Little Rocky Creek

On 19 November 1854 Sam Houston was baptised in Little Rocky Creek by Rufus C. Burleson, the Baptist minister who was then president of Baylor University at Independence. Houston was sixty one, a sitting United States senator, and had spent most of his life conspicuously outside any church. His wife Margaret and her mother Nancy Lea had been working on him for years, and he joined Independence Baptist Church after hearing Burleson preach. The baptism produced the most repeated anecdote in Washington County: told that his sins had been washed away, Houston is supposed to have replied that God help the fish downstream. It has no contemporary attestation at all. The earliest version anyone has found is in Marquis James's biography of 1929, seventy five years after the fact, sourced to a conversation rather than a document, and it turns up since in accounts written by people who were not standing on the bank. Whether he said it or not, the conversion held. Houston's late religion was not merely domestic. Six years later, as governor of Texas, he refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and was removed from office in March 1861. He died at Huntsville in July 1863 with the war still running. The creek is a small tributary in the rolling country a couple of miles south of Independence. The congregation he joined still meets there, though it had no building of its own in 1854 and the one standing now is an 1872 rebuild, put up after the first burned.