 2, 1950 to accept the head coaching position at New York University, citing the proximity to his New Jersey roots. He had entered the job in hopes of improving the fortunes of the once-powerful program which had struggled after years of neglect and strict academic standards that had led to a severe downturn. The effort went for naught when after three years of trying, the school announced on March 10, 1953 that it was dropping its football program after 80 seasons, leaving Devore looking for work.

    Less than a month later, he found employment at the professional level for the first time as an assistant with the NFL's Green Bay Packers. That role lasted only one season before he returned to the colleges as head coach at the University of Dayton on January 6, 1954. After two seasons with the Flyers, homesickness pangs once again led him to accept the position of head coach of the NFL Eagles on January 9, 1956. Devore struggled during his two seasons, which led to hiss firing on January 11, 1958. He quickly found work again at Notre Dame as freshman coach and assistant athletic director. On February 9, 1966, he was hired as an assistant coach for the American Football League's Houston Oilers. After five years in that capacity, Devore then went to work as promotions director for the Houston Sports Association, dealing primarily with bringing in events for the city's Astrodome. He continued working until his retirement at the age of 75 in 1986. Health issues led Devore to move in with his daughter in August 1992, and four months later he died, nearly two weeks after his 82nd birthday.

Section 2
Memorial Oaks Cemetery
Houston

COORDINATES

29° 46.991, -095° 36.971

Elisha Marshall Pease (1812-1883)

    Elisha Marshall Pease, governor of Texas, son of Lorrain Thompson and Sarah (Marshall) Pease, was born on January 3, 1812, at Enfield, Connecticut. After study at Westfield Academy in Massachusetts he held several minor positions, including a clerkship in the post office at Hartford, Connecticut. In 1834 he sought new opportunity in the West. By early 1835 he had made his way to Texas, where he settled in the Municipality of Mina and continued the law studies he had begun in Connecticut. Almost immediately Pease became embroiled in the developing Texas Revolution. In the spring of 1835 he became secretary of a committee of safety at Mina. Though at first he hoped for conciliation with Mexico, Pease soon changed his position and fought in the battle of Gonzales, the first battle of the revolution, on October 2. He then served as secretary to the General Council of the Provisional Government and, as a member of that body, attended the convention that met at Washington-on-the-Brazos in March 1836. At that meeting he wrote part of the Constitution of the Republic of Texas. He then served the ad interim government as chief clerk, successively, of the Navy and Treasury Departments. During the early months of the republic Pease served as clerk to the judiciary committee of the House of Representatives and took a major part in writing the new nation's criminal code. In the fall of 1836 he served as acting Secretary of the Treasury but declined President Sam Houston's offer of the postmaster generalship in order to return to Brazoria to continue his legal studies. After his admittance to the bar in April 1837 Pease became the republic's first comptroller of public accounts. He then took up the practice of law at Brazoria and soon became successful and respected in his profession.

    After annexation Pease represented Brazoria County in the first three legislatures and authored the Probate Code of 1846. In 1851 he made an unsuccessful run for the governorship. Two years later he won the office and was reelected in 1855. Pease was an outstanding governor. Among his important achievements was his pioneering effort to persuade the legislature to establish a system of public education and a state university. Though this effort proved largely premature, Pease's administration did establish the permanent school fund, and his vision laid the groundwork for future achievement. He also worked to encourage railroad construction in Texas, to put the state penitentiary on a self-supporting basis, and to establish reservations to civilize and educate the state's Indian population. In addition, he supervised the building campaign that led to the completion of the Governor's Mansion, the General Land Office building, the State Orphan's Home (now the Corsicana State Home), and a new Capitol. Perhaps his most significant accomplishment was the settlement of the public debt of the state, by which he made available funds for the establishment of a hospital for the mentally ill and schools for the deaf and blind, all of which he had recommended to the legislature. Upon his retirement from office in 1857, the state was in excellent financial condition.

