Dimmit County

Philip Dimmitt designed the first flag of Texas independence, a bloody arm holding a bloody sword on a white field. A Kentucky-born trader who reached Texas about 1823, he commanded the garrison at Goliad after volunteers took it in October 1835, and the flag was raised there on December 20, 1835. In January 1836 he resigned after other officers seized the garrison's supplies. Mexican troops captured him on July 4, 1841 and took him to Matamoros. At Saltillo, told he would be shot if fugitives did not surrender, he took his own life.

What the plaque says

Dimmit County Created February 1, 1858; organized November 2, 1880 Named in honor of Philip Dimmitt, a pioneer trader and captain in the Texas Army who died in 1841. Carrizo Springs, The County Seat (3.7 mi. N Carrizo Springs, US Hwy. 83)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dimmit County Courthouse — steps away
  An 1884 Italianate courthouse wrapped in a 1920s Classical Revival remake, in the seat of a county whose white primary kept Mexican Americans out of politics for nearly fifty years.
• My Story Museum — 11 mi
  A free museum on Zavala Street holding three stories of one small Texas town: the 1969 student walkout and Raza Unida years, the internment camp and its veterans.
• Crystal City Family Internment Camp Site — 12 mi
  The only wartime camp built for whole families, where Japanese, German and Italian Americans and Latin American deportees were held from 1942 to 1948, now marked by cottage foundations and a pool.
• Chaparral Wildlife Management Area — 31 mi
  A 15,200-acre South Texas brush country research tract in La Salle and Dimmit counties, open to the public in spring and summer, with a short accessible trail and a long ranching past.

More markers nearby

• Burleson Cemetery — 4.6 mi
• Zavala County — 11 mi
• Crystal City Family Internment Camp, World War II — 12 mi
• Zavala County — 17 mi