Rural towns tell the story of Texas revolution and the republic that followed

Sunday, February 01, 2004

By Terese Loeb Kreuzer, Travel Arts Syndicate

WASHINGTON-ON-THE-BRAZOS, Texas -- With a sudden crash, black walnuts fall from a tree just outside the door of Independence Hall in Washington-on-the-Brazos, causing visitors to scurry inside.

The unpainted frame building is a replica of the one in which 59 men met in March 1836 to draft and approve Texas' Declaration of Independence from Mexico and a constitution for the new republic.

Because of what happened here, this place is called the "Philadelphia of Texas," but this crude building, open to the rafters, is nothing like Philadelphia's elegant brick State House, and the men who met here were unlike the patricians who gathered in Philadelphia in 1776.

The great Sam Houston said of his colleagues, "All new states are invested, more or less, by a class of noisy, second-rate men who are always in favor of rash and extreme measures, but Texas was absolutely overrun by such men."

These were frontiersmen, many of them soldiers or former soldiers, all of them armed. Even the most august of them knew what it was like to sleep on a mud floor or on the ground, hunt for their supper, cross a flooded river on a horse.

But like their counterparts in Philadelphia 60 years before, by signing a Declaration of Independence, they endangered their lives, their property and their families.

In fact, Washington-on-the-Brazos was chosen for the convention simply because it was far enough inland and away from Mexico that the delegates might hope to confer for a few days or weeks without being discovered -- but if they were, they were near a well-traveled river crossing that would allow them to escape.

Just after they arrived for the convention in late February, a norther blew in. The temperature dropped to 33 degrees, accompanied by thunder, lightning, rain and hail.

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The windows of the unheated building in which they met were covered with cloth, not glass. And they knew that while they met, the Mexican president and general, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, was laying siege to the Alamo in San Antonio, around 200 miles away.

The task of forging a new nation was formidable; the urgency was great. In the beginning, couriers brought reports that the rebels at the Alamo were holding out and that reinforcements were on their way. Then there were days of silence. The delegates grew ever more anxious. Two of them had brothers in the Alamo, and one a son. Hopes rose and fell. Finally, on March 15 came incontrovertible word that the Alamo had fallen nine days before and that all the defenders were dead.

Much of this is explained in a handsome visitors center at Washington-on-the-Brazos or by rangers who lead tours of the site. The park's Lone Star Museum contains exhibits about the Republic of Texas, which existed from 1836 to 1846. The Barrington Living History Farm shows what rural life was like in the early days of statehood. The rest must be imagined.

Washington-on-the-Brazos wasn't much of a town when the convention met there -- it had one street, three frame buildings and several log cabins -- though it grew substantially. In 1845, when the capital was moved to Austin, the town declined.

"By the early 1880s," says ranger Walt Bailey, "Washington had been all but abandoned. There were four men, two mules and one dog living in the former capital of Texas."

Only one visible artifact remains from the 19th-century town, a cistern in a field across from Independence Hall.

But the rest is not silence. Throughout 28 counties of central and Gulf Coast Texas linked by what is called the "Texas Independence Trail" are small towns and historical markers that tell the story of the Texas revolution and of the republic that followed it. And in these towns are descendants of the people who fought that revolution and who created the republic. The legacy is very much alive.

To explore the 960-mile-long trail from San Antonio to Houston and back could take a few weeks, but the town of Gonzales, around 60 miles from San Antonio, is one of the essential stops. This is where Gen. Sam Houston went when he left the convention three days after the Declaration of Independence had been signed March 2, 1836, which happened to be his 43rd birthday.

Houston's task was to organize an army. In Gonzales, he learned of the fall of the Alamo. To keep the town and its provisions from falling into Mexican hands, he ordered it burned.

Then he camped with his fledgling army around 10 miles east of Gonzales under an oak tree. The Sam Houston oak is still there with a towering crown and massive, aging arms resting on the earth.

Houston, wounded in the War of 1812, was schooled as a fighter under his mentor and friend Andrew Jackson, who was now president of the United States.

Houston knew his little army was no match for the Mexicans. His strategy was to retreat, giving him time to gather and train additional forces.

Under the oak tree March 14, he ordered what has become known in Texas history as "the runaway scrape." Women and children and men too old or too ill to fight were to flee toward the Gulf of Mexico and the United States. The army would take the best wagons and animals. The women would have to manage with what was left.

"I cannot even imagine what these women went through," says Barbara Hand, whose family has lived in Gonzales since 1899. They carried their children, whatever of their belongings they could salvage, their sick. Some of the women were pregnant. The way was muddy, the weather cold. Many died.

Toward the end of April, when the refugees heard of Houston's decisive victory over the Mexicans at the Battle of San Jacinto, many refused to believe the news. They had lost hope too many times. Nevertheless, they were persuaded they could return and did to find everything gone. Town after town had been plundered and burned. Nothing was left.

That's why in the small towns of the Texas Independence Trail the oldest buildings date from the 1840s.

In Gonzales, the oldest building is the Eggleston house, a two-room structure built in 1845. It's on the grounds of the Gonzales Memorial Museum, notable because it houses the tiny cannon that provoked the first shots of the Texas revolution when Santa Anna sent soldiers to retrieve it and 18 men of Gonzales refused. Their defiant cry, "Come and take it!" has become the town's motto.

Gonzales lost 41 of its men at the Alamo. Bastrop, another town on the Trail, lost 11 and of the remaining men, 60 fought at the Battle of San Jacinto.

In Goliad, a contingent of the Texian army under Col. James W. Fannin Jr. was defeated by Santa Anna, and 342 men were executed.

Annual re-enactments transmit these memories to younger generations, but in subtle ways they are ever-present in many of these towns. Houses bear historical markers such as the one on the simple Sarah Jenkins house in Bastrop that says her first husband was scalped by Indians and her second died at the Alamo.

Some of the older commercial buildings in these towns still look like the classic Western frontier: two-story-tall false fronts over one-story buildings shaded by porches whose railings could be used for a horse hitch. Highways and subdivisions and golf courses may be springing up on the outskirts, but the historic core of these towns is very much intact.

And in the center may be an imposing courthouse and a jail -- visible reminders to armed, sometimes obstreperous citizens that they'd better behave. The graffiti-covered jail in Gonzales (used from 1887 to 1975) now houses the chamber of commerce and includes a museum with photos of stern-looking sheriffs and cases full of the tools of their trade, such as shackles and handcuffs.

Upstairs are desolate cells and the gallows. Hangings always attracted a crowd.

The frontier receded but the rural towns persist in a reverie, remembering the Alamo, remembering Goliad and San Jacinto, remembering the Civil War and the cattlemen and ranchers who built mansions with the fortunes they made after it was over, remembering the railroads that kept some of the towns alive while those that resisted the railroad dwindled away.

Terese Loeb Kreuzer has written about England, Scotland, France, Italy, Poland, Guatemala, China, Mexico, Chile and the Caribbean as well as about many places in the United States. She is the editor of the Travel Arts Syndicate.

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