This park beside the interstate in Conroe was built in 2011 to press a claim that historians have never accepted. Montgomery County says the Lone Star flag was designed by Dr Charles Bellinger Tate Stewart, a physician who lived in the town of Montgomery, about fourteen miles west of here. On 30 May 1997 the Texas House of Representatives adopted a resolution commemorating Montgomery County as the birthplace of the Lone Star flag, which is how a contested attribution acquires an official ring. The contest is not close. Stewart's name does not appear on the final report of the Senate committee that settled the flag in 1839, and the Texas State Library notes there is no record of his serving in that Congress at all. Most historians treat a different drawing, by the Austin artist Peter Krag, as the first draft. The Stewart sheet surfaced through a letter from his son in 1922 and appears to trace the Krag original, upside down signature and all. What is not in doubt is that Stewart was a real figure of the revolution: he signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836 and had served as secretary to the provisional governor the year before. The park runs to about three and a half acres beside the county library, free, open from dawn until eleven. Thirteen flags fly on thirty five foot poles, one for each of the thirteen days of the Alamo siege, and they run from a Mexican state flag through the Gonzales come and take it banner to the Lone Star flag itself. At the centre is The Texian, a fourteen foot bronze by the Conroe sculptor Craig Campobella, unveiled in 2011: a veteran of the revolution planting a flagstaff into the ground.
Getting there
30.3122, -95.4693
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
