This Day In Texas History - July 8

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1813 - John Hunter Herndon, planter, rancher, and businessman, the son of Boswell and Barbara Herndon, was born near Georgetown, Kentucky, on July 8, 1813. After graduating from Transylvania College in both arts and law, he left Kentucky and arrived in Galveston, Texas, on January 18, 1838. During most of that year he lived in Houston, where he continued his study of law. On April 12, 1838, he was elected engrossing clerk of the House of Representatives of the Republic of Texas.

He moved to Richmond in Fort Bend County, where he was admitted to the bar on November 23, 1838. On August 27, 1839, he married Barbara Mackall Wilkinson Calvit, the only daughter of Alexander Calvit and heir to the Calvit sugar plantation in Brazoria County. Herndon and his wife had four sons and two daughters. The plantation, near the site of present Clute, was noted for its Arabian horses and cattle herds, which were later sold to Abel Head (Shanghai) Pierce. Herndon owned stock ranches in Matagorda, Guadalupe, and Medina counties, engaged in real estate, and incorporated several other entrepreneurial ventures.

He was a member of the Somervell expedition in 1842 and with many others turned back at the Rio Grande and escaped the Black Bean Episode. The 1850 census indicates that he owned real estate valued at $100,000, the largest holding in Fort Bend County; by 1860 he had acquired $1,605,000 in real property, $106,050 in personal property, and forty slaves and was thus the wealthiest man in the state. Herndon at one time owned a summer house at Velasco and is believed to have owned a million acres of Texas land. War and Reconstruction destroyed most of his fortune. After the war he moved to Hempstead and later to Boerne, where he died on July 6, 1878. He was buried at Hempstead.

1823 - Luciano García, Spanish commander in Texas, had been sent to the area by Joaquín de Arredondo after the Gutiérrez-Magee expedition to reorganize the presidial company at La Bahía and to bring it to its full complement as specified in the Regulations of 1772. García was appointed ad interim governor of Texas on June 16, 1823, and assumed his duties on July 8. He served in that capacity until October 12, 1823, at which time he released his civil duties to become commandant general of the Province of Texas.

In 1824 he was appointed political chief of the province and, as such, was friendly to the interests of Stephen F. Austin's colony, helping it in every way he could. On July 17, 1823, García completed the governing system for the colony by appointing the Baron de Bastrop as commissioner to extend land titles. Also during his administration as political chief García called the first elections in 1823 for the Texas representatives to the constituent Congress of Mexico. After retiring from the political scene in Bexar sometime in 1826 and receiving a discharge as lieutenant colonel of the cavalry of Nuevo Santander, in which he had been active. García devoted himself to stock raising.

1824 - William Roberts, one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, was living on the lower Brazos River on May 1, 1824, when Josiah H. Bell assembled Austin's colonists to take an oath of allegiance to the Mexican government. On July 8, 1824, Roberts received title to a sitio of land now in Brazoria County. The census of March 1826 classified him as a farmer and stock raiser aged over fifty. He had a wife, Peggy, a grown son, and one servant.

The William Roberts who received land for service in the Texas Revolution may have been Roberts's son. One William Roberts who located in the Austin colony was a native of Virginia and had his character certificate signed at San Augustine on November 25, 1834. According to some sources, William Roberts died about 1836 in San Augustine. Another William Roberts immigrated into the Nacogdoches District in 1826. The William E. Roberts who went with a Galveston County company on a campaign against the Comanche Indians in 1839 may have been a son of the original colonist.

1828 - (1828–1905). Diedrich Johann Gottlieb Rode, rancher and businessman, was born to Karl Friedrich and Marie (Bousmann) Rode on July 8, 1828, at Koelzow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Germany. He immigrated to Texas in 1846 under sponsorship of the Adelsverein, a corporation organized by a group of German noblemen in 1842. Records of the Gillespie County Historical Society show that Rode arrived in Galveston in January 1846 and was one of the first settlers of Fredericksburg. He married Katherina Phillippine Klaerner in Fredericksburg on July 27, 1851, and was a director of the original Zion Lutheran Church of Fredericksburg for several years. He moved to nearby Cherry Spring in 1852 to take charge of a section of land he purchased with a relative, Wilhelm Kothe, for twenty-five cents an acre. The Rodes raised three children. As civic leader, minister, teacher, and rancher, Rode worked tirelessly to improve the lives of settlers in his area. He died on July 13, 1905, and was buried with his wife and other family members in a private cemetery on the ranch a half mile from his old ranchhouse, a majestic landmark in this small village.

1855 - Camp Verde, a United States Army frontier post, was established on July 8, 1855, on the northern bank of Verde Creek three miles outside of Bandera Pass in southern Kerr County. In 1856 the camp was headquarters for forty camels sent by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to be used in a system of overland communications. Albert Sidney Johnston started from Camp Verde in 1857 on his expedition against the Mormons in Utah. The post was surrendered to the Confederate government in 1861, reoccupied by United States troops in 1865, and abandoned on April 1, 1869. In 1949 a few ruins of the camel corrals and officers' quarters remained. The Texas Centennial Commission placed a marker at the site near Camp Verde, Texas, in 1936.

