The Haunted History Connecting South #Texas to Central #Louisiana | #CenLa

Race riots, desecrated bodies, classism and long buried secrets – all dug up when searching for the secrets of how my town got it’s name, and the trail lead me 600 miles from Brownsville, Texas, to Alexandria, Louisiana.

Every year I tell my students the story of “How Brownsville Got Its Name,”more-or-less as it was told to me by the late Bruce Aiken, a Texas historical commissioner who had the uncanny ability to tell you exactly what was important about any given date in South Texas history purely by memory (by the time I met him, he’d long since lost his ability to see the tiny print in the texts he used to pour over).

And while it’s easy to say Brownsville was named after Fort Brown, which was in turn named after Maj. Jacob Brown, things’re never quite that simple.

It all traces back to a forgotten soldier named Horace Weigart.

It seems Gen. Zachary Taylor – who would later go on to be president – promised the met at the camp on the northern bank of the Rio Grande that he would rename the fort – then-called Fort Texas because they always called new forts in Texas, “Fort Texas” – after the first man to die in battle against the Mexicans.

That day finally came on May 3, 1846, when Sergeant Horace Weigart, a “lowly enlisted man” as Aiken put it, was asked to check a hole in the wall. A Mexican shell struck nearby, killing him instantly. In my imagination, the last thing he thought was “at least they’ll name the fort after me.”

Shortly afterwards, his body was moved to a medical tent as the battle continued. Then another volley came over the wall, landing on the tent, knocking Weigart’s head clean off. They moved his body to a shallow grave, only to have another shell land there.

Weigart had died three times in the name of his country.

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