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In
the late 1950s or early 1960s, a worker bulldozing a trench during
construction of a new building at the Granite Mountain Quarry near
Marble
Falls made a discovery that created a mystery still unsolved.
Four feet down, the machine's heavy metal blade struck something
hard. Climbing from his seat to see what he had hit, the operator
found a chunk of concrete or plaster. Soon he found several other
pieces. Brushing the dirt from the larger piece, he could make out
one word indented on the smooth side of the object: "Thermopylae."
Someone took the jagged fragment stamped with that unusual word
to Mrs. Marie Houy, librarian and keeper of a small museum in Marble
Falls. About 10 inches long, it looked like a piece of some
kind of monument or marker. But what did the artifact commemorate
and what was it doing at the Burnet
County granite quarry? Neither the librarian, a longtime area
resident then in her early 70s, nor anyone else she contacted had
any idea.
The only clue was that one word, "Thermopylae."
Checking the library's not-so-up-to-date encyclopedia set, Mrs.
Houy read that in ancient times Thermopylae had been the only northern
entrance to Greece. It had been defended bravely if unsuccessfully
against invading Persians.
While Mrs. Houy had not heard of that Grecian city until she looked
it up, in the 19th century educators stressed the classics much
more than they would in the following century. In the 1800s, many
well-schooled individuals knew the story of the 480 B.C. Battle
of Thermopylae.
Given the general similarity between the Grecian fight and the Alamo,
the figurative ruins of Thermopylae lay ripe for use as metaphor.
The Telegraph and Texas Register, in an editorial published March
24, 1836 -- only two weeks after the massacre in San
Antonio -- called the battle "the Thermopylae of Texas." That
comparison having been made, others picked up on it. Republic of
Texas Vice President Edward Burleson later used the analogy in a
speech said to have been ghost-written by General Thomas J. Green.
In this talk, Burleson famously recited, "Thermopylae had her messenger
of defeat; the Alamo had none."
In 1841, some stones from the ruins of the crumbling Spanish mission
in San Antonio were
removed and transformed into a monument honoring the dead defenders.
Englishman William B. Nangle, a sculptor, fashioned the piece. A
tapered shaft resting on an ornately carved base, the commemorative
work rose 10 feet. Originally displayed in San
Antonio as a commercial venture, but subsequently discarded,
the monument later was purchased by the state following Texas' admission
to the Union.
Most pertinent in regard to the mystery object found just west of
Marble
Falls, the Alamo monument bore Burleson/Green's words comparing
the Alamo to Thermopylae.
The statue stood in the vestibule of the 1853-vintage limestone
state house until fire gutted the building in 1881. Collapsing interior
beams and walls, not to mention the intense heat, wrecked the monument.
After the fire, Judge John P. White, picking through the ashes and
debris hoping to salvage what state property he could, found the
portion of the shaft containing verbiage on each side. Even though
the Alamo memorial was only 40 years old at the time, the judge
appreciated its historical significance and kept it seven years.
Then, in 1888, he conveyed it to L.L. Foster, state commissioner
of insurance, statistics, history and agriculture.
The state retained the monument remnant until passing it on to the
Daughters of the Republic of Texas for display in the museum the
DRT maintained in the Old General Land Office building across from
the
current Capitol. Exactly when that transfer occurred has not
been determined, but the Handbook of Texas has it there by 1950.
It remained on display until September 1989, when the DRT returned
the remnant to the state preparatory to moving its museum to a new
location.
"How the pieces landed here we do not know, unless they hauled it
off, after the fire, to get it out of the way at the time they were
bringing granite blocks from here to Austin
for the new
Capitol," Mrs. Houy wrote of the Marble
Falls artifacts in 1963.
The remnant held by the state includes the Thermopylae wording,
which rules out any possibility that the pieces found near Marble
Falls came from the original Alamo monument. What seems likely,
though no documentation has been found, is that during construction
of the new red granite Capitol the quarry may have been commissioned
to make a granite replica of the monument. But for whatever reason,
that did not happen and the quarry broke up and disposed of what
might have been a concrete prototype or a casting from the original.
And now another mystery: The Marble
Falls fragment with the word "Thermopylae" has since gone missing.
Mrs. Houy died in 1989, just shy of her 100th birthday. The library
she once ran in an old downtown building got a new home in the 1990s
and the Marble Falls museum, now known as the Falls of the Colorado
Museum, has its home in the old Marble Falls school house. While
the puzzling artifacts Mrs. Houy curated presumably ended up in
the Falls of the Colorado collection, no one there knows anything
about a piece of concrete bearing the simple legend of "Thermopylae."
© Mike Cox
"Texas Tales" September
7, 2016 column
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