SOUTH CAROLINA: Saluda, S.C.: Where Texas Began
SALUDA , S.C.– In a state that has long embraced lost causes like the Civil War, Saluda County has a special fondness for one that happened a thousand miles away.
The county, nestled in the pine forests and rolling farmland of western South Carolina, bills itself as “The Birthplace of Alamo Heroes.” It reveres native sons William Barret Travis and James Butler Bonham, who died along with roughly 180 others defending the former Spanish mission to the death in 1836 in the fight for independence for Texas.
And long before the latest movie of “The Alamo,” local historians have been telling and retelling how Travis unloaded both barrels of his shotgun as he took a ball to the forehead and Bonham sneaked through Mexican lines at least twice with letters asking for reinforcements.
“It’s a great story about two dashing young idealistic men,” said Saluda County Historical Society Executive Director Bela Herlong.
They’ve been proud for a long time. In 1947, a monument was dedicated on the courthouse lawn remembering the pair as “comrades in arms” who “perished together in battle.”
Want to know where most historians think Travis was standing when he died? Just check out the diorama, which took six months to build and was dedicated in 2003 on the 167th anniversary of the battle. It takes up a good portion of the rear of the county museum.
Inside the glass case, hundreds of handpainted miniature Mexican soldiers are poised at the Alamo walls, ready to overwhelm the hundred or so Texans. Travis is the one in the tan coat, pointing at the invaders and urging his soldiers to fight to the death.
Nearly half the museum is dedicated to Alamo memorabilia, including copies of Travis’ famous letter to “The People of Texas & All Americans in the World,” which the young man signs “Victory or Death!”
The historical society also has spent thousands of dollars saving Bonham’s birth home, built in 1779. It sits about five miles outside of the town of Saluda. The society has placed an elaborate monument around the place where the group thinks Travis was born.
“The Texans love us,” Herlong said. “Of course, they love anything about the Alamo.”
While the county’s signs call it the birthplace of Alamo heroes, the unofficial motto passed around members of the society is “Where Texas began.”
The two women, both former schoolteachers, have written plays about Bonham and Travis, and pushed to have the men named to the South Carolina Hall of Fame in 2001.
Travis moved from Saluda County to Alabama as a boy, while Bonham was raised in South Carolina and passed the bar. But he left the state for Alabama after he was jailed for 90 days for contempt of court for threatening a judge who he thought insulted a female client.
The two met in Alabama, but Travis moved on to Texas, looking for adventure and cheap land. Legend has it he wrote back to Bonham telling him great things were happening out West and to come be part of the excitement. “But there nothing on the record that supports that,” Herlong said.
On the back wall of the museum hangs a portrait of the two men shaking hands, looking dashing and handsome with determined looks on their faces.
“I guess it would be good if more young people today had that kind of idealism,” said Gloria Caldwell, president of the historical society. “We’ve just lost it.”
But it might not be completely gone in Saluda County. The area used to be a part of nearby Edgefield County, but demanded to be split away during a state constitutional convention of 1895.
And people here still don’t like to be told what to do. The county has been fighting for years over zoning laws and Caldwell remembers what her grandfather told a neighbor many years ago during a dispute over chickens.
“Everything on your side of this fence is yours,” Caldwell recalls her grandfather saying. “And everything on my side is mine — all the way down to hell.”
–goupstate.com
