Thia Day In Texas History - May 7

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1813 - John Richardson Harris wed Jane Birdsall in New York. While living in Missouri, the Harris's met Moses Austin, who convinced them to move to Texas. John went to Texas in 1824 and received title to 4,428 acres of land in what is now Harris County. He boarded with William Scott while he built a house at the junction of Buffalo and Bray's bayous, and two years later hired Francis W. Johnson to lay out the town of Harrisburg. After John Harris died of yellow fever in 1829, his widow moved to Harrisburg. There, in the spring of 1836, she was the hostess of the provisional government; so crowded was her house that all of the cabinet, except the president, vice president, and secretary of state, were obliged to sleep on the floor.
She later operated an inn that, after the construction of the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railway, was patronized by travelers who changed from railroad to steamship and from steamship to railroad at Harrisburg. Jane Birdsall Harris died in 1869.

1824 - In 1824, as the new Mexican Constitution was evolving, pieces were being enacted into law. One provision enacted on this date in 1824, forced Texas and Coahuila into becoming a single Mexican state until Texas could sustain enough population to become its own state. That meant that Texas would NOT get it's own Senators to the Mexican Congress, but share Senators and Congressmen with Coahuila. Settlers in Texas, who had willingly become Catholic, who had taken oaths to become Mexican Citizens, who had brought commerce and wealth to the region, and who served Mexico as loyal subjects, were still being treated like outsiders, tolerated rather than respected. Efforts to acknowledge the growing population of Texas, and establish it's independent statehood failed, eventually leading to conflicts with Mexican authorities, and the Texas Revolution.

1837 - Col. Joseph H. D. Rogers of the First Regiment, Permanent Volunteers was named commander of Camp Bowie, the principal encampment of the Army of the Republic of Texas. Camp Bowie was located on the east side of the Navidad River at Red Bluff, one mile below Texana. The site is near Red Bluff Cemetery, eight miles southeast of the Jackson County community of Edna. The camp's first commander was Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, commanding general of the army. Rogers was the second.

1844 - The Scioto Belle, a river steamer believed to have been built on the Scioto River in Ohio, arrived at Galveston from New Orleans. The vessel was described in the Telegraph and Texas Register as a substantial, well-built ship, nearly new, well adapted for carrying freight, and with excellent accommodations for passengers. The steamer operated between Galveston and Houston and landings on the Trinity River but, probably because of the poor condition of the Trinity channel in the 1840s, was not able to go much farther up the river than Liberty Landing. In 1844, during a yellow fever epidemic, the Scioto Belle was docked at Lynchburg and converted by Dr. John Henry Bowers into a hospital.

1849 - Major general William Jenkins Worth died in San Antonio, from cholera he contracted from the troops under his command. During the Mexican War Worth served under generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. He participated in the battle of Monterrey in 1846, led the first troops ashore in the United States amphibious landing at Veracruz in March 1847, and commanded the troops that captured Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City in September 1847. Worth was assigned as a commander of the newly created Department of Texas, with headquarters in San Antonio.
The city of Fort Worth was named in Worth's honor.

1860 - Julius Real, who stages the legislative Whiskey Rebellion of 1911 to keep Texas wet, is born in the hill country.

1861 - Anna Pennybacker, clubwoman, woman suffrage advocate, author, and lecturer, was born in Petersburg, Virginia. She graduated from the first class of Sam Houston Normal School in Huntsville, Texas. In 1884 she married native Texan Percy V. Pennybacker. Mrs. Pennybacker wrote and published A New History of Texas in 1888, and the textbook was a staple of Texas classrooms for forty years. She founded one of the first women's clubs in Texas, the Tyler Woman's Club, in 1894. She went on to serve as president of the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs from 1901 to 1903, a position in which she raised $3,500 for women's scholarships at the University of Texas and helped persuade the legislature to fund a women's dormitory there. She was part of the Food Administration of Texas during World War I, and the Texas Centennial Commission in 1934. In 1937, Penneybacker became the first woman to give the commencement speech to Houston's combined high schools.

1955 - The state's two-millionth telephone was installed in the governor's office at Austin.

1968 - On this date in 1968, longtime head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Home Garrison, dies at age 66.

1972 - Barbara Jordan, the first black woman ever to serve as Texas state senator, wins the Democratic Party nomination for U.S. Congress in her home district. She had been a Texas senator for four years.