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Future Alamo defender and survivor elope
May 24, 1829
On this day in 1829,
Almaron Dickinson eloped with Susanna Wilkerson. Dickinson, a native of
Pennsylvania, was born around 1800 and later moved to the area of
Bolivar, Tennessee, where he met Wilkerson, who was born in that state
in 1814. The couple moved to Gonzales, Texas, in 1831 and had a
daughter, Angelina Dickinson, in 1834. As a colonist in Green DeWitt's
colony, Dickinson received a league of land on the San Marcos River. He
participated in the battle of Gonzales in 1835 and distinguished himself
as a lieutenant of artillery at the siege of Bexar; at the battle of
the Alamo he was the captain in charge of artillery. Although he died at
the Alamo, his wife and child survived; legend says Susanna displayed
her husband's Masonic apron to a Mexican general in a plea for help.
General Santa Anna sent Susanna and her daughter to Sam Houston with a
letter of warning dated March 7. Susanna married four more times before
her death in 1883.
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El Paso civic leader and cigar manufacturer born in Prussia
May 24, 1857
On this day in 1857, Ernst
Kohlberg was born in Beverungen, Westphalia, at that time a province of
Prussia. He left home in 1875 with Solomon C. Schutz, who had business
interests in the El Paso area. Kohlberg agreed to work for Schutz
without salary for six months to a year in order to defray the costs of
his passage to Texas. The two reached Franklin, as El Paso was then
called, by stagecoach. Kohlberg's first impressions of his new home were
less than glowing. He wrote to his parents that the town was "nearly
the end of the world and the last creation." After working off his debt
to Schutz, Kohlberg invested in a Mexican gold mine and worked in San
Francisco before returning to Franklin in 1881 and opening a cigar store
in partnership with his brother. On a family visit to Germany in 1884,
Kohlberg met and married Olga Bernstein. The two became prominent civic
leaders and philanthropists in El Paso; Olga Kohlberg founded the first
public kindergarten in Texas. In 1886 the Kohlberg brothers established
the first cigar factory in the Southwest. Among Ernst Kohlberg's other
holdings was the St. Charles Hotel, which he leased to a compulsive
gambler who in 1910 shot and killed Kohlberg after falling far behind in
his rent.
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Alleged participants in mob killing go on trial
May 24, 1869
On this day in 1869,
twenty-four defendants went on trial in the celebrated Stockade Case. On
the night of October 24, 1868, a Marion County mob dragged five
Republicans, arrested the previous night after a Republican meeting
ended in a gunfight with local Democrats, from the Jefferson jail and
killed three of them, a white and two blacks. After the killings
Reconstruction officials arrested some thirty-five suspects, and
eventually tried twenty-four of them. The trial involved the testimony
of 176 witnesses, and a verdict was not delivered until August 23, 1869.
Only seven of the defendants were found guilty of any of the charges,
and it is unclear whether any of them served any time in prison.
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posted - 5.24.2012 - The Texas State Historical Association
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