This Day In Texas History - April 16

[joe817]

1836 - The Texas army, 1100 men under the command of Sam Houston, stopped at Matthew Burnett's Homesite about dusk on April 16, 1836, after turning southeast at the Robert's crossroads earlier in the day. During their overnight stay they consumed most of Burnett's livestock and grains, and burned fence rails for fuel. The next morning the Texas army departed for Harrisburg. (The homesite is located in Telge Park, just east of Telge Rd. on Pleasant Grove St. in Houston.)

1836 - Mexican Col. Juan N. Almonte and a company of dragoons arrived and seized the warehouses and buildings on Galveston Island. The Mexicans consumed or destroyed what was stored in the warehouses, slaughtered cattle, seized horses, and appropriated the lighter used to land merchandise from vessels anchored in the river. When they left to attack Sam Houston's army on Buffalo Bayou on April 20 they burned all of the buildings.

1852 - The wealthy twenty-six-year-old Mexican widow Petra Vela de Vidal married Anglo rancher Mifflin Kenedy in Brownsville. Though Kenedy was raised a Quaker, he accepted his wife's Catholicism, and she became one of the few upper-class women of Mexican origin in nineteenth-century Texas. In 1850 Mifflin Kenedy had formed an immensely profitable steamboat company in partnership with Richard King, and the two gradually began buying up vast amounts of ranching land. In 1869 the Kenedy family moved from Brownsville to the Laureles Ranch in Nueces County.

1947 - The ship SS Grandcamp exploded at the docks in Texas City. The French-owned vessel, carrying ammonium nitrate produced during wartime for explosives and later recycled as fertilizer, caught fire early in the morning. While attempts were being made to extinguish the fire, the ship exploded. The entire dock area was destroyed, along with the nearby Monsanto Chemical Company, other smaller companies, grain warehouses, and numerous oil and chemical storage tanks. The concussion of the explosion, felt as far away as Port Arthur, damaged or destroyed at least 1,000 residences and buildings. The ship SS High Flyer, in dock for repairs and also carrying ammonium nitrate, was ignited by the first explosion; it was towed 100 feet from the docks before it exploded the next day. The ship's anchor monument records 576 persons known dead, only 398 of whom were identified. Probably the exact number of people killed will never be known.

1971 - Tejana superstar Selena Quintanilla Perez was born in Lake Jackson. She won the first of eight Tejano Music Awards as female entertainer of the year in 1987. Her 1992 album Entre a Mi Mundo made her the first Tejana to sell more than 300,000 albums, and her bilingual 1995 album Dreaming of You hit number one on the national Billboard Top 100 the week it was released. On March 31 of that year in Corpus Christi, Selena was fatally shot by the founder of her first fan club. More than 30,000 people viewed her casket at the Bayfront Plaza Convention Center in Corpus Christi. A biographical film of her life was released in 1997.

1996 - On her nationally televised talk show, Ophra Winfrey and vegetarian activist Howard Lyman suggested that feeding practices of Cattle could lead to Mad Cow disease in humans, even though there had been no reported cases of Mad Cow disease in the United States. To an enthusiast audience, Ophra exclaimed that Lyman's stories were enough for her to give up hamburgers. Cattle prices plundged, and Texas cattlemen soon lost an estimated $11 million in beef prices. The Cattlemen sued Winfrey and Lyman under the Texas "veggie liability" law protecting the agriculture industry against false claims of tainted foods. Ophra's attorneys argued for the first amendment right to free expression of opinion. In February 1998, a Jury found Ophra Winfrey not liable for damages to the Texas Cattle industry.