This Day In Texas History - July 23

[joe817]

1803 - Land baron Samuel Maverick was born at Pendleton, South Carolina, on July 23, 1803. His free-roaming cattle on Matagorda Island gave rise to the term "maverick" for an unbranded calf. (When he returned permanently to San Antonio with his family, Maverick left a small herd of cattle originally purchased in 1847 on Matagorda Peninsula with slave caretakers. It was this herd that was allowed to wander and gave rise to the term maverick, which denotes an unbranded calf.)

Maverick led a fascinating life - He arrived shortly before the siege at Bexar in Dec. 1835 and was placed under house arrest until Dec.1,1835. He then led Benjamin R. Milam's division during the War for Independence. He was one of 2 delegates from the Alamo garrison to the independence convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos. He left the embattled garrison on March 2 and arrived at the convention on March 5. During the years between Maverick's return to San Antonio and his death, he expanded his West Texas landholdings, which in 1851 totaled almost 140,000 acres.

By 1864 they had burgeoned to more than 278,000 acres, and at his death they topped 300,000 acres. He died on September 2, 1870, after a brief illness. Surviving him were his wife and five of his ten children. Maverick, an Episcopalian, was buried in San Antonio's City Cemetery Number 1. For a fascinating read: [ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fma84 ]

1845 - When the Mexican War broke out, the United States Army quartermaster contracted the Dayton(a 111-ton sidewheel steamship) to transport men and goods from the depot on St. Joseph Island to the large army beach encampment at Corpus Christi. On July 23, 1845, Gen. Zachary Taylor and a party of the Third Regiment of Infantry made the trip. The Dayton is chiefly remembered for the boiler explosions that caused it to sink in Corpus Christi Bay on September 12, 1845. [ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/etd03 ]

1856 - On July 23, through the blazing heat of a dry summer, (the then)Colonel Robert E. Lee and his four squadrons of cavalry from Camp Cooper and forts Mason and Chadbourne returned to his home post of Camp Cooper (in present Shackelford County twenty-five miles north of Albany), having scouted completely valleys and canyons of nearby rivers and creeks. He led the 1,600-mile expedition out to the foothills of the Llano Estacado and returned, scouting the headwaters of the Colorado, Brazos, and Wichita rivers.

1877 - On this date in 1877, John B Armstrong of the Texas Rangers arrested John Wesley Hardin and three other members of his gang, on a train in Pensacola Florida. Hardin had fled with his family to Florida after he had killed a Texas Ranger among others. He was later tried and sent to prison at Huntsville, eventually being pardoned after serving 16 years of a 25 year sentence.

1885 - The Texas Bankers Association, the oldest state bankers' association, was founded at Lampasas Springs (now Lampasas). Their chief objective in organizing the association was to promote legislative and regulatory changes for banking, specifically to bring about the repeal of the constitutional restriction against the chartering of state banks. In the 1990s the Texas Bankers Association had over 2,500 members and was headquartered in Austin.

1895 - Florence Arto was born in Houston. She appeared in Texas filmmaker King Vidor's first two-reel film, In Tow, as well as in a documentary on the sugar industry. In 1915 she and Vidor were married and traveled to California in hopes of employment in the expanding film industry. A mature and elegant presence, Florence Vidor performed in fifty-nine feature films, often cast in upper-class or aristocratic roles.

1919 - The Texas Legislature voted to ratified the 19th amendment, which provides that neither the individual states of the United States nor its federal government may deny a citizen the right to vote because of the citizen's sex.

1941 – The Lone Star Army Ammunition Plant, also known as the Lone Star Ordnance Plant, is located on a 24,300-acre tract nine miles west of Texarkana, next to the Red River Army Depot. The plant was constructed at the beginning of World War II at a cost of $45.5 million and operated for the army by the Lone Star Defense Corporation, a subsidiary of the B. F. Goodrich Rubber Corporation, as an ammunition-loading plant for artillery shells, bombs, fuses, boosters, and other auxiliary ammunitions items.

The contract for the plant was let on July 23, 1941; the first small-caliber ammunition was sent out on May 27, 1942. Production of aluminum nitrate was suspended in the spring of 1943, and in April of the same year the depot was consolidated with the Red River Army Ordnance Depot to form the Texarkana Ordnance Center. The plant continued to operate after the war, and in the early 1990s the base had a small number of military personnel and some 4,300 Civil Service employees.

1966 - Rancher and writer Cordia Duke died. Born Cordelia Jane Sloan in Missouri in 1877, she taught school as a teenager in the Oklahoma Territory before moving to Sherman County, Texas, to teach in a one-room school near the XIT Ranch. She married Robert L. Duke, foreman for the Buffalo Springs division of the XIT Ranch, in 1907.

In the ensuing years Cordia Duke chronicled the stories and activities of ranch hands and thus recorded a rapidly vanishing way of life. Her articles appeared in magazines such as the Cattleman. In the 1920s she was appointed the first woman game warden in Texas when the land surrounding the Duke homestead was designated a wildlife sanctuary. Passages from her diary as a ranch wife eventually became the basis of a book titled 6,000 Miles of Fence, published in 1961. After her husband's death in 1933, Cordia Duke moved to Dalhart, where she died on July 23, 1966, and was buried. [ https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fdu11 ]