This Day In Texas History - July 3

[joe817]

1863 - On this date in 1863, Hood's Texas Unit retreated at Gettsyburg after suffering 597 casualties in the bloody three-day battle that turned the tide of the Civil War. The Texas Brigade was involved in heavy fighting on the slopes of Little Round Top and fell back to south side of Devil's Den before leaving the battlefield on the evening of July 3. Hood's Texas Brigade included three Texas infantry regiments -- the 1st, 4th and 5th -- and the 3rd Arkansas. Its commander, Brig. General Jerome Bonaparte Robertson, was among the wounded. Today, there is a monument at the spot where the Texans retreated at the close of the disastrous battle. (There's much more to this story: [ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/qkh02 ]

1884 - The City-County Hospital, the oldest public hospital in Texas, opened in Austin. The hospital was owned jointly by the city of Austin and Travis County until 1907, when the county withdrew its support. It was known as City Hospital until 1929, when the city council renamed it in honor of Dr. Robert J. Brackenridge, who had served as chairman of the hospital board and worked for many years toward improving medical care in Austin. Brackenridge also housed the area's first nursing school, which was established in 1915 and operated by the hospital until 1984, when Austin Community College assumed responsibility for the program. After beginning an education program for interns and residents after World War II, Brackenridge became a fully accredited teaching hospital in the mid-1950s.
[ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/sbb02 ]

1887 - Clay Allison, gunfighter, the fourth of nine children of Jeremiah Scotland and Mariah R. (Brown) Allison, was born on a farm in Wayne County, Tennessee. When the Civil War broke out, Allison joined Phillips' Tennessee Light Artillery Company in the Confederate Army. On January 15, 1862, he received a medical discharge for emotional instability resulting from a head injury as a child, but in September he reenlisted as a cavalryman with Company F, Col. Jacob B. Biffle's Nineteenth Tennessee Cavalry. After the war Allison moved to the Brazos River country in Texas.

Allison soon signed on as a cowhand with Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight and may have been among the eighteen herders on the 1866 drive that blazed the Goodnight-Loving Trail. He was in Colfax County, New Mexico, by the spring of 1871 when he accidentally shot himself in the foot while he and some companions stampeded a herd of Gen. Gordon Granger's army mules as a prank. n 1883 he bought a ranch located on the Texas-New Mexico border northwest of Pecos and became involved in area politics. On July 3, 1887, while hauling supplies to his ranch from Pecos he was thrown from his heavily loaded wagon and fatally injured when run over by its rear wheel. (There's much more to this story).
For an interesting read: [ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fal39 ]

1897 - Blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson is born near Wortham.

1898 - The first United States battleship to be named USS Texas was built at the Norfolk Navy Yard and commissioned August 15, 1895. It was the first commissioned American steel-hulled battleship and was 309 feet long. During the battle of Santiago on July 3, 1898, the USS Texas helped in the defeat of the Spanish squadron commanded by Admiral Pascual Cervera. The USS Texas brought home the bodies of those killed on the Maine. In 1908 it was used as a station ship in Charleston, South Carolina. Its name was changed to USS San Marcos in 1911 so that the name Texas could be assigned to a new, more modern battleship. The San Marcos became a gunnery target in 1920 and was eventually sunk in Chesapeake Bay, seven miles south of Tangier Island, by the USS New Hampshire. While a target the ship was bombed from the air by Gen. William L. (Billy) Mitchell in 1921. The hulk became a hazard to navigation and was finally blasted by the Navy to send it twenty feet under the surface.

1931- The Red River Bridge controversy between Texas and Oklahoma (sometimes called the Red River War) occurred in July 1931 over the opening of a newly completed free bridge, built jointly by the two states, across the Red River between Denison, Texas, and Durant, Oklahoma. On July 3, 1931, the Red River Bridge Company, a private firm operating an old toll bridge that paralleled the free span, filed a petition in the United States district court in Houston asking for an injunction preventing the Texas Highway Commission from opening the bridge.

The company claimed that the commission had agreed in July 1930 to purchase the toll bridge for $60,000 and to pay the company for its unexpired contract an additional $10,000 for each month of a specified fourteen-month period in which the free bridge might be opened, and that the commission had not fulfilled this obligation. A temporary injunction was issued on July 10, 1931, and Texas governor Ross S. Sterling ordered barricades erected across the Texas approaches to the new bridge.

However, on July 16 Governor William (Alfalfa Bill) Murray of Oklahoma opened the bridge by executive order, claiming that Oklahoma's "half" of the bridge ran lengthwise north and south across the Red River, that Oklahoma held title to both sides of the river from the Louisiana Purchase treaty of 1803, and that the state of Oklahoma was not named in the injunction. Oklahoma highway crews crossed the bridge and demolished the barricades. Governor Sterling responded by ordering a detachment of three Texas Rangers, accompanied by Adjutant General William Warren Sterling, to rebuild the barricades and protect Texas Highway Department employees charged with enforcing the injunction. There's more to the story:
[ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/mgr02 ]

1932 - Lake Brownwood, also known as Brownwood Reservoir, is an artificial lake on Pecan Bayou, eight miles north of Brownwood in north central Brown County. Work on the dam began in 1931; the deliberate impoundment of water began in July 1933. A survey of the watershed of the lake revealed that two years of normal rainfall were needed before the lake would fill, but on July 3, 1932, torrential rains caused Pecan Bayou and Jim Ned Creek to pour flooding waters into the lake, filling it to a level of 150,000 acre-feet and covering more than 7,000 acres of land in six hours.
[ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/rol19 ]

1964 - Natural Bridge Caverns, the largest known cavern in Texas, was opened to the public. The cavern was discovered on March 27, 1960, by four spelunkers who were students at St. Mary's University in San Antonio. It is located off Farm Road 1863 in the hill country of Comal County midway between New Braunfels and San Antonio.