Sarah Creath McSherry Hibbens Stinnett Howard

Before she turned thirty, Sarah Creath had lost three husbands, a brother and an infant. In February 1836 a Comanche raiding party attacked her ox cart about fifteen miles from home and killed John Hibbens and her brother George. After the child was killed, she escaped, walked a day and reached Texas Rangers, who recovered her son. John Henry Brown blamed Claiborne Stinnett's 1838 disappearance on two enslaved men who had fled; retellings add a confession in Mexico, but none names the men or shows evidence. She married Phillip Howard in 1839 and died in Bosque County in 1870.

What the plaque says

Sarah Creath McSherry Hibbens Stinnett Howard SARAH HOWARD SUFFERED MUCH AT THE SAVAGERY OF THE TEXAS WILDERNESS. BORN IN ILLINOIS, SARAH CAME TO TEXAS WITH HER HUSBAND, JOHN McSHERRY, IN 1828. THE NEXT YEAR, JOHN WAS KILLED NEAR THEIR HOME BY INDIANS. SARAH LATER MARRIED JOHN HIBBENS, BUT INDIANS TOOK THE LIVES OF JOHN AND SARAH'S BROTHER NEAR THIS SITE. SARAH AND HER TWO SONS WERE TAKEN CAPTIVE, AND SHE ALONE ESCAPED. EVENTUALLY, SARAH'S OLDEST SON WAS RETURNED UNHARMED. IN 1836, SARAH MARRIED CLAIBORNE STINNETT. TWO YEARS LATER, HE WAS KILLED BY RUNAWAY SLAVES. IN 1839, SARAH MARRIED COL. PHILLIP HOWARD IN GONZALES. SARAH EPITOMIZES THE TEXAS PIONEER WOMAN BY HER DETERMINATION AND WILL TO SURVIVE. (2011)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spoetzl Brewery — 1.0 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.
• Lavaca County Courthouse — 13 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.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 18 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.
• Gonzales Memorial Museum — 18 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.

More markers nearby

• Saint Ludmila's Academy — 0.5 mi
• Kaspar Wire Works — 1.1 mi
• First National Bank of Shiner — 1.1 mi
• Shiner — 1.2 mi