Fannin Memorial Monument

This is a grave, and the monument is the place to stand. At dawn on Palm Sunday, March 27, 1836, the Texan prisoners at La Bahía, men surrendered at Coleto and men of William Ward's Georgia Battalion, were marched out in three columns on the Bexar, Victoria and San Patricio roads, told they were going to gather wood or drive cattle or sail for New Orleans. Half to three-quarters of a mile out, the guards fired. Fannin and the wounded were killed inside the fort. A man-by-man study put the dead at 342; twenty-eight escaped, and about twenty were spared as doctors, orderlies and mechanics, many of them through the pleading of Francita Alavez, the Angel of Goliad, and of Col. Francisco Garay.

Santa Anna ordered the killings under a December 1835 decree that foreigners taken in arms be treated as pirates; Urrea had recommended clemency, and Col. José Nicolás de la Portilla, given conflicting orders, chose Santa Anna's. The bodies were burned and left in the open until June 3, 1836, when Thomas Rusk's army gathered the remains and buried them with military honors.

The site was then lost. A Goliad merchant, George von Dohlen, piled rocks where he believed it was around 1858, and the town raised a memorial elsewhere in 1885. In 1930 Boy Scouts found charred bone, the University of Texas anthropologist J. E. Pearce examined the site, and the Centennial paid for this monument, dedicated on June 4, 1938. Treat the ground as a burial place.