William Daniel Durham

The Handbook gives his name as William Davis Durham and says the San Jacinto Monument engraves it wrongly as William Daniel Durham. The eldest of seven children, he came from Bardswell in Norfolk, England, with a family that settled in New York, and he enlisted in the New Orleans Greys on October 22, 1835, landing at Velasco three days later. The Milam Guards, Houston's light riflemen, had been organized under Capt. Joseph Daniels on Sam Houston's commission of March 9, 1838, the first militia unit formed after independence. Yellow fever killed him.

What the plaque says

William Daniel Durham Born in England in 1814. Participated in the capture of bexar, December 5th to 10th, 1835. Served in Captain william J. E. Heard's company at San Jacinto and was second lieutenant in the Milam Guards when he died at Houston, August 26, 1838.

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
• Major Isaac N. Moreland — steps away
• Gravesite of John Kirby Allen — steps away
• George Allen — steps away