William C. Swearingen

The line on this tablet comes from a long letter, and Louis Kemp's copy shows it went to a brother. Swearingen headed it "Buffaloe Bieau April 22nd, 1836" and addressed it to Lemuel Swearingen of Scottsville, Kentucky. Writing the day after the battle, he put the Mexican dead at 620 to 700, the prisoners at 480 and the fighting at eighteen minutes. John H. Jenkins later printed it in The Papers of the Texas Revolution. By August 1837 Swearingen signed himself captain commanding the post on the Sabine.

What the plaque says

William C. Swearingen Born in Kentucky. Arrived at Velasco, January 28, 1836 on the schooner Pennsylvania to fight for the freedom of Texas. A member of Captain Amasa Turner's company at San Jacinto. Died in Houston, December 24, 1839. "Kiss William for me and tell him Pappy will be there in the fall and stay with him and that he must be a good boy." From a letter Mr. Swearingen wrote to his parents in Kentucky.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 0.5 mi
  Ten 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.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 1.5 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Rothko Chapel — 1.7 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Emancipation Park — 1.7 mi
  The 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.

More markers nearby

• Robert Barr — steps away
• Henry Livingston Thompson — steps away
• David Grieves — steps away
• William Daniel Durham — steps away