Abel Morgan

Morgan was a hospital orderly under Fannin, and his story turns on a wagon. At the battle of Coleto he drove an ox-drawn wagon of four wounded men; an ox was killed, and he refused to leave it. After the surrender a Mexican officer hid him behind a shutter while the executions of March 27, 1836, went on for more than an hour. The Handbook counts 342 Texans shot at Goliad and about twenty spared as physicians, orderlies, interpreters or mechanics. Morgan's 1847 account is among those showing Fannin disobeyed Houston's order to leave.

What the plaque says

Abel Morgan Star and Wreath Born in North Carolina December 23, 1792. Arrived at Bexar in late December, 1835, as private Thomas Smith in Captain J. O. Blair's Company. Discharged and later enlisted in Captain Ira Westover's Company, Colonel Fannin's Command. Escaped the Goliad Massacre "at which time I was saved for a nurse." Died October 12, 1873. Erected by the State of texas, 1962

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cooper Lake State Park — 9.4 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 20 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 28 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 28 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.

More markers nearby

• Union Cemetery, Old — 2.8 mi
• Old Klondike Cemetery — 3.9 mi
• Pioneer Smith Brothers — 5.1 mi
• Incorporation of Commerce — 6.1 mi