The Burning of San Felipe

On 29 March 1836 the town that had been the capital of Anglo Texas was burned by its own garrison. Captain Moseley Baker had been left with a small company to hold the Brazos crossing against Santa Anna's advance, and he ordered San Felipe de Austin evacuated and put to the torch so the Mexican army could not use it. Baker said afterwards that Sam Houston had ordered the burning. Houston flatly denied it. The quarrel was never settled, and the two were still trading public insults about it years later. Before the fire the town held about six hundred people and ranked second only to San Antonio as a commercial centre in Texas. The innkeeper Angelina Peyton had kept a tavern on the square since 1825 and begged Baker not to do it, telling him that everything she had was there. She came back after San Jacinto to piles of broken crockery, cinders and ash, camped under the trees, and decided not to rebuild. She moved to Columbia and then to the new town of Austin, where, as Angelina Eberly, she later fired the cannon that began the Archive War. Nine days after the burning Baker's men were still on the river. They had hidden every boat and raft, and Santa Anna's troops reached the far bank at dawn on 7 April. Two days of sniper and artillery fire followed, and Private John Bricker was killed by grapeshot, the only Texian killed in the fighting at the crossing. Holding the ford pushed Santa Anna downstream and away from Houston's flank. San Felipe came back as county seat in 1837, but by the mid 1840s it was six or seven log houses and a tavern. The county seat went to Bellville in 1846 and the last offices left in January 1848. It has never again been as large as it was the day it burned.