Dr. John Turner Tinsley

The plaque lists Dr. John Turner Tinsley's offices; town records show where he lived. In 1835 Andrew Ponton deeded him four twelve-acre lots east of Water Street near a creek, and the family history says the stream came to be called Tinsley Creek. A. J. Sowell later wrote that Sam Houston used the Tinsley house as his headquarters in 1836. The 1850 census valued the doctor's holdings at $17,000, and that year the council ordered him and B. B. Peck to move their houses off the public square. His son John Willis later served as city marshal.

What the plaque says

Dr. John Turner Tinsley John Turner Tinsley was born circa 1809 in Sumner County, Tennessee to Moses and Elizabeth (Turner) Tinsley. He later became a physician and married Nancy Willis of Kentucky, with whom he had five children. The family came to Gonzales in 1834 and settled east of Water Street. Tinsley served the community as a physician, alderman, mayor and justice of the peace. He also took part in the Battle of Gonzales at the beginning of the Texas Revolution, and aided Gen. Sam Houston's troops during the Runaway Scrape. The Texas patriot was buried here in 1878. Recorded - 2004

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 0.9 mi
  A 1937 Centennial museum for the Immortal Thirty-two who died at the Alamo, holding the small iron cannon Gonzales calls its Come and Take It gun and the Handbook calls a second one.
• Palmetto State Park — 9.8 mi
  Dwarf palmettos, bogs and a spring-fed oxbow on the San Marcos River, with CCC stonework from the 1930s, a swamp an hour from Austin and San Antonio.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 18 mi
  The brewery a Czech and German railroad town started in a tin shed in 1909, run through Prohibition by a Bavarian who had brewed in Cairo, and then by his daughter.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 26 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.

More markers nearby

• Eli Mitchell — steps away
• William A. Matthews — steps away
• Amasa Turner — steps away
• Charles Mason — steps away