This Day In Texas History - May 25

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1839 - On May 25, 1839, President Mirabeau B. Lamar appointed James Harper Starr secretary of the Texas treasury. As a member of the Lamar faction, Starr participated in the removal of the government offices from Houston to Austin in fall 1839.

1861 - Sarah Seelye enlisted in Company F, Second Michigan Volunteer Infantry Regiment, under the alias Franklin Thompson. She was one of a number of women who disguised themselves as men to enlist in the Civil War. She had run away from home at age seventeen, disguised as a boy, to avoid an unwanted marriage. After enlisting in the Union army in 1861, she served for nearly two years as a male. Ironically, in her secret-service duty she penetrated Confederate lines "disguised" as a woman. She deserted the army and resumed life as a female in 1863. She later published a fanciful, but highly successful, account of her experiences in the army, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army (1865). She and her husband moved to La Porte, Texas in the early 1890s. On April 22, 1897, Sarah Seelye became a member of the McClellan Post, Grand Army of the Republic, in Houston. She was the only woman member in the history of the GAR.

1874 - The worst example of vigilante violence occurred on the evening of May 25, 1874 in Belton, Bell county, when a mob of men from Bell and other counties broke into the Belton jail and killed nine men, eight members of a gang of accused horse thieves and an accused murderer.

1896 - The Texas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy met for the first time in Victoria. The United Daughters of the Confederacy was established in 1894 by the merger of state groups in Georgia, Missouri, and Tennessee. The Texas Division was organized by Kate Cabell Muse, who had earlier organized a local chapter in her hometown, Dallas. The Texas Division has been active in marking historic locations and holds annual memorial observances to remember not only Confederate veterans but veterans of all wars. The division formerly sponsored the Texas Confederate Home and the Confederate Woman's Home and each year awards thousands of dollars in scholarships to descendants of Confederate veterans. It also maintains the Texas Confederate Museum.

1898 - President William McKinley issued a call for an additional 75,000 volunteers on May 25, 1898, and Texas raised the Fourth Texas Infantry, to help in the War with Spain.

1956 - President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke at the Commencement exercises of Baylor University in Waco. Eisenhower himself receives an honorary Doctor of Law degree by the University.

1966 - Melvin B. Tolson received the annual poetry award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Tolson, born in Missouri in 1898, was only fourteen when his first poem was printed. He began teaching English and speech at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, in 1924, and remained there for twenty-three years. Several of Tolson's poems were published in Modern Monthly and the Modern Quarterly in the late 1930s, and in September 1941 the Atlantic Monthly published his prize-winning "Dark Symphony," which was later set to music by Earl Robinson and performed by Paul Robeson. Tolson wrote a weekly column about black life in America for the Washington Tribune from 1937 to 1944.