Gonzales Memorial Museum

The Texas Revolution's first fight, on October 2, 1835, was over a cannon the Mexican authorities had lent the colony in 1831 and the colonists of Gonzales refused to give back. Which gun sits in this museum is an honest argument. The museum calls its small iron cannon the Come and Take It gun. The Handbook of Texas, in an entry revised by James Woodrick, says the colony's bronze six-pounder went on to the siege of Bexar and was taken at the Alamo, and that this piece is a second gun, an esmeril, the smallest Spanish class of cannon, whose carriage failed at Sandies Creek on the march to San Antonio; a flood in 1936 uncovered it. Castañeda's own reports of the fight say two cannons were fired.

The building is itself a Centennial project. It was built in 1936-37 with Centennial and Works Progress Administration money, about $68,000 in all, to plans by Phelps and Dewees of San Antonio, in Texas shell stone trimmed with Cordova cream limestone, and dedicated on October 30, 1937, to the Immortal Thirty-two, the Gonzales men who died at the Alamo. The amphitheater behind it carries a marble tablet for the Old Eighteen, and the south wing held the town library until 1972.

Inside are the 1831 Constitution of Gonzales, a letter in Latin from 1683, the DeWitt and Eggleston family Bibles and an early county map found in an attic. On the grounds stands Horace Eggleston's hand-hewn walnut dogtrot of 1848, which the museum calls the oldest house in the county.