John Holland Jenkins

Jenkins was thirteen when he joined Jesse Billingsley's Mina Volunteers, thought to be the youngest Texan in the San Jacinto campaign. At Gonzales he learned that his stepfather, James Northcross, had died at the Alamo, and on the retreat Edward Burleson sent him back to help his mother and other Bastrop families in the Runaway Scrape, so he missed the battle. He later rangered, fought at Palmito Ranch in 1865, and in 1884 wrote his memoirs for the Bastrop Advertiser, published in 1958 as Recollections of Early Texas. He is buried in Fairview Cemetery.

What the plaque says

John Holland Jenkins Star and Wreath A young soldier in the Texas War for Independence during the San Jacinto campaign. Erected by the State of Texas, 1962

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bastrop State Park — 1.2 mi
  The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 19 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 25 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 27 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.

More markers nearby

• William Dunbar — steps away
• Robert Love Reding — steps away
• Governor J. D. Sayers — steps away
• Bastrop County — 0.7 mi