This Day In Texas History - May 24

[joe817]

1690 - The first Spanish mission in East Texas, San Francisco de los Tejas, was begun in May 1690 as a response to the La Salle expedition. The location, according to the most recent research, was on San Pedro Creek just east of the site of present Augusta, a few miles west of the replica in San Francisco de los Tejas State Park.

1829 - Almaron Dickinson eloped with Susanna Wilkerson. Dickinson, a native of Pennsylvania, was born around 1800 and later moved to the area of Bolivar, Tennessee, where he met Wilkerson, who was born in that state in 1814. The couple moved to Gonzales, Texas, in 1831 and had a daughter, Angelina Dickinson, in 1834. As a colonist in Green DeWitt's colony, Dickinson received a league of land on the San Marcos River. He participated in the battle of Gonzales in 1835 and distinguished himself as a lieutenant of artillery at the siege of Bexar; at the battle of the Alamo he was the captain in charge of artillery. Although he died at the Alamo, his wife and child survived; legend says Susanna displayed her husband's Masonic apron to a Mexican general in a plea for help. General Santa Anna sent Susanna and her daughter to Sam Houston with a letter of warning dated March 7. Susanna married four more times before her death in 1883.

1838 - The Congress of the Republic of Texas, in the first Texas railroad charter, chartered the Brazos and Galveston Railroad Company on May 24, 1838, to make turnpikes, crossings, and a railroad from Austinia on Galveston Bay to Bolivar on the Brazos River. The site was located on Dollar Point in the Stephen F. Austin league, now within the bounds of Texas City. Austinia was to be the headquarters for the company.

1841 - On this date in 1841, Texas Rangers capture three Indian villages in the battle of Village Creek. The Battle of Village Creek, fought on May 24, 1841, was a running gunfight along the banks of Village Creek, a major tributary of the Trinity River, in eastern Tarrant County. The stream now forms the city limits of Arlington and Fort Worth, and much of the battlefield has been inundated by Lake Arlington.[this is a fascinating read, from a personal perspective. https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/btv01 ]

1857 - Ernst Kohlberg was born in Beverungen, Westphalia, on this day, at that time a province of Prussia. He left home in 1875 with Solomon C. Schutz, who had business interests in the El Paso area. Kohlberg agreed to work for Schutz without salary for six months to a year in order to defray the costs of his passage to Texas. The two reached Franklin, as El Paso was then called, by stagecoach. After working off his debt to Schutz, Kohlberg invested in a Mexican gold mine and worked in San Francisco before returning to Franklin in 1881 and opening a cigar store in partnership with his brother. The two became prominent civic leaders and philanthropists in El Paso; Olga Kohlberg founded the first public kindergarten in Texas. In 1886 the Kohlberg brothers established the first cigar factory in the Southwest. Among Ernst Kohlberg's other holdings was the St. Charles Hotel, which he leased to a compulsive gambler who in 1910 shot and killed Kohlberg after falling far behind in his rent.

1869 - Twenty-four defendants went on trial in the celebrated Stockade Case. On the night of October 24, 1868, a Marion County mob dragged five Republicans, arrested the previous night after a Republican meeting ended in a gunfight with local Democrats, from the Jefferson jail and killed three of them, a white and two blacks. After the killings Reconstruction officials arrested some thirty-five suspects, and eventually tried twenty-four of them. The trial involved the testimony of 176 witnesses, and a verdict was not delivered until August 23, 1869. Only seven of the defendants were found guilty of any of the charges, and it is unclear whether any of them served any time in prison.
[ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/jrs03 ]

1933 – The Texas Geographic Society was organized in Dallas. In 1937, it began publication of the Texas Geographic Magazine.

2000 - A Democratic Party event for Al Gore in Washington brought in $26.5 million. The amount set a new record, which had just been set the previous month by Republicans for Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

2003 - At the Colonial in Fort Worth, TX, Annika Sorentam missed the cut by four shots. Two days earier she had become the first woman in 58 years to play in the PGA.