Susanna W. Dickinson

Illiterate, widowed and twenty-two, Dickinson petitioned the government at Columbia in October 1836 for help, but the proposed $500 was never awarded. She married John Williams in 1837; he beat her and Angelina, and her divorce in March 1838 was one of the first in Harris County. She married Francis P. Herring that December, and after his death in 1843 wed Peter Bellows in 1847, a marriage that also ended in divorce. The Baptist minister Rufus C. Burleson praised her nursing of cholera victims in Houston and baptized her in Buffalo Bayou in 1849.

What the plaque says

Susanna W. Dickinson (1814-1883). Almaron and Susanna Dickinson settled in Gonzales about 1835 as members of DeWitt's Colony. Present with her daughter, Angelina, when the Alamo fell in March 1836, Susanna witnessed the deaths of Almaron and the other Texans. She was released by Mexican General Santa Anna after the battle, and with an escort made her way to Sam Houston with news of the Alamo. She married Joseph Hannig in 1857 and lived in Austin until her death. Recorded-1993.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• George Washington Carver Museum — 0.4 mi
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
• Texas State Cemetery — 0.6 mi
  A hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.7 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.
• LBJ Presidential Library — 0.7 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.

More markers nearby

• John Crittenden Duval — steps away
• Andrew Jackson Hamilton — steps away
• Abner Hugh Cook — steps away
• Swante Palm — steps away