1975 - Jefferson Davis, representative and senator from Mississippi in the United States Congress and later president of the Confederate States of America, was born in Todd County, Kentucky, on June 3, 1808. He graduated at the United States Military Academy in 1828 and served seven years in the army before resigning in 1835. After spending nearly ten years as a planter in Mississippi, he became active in Democratic Party politics and won a seat in the United States House of Representatives, which he took he December 1845. He supported the annexation of Texas to the United States.

Davis came to Texas first in 1846, when the volunteer regiment from Mississippi that he commanded was assigned to Zachary Taylor's army on the Rio Grande. He served with distinction in the Mexican War and was elected to the United States Senate in 1847. He resigned from the senate in 1851, but when his friend Franklin Pierce became president in 1853, Davis received an appointment as Secretary of War. In this position, he recommended in 1854 the Texas or thirty-second-parallel route for construction of a railroad to the Pacific Ocean and in 1856 sent camels to Camp Verde in a project to use the animals for army supply and overland transportation. When Mississippi seceeded in January 1861, Davis came home and soon thereafter became president of the Confederate States of America. When the Confederacy collapsed in the spring of 1865, Davis evacuated the capital in Richmond, Virginia, where he had spent the war years and sought to escape across the South and into Texas. However, he was captured in southern Georgia in May 1865. Although indicted for treason, Davis never faced trial. He was released on bond in 1867 and, after traveling for several years, spent most of the remainder of his life in Mississippi. After Reconstruction a movement was launched in Dallas to purchase a homestead for Davis and invite him to move to Texas. On June 14, 1875, he was offered the presidency of the newly established Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas. When he declined the appointment on July 8, 1875, he wrote of his hopes of revisiting Texas. He died in New Orleans on December 6, 1889. Davis is memorialized in Texas on three monuments placed by the Texas Centennial Commission and by the name of Jeff Davis County (formed in 1887).

1911 - Alfonso (Alphonso) Steele, last Texas survivor of the battle of San Jacinto, was born on April 9, 1817, to a pioneer family in Hardin County, Kentucky. At the age of seventeen he traveled by flatboat down the Mississippi River to Lake Providence, Louisiana, and there in November 1835 joined Capt. Ephraim M. Daggett's company of volunteers bound for Texas to aid in the revolution. They arrived in Washington-on-the-Brazos on New Year's Day 1836 but quickly disbanded, since the Texans had not yet declared their independence.

Many volunteers returned home, but Steele stayed, working in a hotel and grinding corn for bread to feed the delegates gathered to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence. Once independence was declared, Steele set out with a company of men under Capt. Joseph L. Bennett to join William B. Travis in San Antonio, but when they reached the Colorado River they received word that the Alamo had fallen. In the battle of San Jacinto Steele was a private in Capt. James Gillespie's company of Sidney Sherman's regiment. He was severely wounded in the first volleys of the battle but continued in the fight until it ended. Houston rode Steele's gray horse through much of the battle, until the animal was shot beneath him.

After months of recuperation, Steele was discharged and made his way to Montgomery County, where he farmed and raised cattle. There he married Mary Ann Powell on September 28, 1838. In 1844 they moved to a part of Robertson County later organized into Limestone County; they resided there until Mrs. Steele's death in 1903. In 1907 Steele revisited the San Jacinto battleground at the invitation of Houston's son, Andrew Jackson Houston, and retraced the course of the historic engagement. On February 10, 1909, the Thirty-first Texas Legislature honored him as one of two living survivors of the battle of San Jacinto. A poem entitled "The Last Hero" was written and dedicated to him by Jake H. Harrison. Steele died on July 8, 1911, near Kosse, at the home of a grandson, and was buried in Mexia. A portrait of him hangs in the Capitol.

1914 - Lincoln “Link” Davis, Sr., tenor saxophonist as well as fiddler and vocalist, was born in Sunset, Texas, on July 8, 1914. One of eight children, he grew up in Wills Point in Van Zandt County and learned to play the fiddle at an early age. In the late 1920s he established a musical trio with two of his brothers, and they performed at area dances. Eventually, he switched to tenor saxophone and focused on the new western swing genre. During the mid-1930s Davis was a member of the Crystal Springs Ramblers, based out of Fort Worth, and he made his first recording with them in 1937.

During the 1950s Davis, based mainly out of Houston, performed and did session work with a variety of well-known musicians, including Floyd Tillman, Harry Choates, and Bennie Lueders (aka Leaders). His skills covered a range of styles from country to Cajun to blues and even the fledgling fields of rockabilly and rock-and-roll. He recorded his best-known song, the Cajun-flavored “Big Mamou,” in 1952. He recorded on the Big Bopper’s hit “Chantilly Lace” and on Johnny Preston’s “Running Bear,” and at times provided instrumental backup at concerts of Elvis and Tommy Sands. Link Davis, aggravated by years of substance abuse, suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed in the late 1960s. He died from cirrhosis of the liver on February 5, 1972. He was survived by his son Link Davis, Jr., who carried on his father’s legacy as a multi-instrumentalist and recording artist.