This marker, and the eighteen similar ones placed throughout the site, is one of the last first-hand accounts of the Battle of San Jacinto.
In 1836, nineteen-year-old James Washington Winters joined the Texas Army and fought in the Battle of San Jacinto. Sixty-five years later, Winters, accompanied by members of the San Jacinto Chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, returned to the battlefield to locate key locations from that decisive battle.
He identified nineteen spots, eighteen of which were marked with temporary iron crosses. A nineteenth spot designating the “camp of General Houston, where he lay wounded under a tree, on the bank of Buffalo Bayou, the spot where Santa Anna was delivered to him a captive” was identified, but it was on private land and left unmarked until later. In 1904, the DRT appointed a committee to find and mark a twentieth spot, the site of Vince’s Bridge.
In 1912, the temporary crosses were replaced with these large granite markers. Learn more about each individual marker on the site map, available for free at the ticket counter in the San Jacinto Monument.