This Day In Texas History - August 30

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1836 - The city of Houston began on August 30, 1836, when Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen ran an advertisement in the Telegraph and Texas Register for the "Town of Houston." The townsite, which featured a mixture of timber and grassland, was on the level Coastal Plain in the middle of the future Harris County. The brothers claimed that the town would become the "great interior commercial emporium of Texas," that ships from New York and New Orleans could sail up Buffalo Bayou to its door, and that the site enjoyed a healthy, cool seabreeze.

They noted plans to build a sawmill and offered lots for sale at moderate prices. In the manner of town boomers the Allens exaggerated a bit, however. The forty-three-inch annual rainfall and temperatures that averaged from a low of 45° F in the winter to 93° in summer later inspired Houston to become one of the most air-conditioned cities in the world. Moreover, in January 1837, when Francis R. Lubbock arrived on the Laura, the small steamship that first reached Houston, he found the bayou choked with branches and the town almost invisible.

The Allen brothers named their town after Sam Houston and persuaded the Texas Congress to designate the site as the temporary capital of the new Republic of Texas. The promoters offered lots and buildings to the government. On January 1, 1837, the town comprised twelve residents and one log cabin; four months later there were 1,500 people and 100 houses.

1841 - Camp Resolution was the name given to four camps occupied by the main body of the Texan Santa Fe expedition from August 30 through September 18, 1841. The first camp was near the junction of Quitaque and Los Lingos creeks in northwest Motley County, 5½ miles northwest of the site of present Flomat.

This camp was used August 30 through September 3rd. Camp Resolution No. 2, used September 3 through September 5, was on the south side of Quitaque Creek, about where Ranch Road 1065 crosses the creek, in extreme northeast Floyd County. Camp No. 3, used from September 5 through 14, was a half mile above No. 2. No. 4 was three-quarters of a mile above No. 3 and was occupied from September 14 through September 18.

1855 - The Texas legislature passed a law on February 6, 1854, that established the Brazos Indian Reservation for the Caddos, Wacos, and other Indians, and also provided four square leagues of land, or 18,576 acres, for a Comanche reserve to be located at Camp Cooper on the Clear Fork of the Brazos in Throckmorton County. In compliance with the treaty of August 30, 1855, about 450 of the Penateka or southern Comanches settled on the reservation and were to be taught farming.

The location had good hunting and water and had been selected by Maj. Robert S. Neighbors. The principal Indian village, established in a bend of the river, consisted of several hundred Indians and their chief, Ketumse, who lived there with his wives and many children.
[ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/bpc10 ]

1856 - Both the Republic and the State of Texas set aside land from the public domain for the support of the public schools, the University of Texas and its branches, and the state eleemosynary institutions. More of the public domain was granted to the schools than to any other institution. By an act of August 30, 1856, a land endowment of slightly more than 100,000 acres was given to each of four eleemosynary institutions for the blind, deaf, insane, and orphans. The acres actually surveyed totaled 410,600.[ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/mnl01 ]

1857 - Between 1851 and 1881 a series of contractors carried the United States mail and passengers westward from San Antonio to El Paso. During various periods the stage line also served Santa Fe, New Mexico, and San Diego, California. On September 20, 1851, Henry Skillman obtained a government contract to carry the mail between San Antonio and Santa Fe via El Paso. He dispatched his first mail west on November 3. By December he was offering passenger service also, despite the continual threat of Indian attack.

In October 1854 Skillman formed a partnership with George H. Giddings, a San Antonio merchant and freighter. They continued to operate the stage line for the next three years in the face of mounting losses to the Indians. In July 1857 Giddings entered a partnership with James Birch, a wealthy New Englander who had prospered in the California express business.

Giddings and Birch operated under government contract to furnish mail service between San Antonio and San Diego on a semimonthly basis; this "San-San" was said to be the first American transcontinental mail and passenger service. The first California mail departed San Antonio on July 9, 1857, and reached San Diego on August 30 after an arduous passage.

