This Day In Texas History - March 23

[joe817]

1836 - Santa Anna replied to Urrea's clemency letter on March 23 by ordering immediate execution of these "perfidious foreigners" and repeated the order in a letter the next day.

1846 - General Zachary Taylor reached the Rio Grande River. He and his men were sent to South Texas in response to threats by Mexico against annexation of Texas by the United States. A few days later, the men will begin construction of Fort Brown.

1861 - Texas Secession Convention ratified the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, by a vote of 126 to 2 after almost no debate.

1869 - Camp Concordia was renamed Fort Bliss. The War Department closed the post in January 1877, just before the Salt War of San Elizario flared. A military board, however, convened to investigate the reopening of the post as a result of the violence; the board recommended in 1878 that Fort Bliss be reestablished, and the post was moved to downtown El Paso, which soldiers called Garrison Town.

1893 - The Fort Worth Stock Yards were officially incorporated. The Fort Worth livestock market became the largest in Texas and the Southwest, the biggest market south of Kansas City, and consistently ranked between third and fourth among the nation's large terminal livestock markets for five decades, from about 1905 to the mid-1950s. By 1886 four stockyards had been built near the railroads. Boston capitalist Greenleif W. Simpson, with a half dozen Boston and Chicago associates, incorporated the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company and purchased the Union Stock Yards and the Fort Worth Packing Company in 1893. In 1896 the company began a fat-stock show that has survived to the present as one of the largest livestock shows in the nation, the Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show. An agreement with Armour and Swift brought in two of the nation's largest meatpackers, who constructed modern plants adjacent to the stockyards. By 1936 Texas had become the largest-producing state for both cattle and sheep, with Fort Worth as the industry's hub.

1908 - Oscar winning actress, Lucille Fay LeSueur was born in San Antonio. She is best known by her stage name, Joan Crawford.

1909 - A tornado kills 11 and injures another 10 people in Slidell, Wise County

1923 - Lamar University originated as South Park Junior College when the South Park Independent School District in Beaumont instructed superintendent L. R. Pietzch to develop plans for "a Junior college of the first class." SPJC opened with an enrollment of 125 students and a faculty of fourteen. The college was later renamed Lamar State College of Technology and, in 1971, Lamar University.

2005 - In Texas City, TX, 15 people were killed and more than 100 were injured in an explosion at a gas plant.

2006 - Mexia resident Cindy Walker died. Born in Mart, she went on to become one of the most prolific song writers in country music history, and was the first woman ever inducted into the Songewriter's Hall of Fame in Nashville. Some of her best loved songs include Roy Orbison's "Dream Baby", Jim Reeves’s "Distant Drums," Jerry Wallace’s "In the Misty Moonlight" and Ray Charles' "You Don't Know Me."