    In 1859 Pease aligned himself with the Unionist faction in Texas politics. He remained active in this movement into the early months of the Civil War, after which he quietly maintained his loyalty to the Union until the end of the conflict. In 1866 he lost a bid to become governor again in the first election of the Reconstruction era. Early in 1867 he helped organize the Republican party in Texas. Later that year Gen. Philip H. Sheridan removed Governor James W. Throckmorton from office and appointed Pease in his place. Pease's subsequent efforts to reorganize the state government and bring accountability to its actions were met by conflict within the Republican ranks and bitterness toward the chief executive by the former Confederate majority in the state. Pease resigned from the governorship in 1869 because of differences with Gen. Joseph J. Reynolds over Reconstruction policies that Pease considered radical and despotic. 

    Throughout the remainder of his life Pease remained actively interested in political affairs in the state. He was president of the non-partisan Tax-payers' Convention of 1871, which opposed many of the measures of Governor Edmund J. Davis's administration. In 1872 he was chairman of the Texas delegation to the national Liberal Republican convention. In 1879 President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Pease to the collectorship of customs at Galveston. In the closing years of his life Pease practiced law in Austin, engaged in various business ventures, and lived a quiet life with his wife, the former Lucadia Christiana Niles, of Poquonock, Connecticut, whom he had married in 1850, and their two daughters. A third daughter had died in childhood. Pease died on August 26, 1883, after an attack of apoplexy. Source

Section 4
Oakwood Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 16.608, -097° 43.631

Hugh McLeod (1814-1862)

    Hugh McLeod, soldier and legislator of the Republic of Texas, was born on August 1, 1814, in New York City, the son of Hugh and Isabella (Douglas) McLeod. The family soon moved to Macon, Georgia. He entered the United States Military Academy at West Point on September 1, 1831, and graduated last in a class of fifty-six in 1835. He was brevetted second lieutenant in the Third United States Infantry on September 18, 1835, and ordered to Fort Jesup, Louisiana. On his way to his first posting, however, he visited Macon and there fell in with the Georgia Battalion volunteers for the Texas army-and accompanied it as far as Columbus, Georgia. Ardent in his desire to join the Texans, he resigned his United States Army commission, effective June 30, 1836. In Texas, McLeod advanced rapidly in rank, becoming adjutant general in the Army of the Republic of Texas in December 1837 and adjutant and inspector general in 1840. He served against the Caddos and Kickapoos in 1838, fought the Cherokees in 1839, and was wounded at the battle of the Nueces. He was appointed one of two negotiators with the Comanches before the Council House Fight in San Antonio in 1840. His official report on the fight is appended to the Journal of the Fifth Legislature of the Republic of Texas.

    During this period he studied law and began practice in 1839. After his tenure as adjutant general ended on January 18, 1841, McLeod was commissioned a brigadier general on June 17 and appointed commander of the military component of the Texan Santa Fe expedition by President Mirabeau B. Lamar. McLeod's illness delayed the expedition somewhat and was perhaps a contributing factor in its failure. He was captured with the rest of the expedition and interned at Perote Prison through the summer of 1842. As an important prisoner, he was reported to have been treated well by his Mexican captors. Later that year he married Rebecca Johnson Lamar, a cousin of President Lamar. The couple had two children: a daughter, who died in infancy, and a son. Upon his return to Texas McLeod was appointed to the House of Representatives of the Seventh Congress (1842-43) from Bexar County, to fill the seat Samuel A. Maverick was forced to vacate when he was captured and taken to Mexico by Adrián Woll's raiders in September 1842. In 1844 he was returned to the House, again representing Bexar County, in the Ninth Congress (1844-45). In national politics McLeod was a Democrat except for a brief flirtation with the Know-Nothing party (or American party) in the mid-1850s, but locally he was a member of the anti-Houston faction. Before the Mexican War McLeod was once again appointed adjutant general of Texas.