1874 - Col. Nelson Appleton (Bear Coat) Miles, led a column against the Indians of the Southern Plains. At Palo Duro Canyon on August 30, 1874, his forces successfully fought off 600 Cheyenne warriors, with one battalion and four companies of the Fifth Infantry, two battalions of the Sixth Cavalry, a detachment of artillery, and a company of Delaware Indians. [ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fmi77 ]

1901 - El Paso Electric provides electric and nuclear power for much of the Southwest. It grew from the Brush Electric Light Company of El Paso, which was organized in the late 1880s by Mayor Joseph Magoffin and the El Paso City Council at the urging of a group of local citizens. By 1890 El Paso pioneer Zach T. White had taken over the electrical business and installed generating equipment to enable the use of incandescent lamps in the city.

The current enterprise was founded when El Paso Electric Railway Company took over the Brush Electric plant on August 30, 1901, and originally incorporated as the El Paso Electric Railway Company to provide power solely within the El Paso area.
[ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/dpe02 ]

1910 - Hortense Ward became one of the first women admitted to the Texas state bar. She received her law license on August 30, 1910, and began practicing with her husband in the civil law firm of Ward and Ward. Hortense Ward became known as a champion of women's rights, writing stirring newspaper articles and pamphlets, and personally lobbying for many social reform measures in the early 1900s. She worked to get the Married Woman's Property Law of 1913 passed by the Texas Legislature.

She also campaigned for a fifty-four-hour week for women in industry, a women's division in the state department of labor, a domestic relations court, and the right of women to serve as officers of corporations. She was an ardent prohibitionist and coauthored the state prohibition constitutional amendment in 1919. Ward helped Minnie Fisher Cunningham campaign for woman suffrage.

1930 - The Houston was a heavy cruiser of the Northampton class, launched at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, Newport News, Virginia, on September 7, 1929. She was christened by Elizabeth Holcombe, the daughter of former Houston mayor Oscar F. Holcombe. The ship had a standard displacement of 9,200 tons, was 600 feet 3 inches long, and had an extreme beam of 66 feet 1 inch. She had a rated speed of 32.7 knots, mounted nine eight-inch guns, eight five-inch guns, and 20-millimeter and 40-millimeter antiaircraft guns.

Her shakedown cruise to Europe began on August 30, 1930. Capt. Albert H. Rooks took command of the ship in August 1939 and remained her commander until he was killed the night she was sunk in the Java Sea. The Houston was reported sunk by the Japanese so many times during the early months of World War II that she was nicknamed the "Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast." On April 21, 1960, a shrine was dedicated to the USS Houston aboard the USS Texas. Twenty survivors attended the dedication. [ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/qth02 ]

1969 - The Texas International Pop Festival was the first major rock festival in Texas. Held August 30 through September 1, 1969, at the Dallas International Motor Speedway in Lewisville, the event was produced in part by Angus Wynne III of Wynne Entertainment. The Texas festival was held only two weeks after the legendary Woodstock festival in Woodstock, New York. It was unusual in the wide variety of musical acts it attracted and in its atmosphere.

With a budget of only $120,000, the promoters booked twenty-six of the biggest names in blues, rock-and-roll, and psychedelic rock. Janis Joplin, Sam and Dave, Sly and the Family Stone, Santana, Canned Heat, the Grass Roots, B. B. King, Chicago Transit Authority, Tony Joe White, Spirit, Johnny Winter, Sweetwater, Ten Years After, Freddie King, and a virtually unknown British band, Led Zeppelin, all performed during the three-day festival.

Some major groups that wanted to perform could not get in to play. A band from Michigan, Grand Funk Railroad, was allowed to perform only after the members agreed to play free and pay their own expenses. At night, many of the performers joined the campers and played without charge. Initially, police and local authorities were concerned about drug usage and traffic problems on nearby Interstate 35.

Although there were a few drug overdoses and problems associated with the intense heat, in general the festival ran very smoothly. The primary complaint from local residents was that the festival participants swam naked in Lake Lewisville. A Texas Historical Marker commemorating the event was erected near the site of the festival in 2010. [ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/xft01 ]