texas – Page 40 – Texas History Notebook

Women of the Alamo

The list includes Concepción Charlé Losoya, Andrea Castañon de Villanueva, Juana Navarro Pérez Alsbury, Gertrudis Navarro, Ana Salazar Castro Esparza, Juana Francisca Losoya Melton and Susanna Wilkerson Dickerson. At least seven children also survived.

La Reunion Community

This Day in Texas (Austin American, Austin, Texas, June 16, 1950)”

June 16 – “On this day in 1855 some 200 immigrants arrived to swell the population of the newly established colony of La Reunion on the west bank of the Trinity River, near present-day Dallas.

La Reunion had been founded by Victor Prosper Considerant, a wealthy Frenchman who was an ardent disciple of the outstanding 19th century Socialist, Charles Marie Fourier. The town was carefully built, rows of small houses around a small square. The government was like that of democratic Athens, by general assembly, and the only punishment ever imposed was banishment from the colony.

One of the first activities of the colony was to found a school of vocal music, and the strains of their songs floated across the river to where a grimmer breed of men and women was pursuing the rituals of everyday existence. In time, the La Reunion colonists joined them., for their lands had been poorly chosen, the farmers were unenthusiastic and the terrain was poorly drained. By 1856 the colonists were drifting away.

The Frenchmen never had sought to prevent their daughters from marrying American settlers across the river and the settlement was completely absorbed within a generation.”

Thurber, Texas

Thurber is located about seventy-five miles west of Fort Worth just into Erath County as you travel west out of Palo Pinto County. It is now only a collection a few building sites and foundations of others but once Thutber was a boom town of as many as eight to ten thousand people.

Elizabet Ney

Elizabet Ney McDonald was a prolific sculptor who lived in Texas for much of her career. She was born in Münster, Westphalia, Germany in 1833 and when she was sixteen, she was enrolled in Berlin Academy where she studied under a famous sculptor named Rauch. Her family ancestry was Polish and she was said to be the grand niece of Marshal Michel Ney, the favorite field marshal of Napoleon Bonaparte. Marshal Ney was captured in Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo after which he was sentenced to be executed. Accounts refer to her ancestry as having initially been a detriment to her initial acceptance. However, she became the first (and at least for many years, the only) female to complete studies at the Art Academy of Munich.

Martín Perfecto de Cos (1800–1854)

Martiín Perfecto de Cos was a key individual in Santa Anna’s leadership. Born in Veracruz in 1800, he is usually described as being a career military soldier and accounts have him entering the military at around the age of twenty.