User:MichaelBludworth/Joseph Worthington Elliot Wallace

New article name new article content ... Joseph Worthington Elliot Wallace, early Texas settler was born on April 8, 1796 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After serving the in Seminole War, he lived in Port Gibson, Mississippi, where he was a colonel in the Mississippi militia. He moved to Texas in 1830 as a Consul of the United States to Mexico. He joined Stephen F. Austin's colony and received a land grant of one league in TresPalacios, Matagorda County, Texas. At the outbreak of hostilities with Mexico he was operating stores at Wharton and Beeson's Crossing on the Colorado River. In the fall of 1835 he led a group of men from Columbus to Gonzales, where he was elected Lieutenant Colonel - he was in joint command of the Texian forces for the Battle of Gonzales. It was at his signal that the cannon at Gonzales, which is what the Mexican detachment was sent to confiscate, was fired. This act is now regarded as the first shot of the Texas War of Independence, although the Mexican group had already decided to leave the area without collecting the cannon, or forcibly interacting with the settlers. In 1836 he wrote Thomas Jefferson Rusk reporting Indian depredations in the Bay Prairie area. He and Willaim B. DeWees re-platted the town of Columbus, Texas in 1837. In 1839 he was a delegate to a convention at Richmond to consider the location of a railroad. He was one of the officers in command at the battle of Plum Creek in 1840. This was one of the early, and continuing, battles with raiding Comanche Indians. Wallace married Harriet Hazelton Holt, daughter of Samuel Holt; she died in Mississippi in 1828. They had one son, William Hazelton Wallace, who died during the Civil War in the service of the Confederacy at Sabine Pass. His daughter, Julia Stella Wallace, would marry Texas rancher Benjamin P. Bludworth, who had also seen service in the Confederacy. Wallace was a Mason and member of the Texas Veterans Association. He died in Columbus on August 24, 1877. In 1955 his great grandson, Wallace (Wally)J. Bludworth, had his body moved and reburied in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin, Texas.