    He subsequently retired from public life and in 1850 became involved in the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway, the first railroad company in Texas. In 1855 he was a delegate to the southern commercial convention in New Orleans. McLeod was commissioned a lieutenant colonel of state troops at the time of secession from the Union and participated in the capture of the federal forts on the lower Rio Grande. During the Civil War he was elected lieutenant colonel of the First Texas Infantry Regiment of what was later became Hood's Texas Brigade. When the regimental commander, Louis T. Wigfall, was promoted to brigadier general, McLeod was promoted to colonel and assigned to command of the regiment. He died of pneumonia near Dumfries, Virginia, on January 2, 1862. His body was returned to Texas and is buried in the State Cemetery in Austin. McLeod was characterized as a "fat, jovial man" and said to have been popular, in spite of his violent attacks on Sam Houston. Source 

Republic Hill
Texas State Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 15.921, -097° 43.645

George Duncan Hancock (1809-1879)

    George Duncan Hancock, soldier of the Republic of Texas, merchant, legislator, and civil leader, was born in Tennessee on April 27, 1809, the son of John Allen and Sarah (Ryan) Hancock. He moved with his family to Alabama in 1819 and was educated there. In 1835 he moved to Texas. At the battle of San Jacinto he served as a private in Capt. William Kimbro's company of Col. Sidney Sherman's Second Regiment, Texas Volunteers. He was one of the five men who accompanied Erastus (Deaf) Smith in the destruction of Vince's Bridge. For his military service, which lasted from March 15 through November 15, 1836, Hancock received a total of 1,280 acres in Lampasas County. Subsequently he worked as a surveyor, locating lands on the frontier. In 1840 he was residing in Bastrop County, where he owned 5,907 acres of real estate, a saddle horse, and a watch. On October 26, 1842, after Adrián Woll's capture of San Antonio, Hancock enlisted in Capt. Bartlett Sims's company of Col. James R. Cook's regiment of the South Western Army, and marched with Gen. Alexander Somervell to the Rio Grande. He returned to San Antonio with Somervell and was discharged on November 21, 1842, thus avoiding the Mier expedition.

    In 1843 he opened a highly successful retail store in La Grange, Fayette County, which he later moved to Bastrop and then in 1845 to Austin, where he established himself at the corner of Congress and Pecan (now Sixth) Street. There he was regarded by the editor of the Texas State Gazette as "an experienced merchant of acknowledged good taste in the selection of goods," and as offering "as large and complete a stock...as has ever been brought to the city." By 1850 Hancock owned assets valued at $40,000 and was residing in an Austin boardinghouse. On September 5 of that year the state legislature granted him, Thomas J. Hardeman, John Rabb, John W. S. Dancy, and nine other men a charter to incorporate the Colorado Navigation Company to promote Colorado River traffic and commerce, and on February 16, 1852, Hancock and six other men were granted corporate rights for the Brazos and Colorado Railroad Company to link Austin and Houston. Hancock was married to Eliza Louisa Lewis, the daughter of Ira Randolph Lewis, on November 2, 1855. In 1861 Hancock, an ardent Unionist like his brother, John Hancock, retired from business.

    At the end of the Civil War Hancock was a member of a committee that welcomed Governor A. J. Hamilton to Austin in August 1865, and later that month Hamilton appointed him to the board of trustees of the State Lunatic Asylum (later the Austin State Hospital). In 1866 he was elected to the Eleventh Texas Legislature. In 1872 he served as chairman of a committee formed to keep Austin the capital of Texas. Hancock died on January 6, 1879, and was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, Austin. He was survived by his wife, who died on April 27, 1890, and a son, Lewis, who became mayor of Austin. Hancock was an active member of the Texas Veterans Association, which he helped to organize in 1873, and a vestryman at St. David's Episcopal Church. He was also a Mason and in 1852 took an active role in establishing Austin Masonic High School. Source

Section 1
Oakwood Cemetery
Austin

COORDINATES

30° 16.515, -097° 43.616