John Himes Livergood

Livergood's road home from Perote is a story of letters. A family account says he got word to his friend Adam Zumwalt, who wrote his mother in Missouri; she wrote her brother George Himes in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, who appealed to Andrew Jackson. At Salado in March 1843 the Mier prisoners drew beans from a jar of 176, seventeen of them black, and the seventeen were shot on March 25. Livergood drew white. The Handbook says the remaining Texans, about 105, were freed at Perote on September 16, 1844.

What the plaque says

John Himes Livergood (September 10, 1815 - October 3, 1893) A native of Pennsylvania, John Himes Livergood came to Texas in 1837 and received 640 acres of land on Peach Creek near Gonzales. From that time until Texas' annexation to the United States nearly ten years later, Livergood played an integral role in the defense of frontier settlements and in several major events during the Republic period. In 1840, Livergood joined Capt. Adam Zumwalt to pursue an Indian party that had attacked his neighbors. The chase ended with a decisive victory at the Battle of Plum Creek. Later he served in several scouting expeditions, including the Spy Company of the Texas Rangers under John (Jack) Coffee Hays. He took part in the Battle of Salado Creek and the Somervell Expedition in 1842. As a member of the doomed Mier Expedition to invade Mexico, he was a survivor of the Black Bean Episode and was finally released from Perote prison in 1844. While visiting family in Missouri in 1847, John H. Livergood met Sarah Ann Elizabeth Perkins (1828-1909). They married in 1847 and established a home (eventually with 13 children) on the Lavaca River. The Livergoods helped found Mossy Grove Methodist Church and were active leaders there. A farmer and rancher, Livergood also entered the political life of Lavaca County, serving as chief justice (county judge) from 1850 to 1852 and later as justice of the peace. In his final military service, Livergood served in the Lone Star Guard, the Texas State Troops and the Confederate army during the Civil War. Both he and Sarah Ann Livergood are buried at Mossy Grove Cemetery. (2001)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lavaca County Courthouse — 6.1 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.
• Spoetzl Brewery — 13 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) — 22 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.
• Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 25 mi
  A red brick Gothic Revival church of 1906 in a German farm settlement, where two San Antonio painters spent 1912 faking marble columns and stone vaults on wood.

More markers nearby

• Petersburg — 3.8 mi
• Wreck of the Don Milo — 5.6 mi
• Joel Ponton — 5.7 mi
• Sacred Heart Catholic Church — 5.9 mi