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When
74-year-old Dr. Henry North Graves died that summer morning in Dallas,
the solution to one of Texas’ enduring mysteries may have died with
him.
Though no irrefutable evidence has been found, some historians believe
that Graves had a hand in the burial of the most famous pieces of
artillery in Texas history – the Twin Sisters.
The two guns had been donated to the Texas cause by the citizens of
Cincinnati in 1836. On April 21 that year, with devastating effectiveness,
the six-pounders helped Sam Houston defeat Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa
Anna in the rout that came to be called the Battle of San Jacinto.
During the near-decade of Texas’ sovereignty as an independent republic,
the Sisters served only occasional ceremonial roles at the capitol.
When Texas joined the Union in 1845, the guns became the property
of the U.S. government, and the Army removed them to a federal arsenal
in Baton Rouge, La.
As Texas and 10 other Southern states moved toward secession in 1861,
the guns barely escaped being recycled at a Louisiana foundry. At
the request of then Texas Gov. Houston, the Louisiana state legislature
voted $700 to restore the guns and return them to Texas. They arrived
on April 20, 1861.
The old guns later sent cannonballs whizzing toward Yankee gunboats
during the Battle of Galveston. The federals briefly took the island
city, but either were not interested in the vintage field pieces or
the guns had been withdrawn to the Houston area. In February 1864,
Lt. Walter W. Blow wrote John S. “Rip” Ford that he was getting ready
to send the guns to San Antonio. Whether that ever happened is not
known.
The Handbook of Texas says a Union soldier, M.A. Sweetman, wrote in
his diary that he had seen the guns near Houston’s Market Square on
July 30 that year.
This is when Graves finally enters the story. Even though the war
ended in 1865, die-hard Texas rebs did not want the historic guns
again ending up as federal property. Graves later said that he and
four other men buried the guns in a field near Harrisburg. The men
made careful mental notes on where they had hidden the artillery and
went on about their lives.
Graves soon married and began studying medicine. He practiced at Gonzales,
Seguin and Georgetown, an early authority on the therapeutic use of
antitoxins. In 1916, he moved from Georgetown to Dallas to live with
one of his three daughters.
An article in the Dallas Times-Herald noted that in his old age, Dr.
Graves “expressed a desire that he would live long enough to make
a trip to Harrisburg and aid in recovering the Twin Sisters.”
Graves attended a Confederate reunion in Houston in 1920 and, as the
Dallas newspaper reported, “escorted a group of veterans to the field
where the guns are concealed, but made no effort to determine the
exact spot where they were buried.”
The doctor had hoped to return to the area “if financial aid could
be extended him.”
But on June 27, 1921, Graves died. His obituary noted that the doctor
“breathed his last Tuesday morning at 8:30 o’clock without designating
the place where the cannon were buried.” Whether someone in his family
made a last ditch effort to get the information out of him went unreported.
As the Dallas newspaper reported, “plans were being made to introduce
a resolution in the Texas legislature at the time of his death asking
the necessary appropriation” to recover and restore the cannons. But
that movement seems to have died with Graves.
The whereabouts of the real Twin Sisters remain a mystery, but the
boom of two cannons still occasionally is heard at the San Jacinto
battleground. In 1985, two graduates of the University of Houston’s
College of Technology oversaw the making of replicas of the famous
cannons.
Of course, replica is a relative term. No one knows exactly what the
Twin Sisters looked like. In the mid-1980s, the Cinncinnati foundry
that manufactured the guns still existed, but it had no record detailing
the specifications of the Twin Sisters.
“There are several descriptions of the cannon left by people who actually
saw or used them,” Austin historian and Republic of Texas reenactor
Charles Yates said at the rededication of the Twin Sisters in 2001.
“But as is the case with multiple eyewitness accounts of the same
event, they seldom agree on all points.”
Unless the real Twin Sisters are found, the replicas will have to
do. |
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