Historical Marker
Will You Come to the Bower, Battle of San Jacinto
Houston, Harris County · Texas
Erected 1936
The tablet has the Texans advancing to "Will You Come to the Bower"; the music is less certain than the stone. The words are credited to the Irish poet Thomas Moore, and the love song circulated in early nineteenth-century tune books in England and America. Kemp and Kilman wrote in 1947 that a single soldier's fife played it, the only music of the battle, though several veterans remembered "Yankee Doodle." Davis family lore, reported in the Houston Post in 1985, says there was no fifer: Daniel Davis and his son George Washington Davis played it on fiddles.
What the plaque says
Will You Come to the Bower, Battle of San Jacinto To the tune of "Will You Come to the Bower" the Texans advanced, "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad" was their cry, with cannons and gunshot, clubs and Bowie knives they fought. No quarter was given, the route was complete -- the slaughter terrific.
Where it stands
29.73202, -95.08997 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 1.3 miThe 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
- Space Center Houston — 12 miThe visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.
- Emancipation Park — 17 miThe Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
- Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 17 miTen historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.