Val Verde Battery, C.S.A.

The plaque follows the guns home; the Handbook of Texas describes the fight where Union artillery was lost. On February 21, 1862, near Fort Craig in New Mexico, Colonel Green's Texans charged the Federal guns at Valverde. McRae's battery fired grapeshot into the charge but was overrun in eight minutes, and McRae and half his men died at their guns. Eighty percent of the Union killed and wounded fell at or near the battery. Canby blamed the New Mexico Volunteers for refusing to counterattack. The plaque does not say which guns became Freestone's.

What the plaque says

Val Verde Battery, C.S.A. Six brass field guns taken by Lt. Joseph D. Sayers' Company in Civil War Battle of Val Verde, N. Mex., 1862, and brought back to Texas with incredible difficulty, armed a new unit of hand-picked men. Sound of the Val Verde guns in action set pace for other outfits, helped secure such victories as the recapture of Galveston, 1863. At Mansfield, La., April 1864, captured new, longer-range guns. Unwilling to lose their guns when the war ended, the men buried four. The last commander, T. D. Nettles, brought this one home to Freestone County. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 18 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.
• Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site — 24 mi
  Where Limestone County Confederate veterans gathered each summer from 1888, later a water supplier in the Mexia oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site on the Navasota River.
• Old Fort Parker — 25 mi
  A rebuilt 1830s family stockade near the Navasota River, where a May 1836 attack killed men of the Parker settlement and took five captives, among them nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker.

More markers nearby

• Freestone County — steps away
• Site of Law Office, General John Gregg — steps away
• Rev. George Washington Baines — steps away
• Butler Church Bell — steps away