Henry Livingston Thompson

Thompson's funeral came about two months after the cruise that ended the first Texas Navy. In June 1837 he and Navy Secretary Samuel Rhoads Fisher took the schooners Invincible and Brutus to the Yucatan coast, though Houston opposed such cruises. Thompson's own report says the crews took possession of Cozumel with a twenty-three-gun salute. They took prizes off Sisal and engaged its batteries on July 26. Back at Galveston in late August, both ships ran aground under Mexican attack and were lost. Charges against him included drunkenness and embezzling prize property; he died before any court-martial.

What the plaque says

Henry Livingston Thompson Commodore of the Texan navy. Died in Houston, Nov. 1, 1837. "The funeral of the late Commodore Thompson took place on the morning of Thursday last. His remains were followed to the grave by the largest and most respectable assemblage of citizens which has ever attended a similar occasion in this city. An oration was delivered at the grave by General Rusk." Texas Telegraph

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 0.5 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 1.5 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Rothko Chapel — 1.7 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Emancipation Park — 1.7 mi
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.

More markers nearby

• William C. Swearingen — steps away
• William Daniel Durham — steps away
• John Cheevers — steps away
• Moses W. Brigham — steps away