How Texas became the Lone Star State--Continuing a Series on the Women of Texas

Joanna Elizabsth Troutman designed this flag and made it from silk skirts

    

  Joanna Elizabeth Troutman was born in Crawford County, Georgia, February 19, 1818.  At age twenty-one, she married Solomon L. Pope and they lived comfortably on the plantation “Elmwood,” near Macon, for the rest of their lives.  Joanna and Solomon had four sons.  After Solomon died in 1872, Joanna married W.G. Vinson, a Georgia Legislator, in 1875.   She died in July of 1879, and was buried in the family plot at Elmwood, next to her first husband.

     Why is there an oil painting of this demure Georgia girl hanging in the Rotunda of the Texas State Capitol?  Why is the only statue of a woman in the Texas State Cemetery a life-size bronze of this Georgia teenager who never set foot in Texas?  How and when was her body moved to Texas? Why?

     The short answer to these questions is Joanna Troutman first identified Texas as the “Lone Star State.”  A single star appears on the great seal of Texas because of Joanna.  She is the reason a lone star dominates the Texas Flag and appears on all official state correspondence.  Even though she never saw Texas, she loved the idea, the spirit, the romance of it.  She loved the thought of brave young men fighting for freedom, giving their lives for an ideal, making a better world.  Joanna, hopelessly idealistic and incurably romantic, loved Texas.

     When she was seventeen, Miss Troutman lived with her parents in Knoxville, Georgia, not far from Macon.  Her family owned and operated the Troutman Inn, a hotel on the main road from Macon to Columbus. The family lived a half-mile away, on top of Mulberry Hill in a spacious frame home with a wrap-around porch on three sides.

      “Texas Fever” was sweeping over Georgia in 1835.  Letters from William B. Travis, exaggerating the difficulties imposed upon the colonists by Mexican despots appeared in the local newspapers, along with requests from Sam Houston for men and money to fight tyranny.  Reports of the first shots being fired at a place called Gonzales dominated the local newspapers during October.  The brave Texans defied an order to return a small cannon to the Mexican Army, inviting them, with a homemade flag, to “Come and Take It.”

     Joanna heard from travelers at the inn about a “Texas Rally” held in Macon on November 14, and a fiery speech made by her friend, Lt. Hugh McLeod.  McLeod, a recent graduate of West Point, was on his way to his first duty station.  The young lieutenant resigned his commission in the U.S. Army and joined the Macon Grays to fight in Texas.  The fact that he was last in his class at West Point may have influenced his decision to resign from the army, or he could have been afflicted with an especially bad case of "Texas Fever."

      This generation of young men in the south had grown up hearing war stories.  Their grandfathers had fought in the Revolutionary War and their fathers had battled in the War of 1812.  They wanted this war.  They needed this war.  Their legends and their fortunes would be built in Texas.  The spell of Texas was magic and they could not resist it.

     The evening after hearing about the rally in Macon, young Miss Troutman sat on the big wrap-around porch at the family home and looked up into the night sky.  She was too excited to sleep, thinking over and over about the brave young men going off to Texas.  If she were only a man, she would go and fight the Mexican tyrants.   As she sat there, she noticed an unusually bright star, rising from the horizon.  Being much brighter than any other star, it dominated the sky with a clear, blue-white light that over-powered its neighbors.  Joanna compared it to Texas, shining alone in the dark, fighting for independence.  Suddenly, she knew what she would do.

     For the next two days, Joanna and her girlfriends commandeered an upstairs bedroom at her family’s inn.  They ripped apart two silk skirts and a petticoat and sewed a flag that Joanna had designed in her mind as she watched the lonely star.  Joanna put a blue, five-pointed star in the middle of a white silk field with the words “Liberty or Death” on one side and a Latin phrase meaning “Where Liberty Dwells, There is My Country,” on the other.   Nothing about the finished flag looked homemade.

     On November 19, as three companies of Texas-bound Macon Grays marched through Knoxville, Joanna stood on the steps of Troutman Inn and presented the battle flag to Major William Ward, asking him to accept it for Lt. Hugh McLeod and fly it as they went into battle.  The crowd cheered and several young men from Knoxville joined the volunteers, then and there.  One who joined was John Turner Spillars.

     Ward first flew the flag over Velasco—present day Freeport—on January 8, 1836.  When the Georgia Battalion moved to Goliad, under command of James Fannin, the flag was the first to fly over the fort after Fannin heard the Texas legislature had declared independence from Mexico.  Because of improper handling, the flag was shredded by its halyard.  The shreds were left hanging, perhaps fittingly, while the Goliad Massacre took place.

     John Turner Spillars was one of only two of the Macon Grays at Goliad to escape the massacre and eventually return to Georgia.  When the Mexicans started killing prisoners, John was lucky and quick enough to run away in the confusion.  Lt. Hugh McLeod was detained in Louisiana while his resignation from the U.S. Army was processed, and this delay saved his life.  McLeod, not a favorite of Houston's, missed the fight at San Jacinto, but enjoyed a long military career in Texas.

     William Ward and virtually all the young Georgia volunteers died at Goliad.  Most were not given the honor of dying in battle, but were among the three hundred fifty marched out and shot down in a pasture on Santa Anna's orders.

     Little more than a month later, Houston’s army defeated and captured Santa Anna at San Jacinto and the war was over.  Among the spoils, Houston captured the silver chest of the high-living General Santa Anna.  He arranged to send a place setting from the chest—an oversize fork and spoon—to Miss Joanna Troutman as a thank you for the flag she contributed to the Texas cause.  Her descendants still own and treasure these pieces, and the letter from General Rusk that accompanied them.

The sculpture marking Joanna's grave in the Texas State Cemetery

     Thirty years after her death, Joanna's sister-in-law, Mrs. John Troutman, Sr., noticed Joanna’s untended grave in the overgrown and neglected family plot.  She contacted Texas Governor Oscar Colquitt, a Georgia native, and made him aware of the situation.  Knowing of Joanna Troutman's contributions to Texas, Colquitt immediately responded, and, as a result of his efforts, in 1913 her body was moved to Austin and buried with honors in the Texas State Cemetery.   An oil painting of her at seventeen, working on the flag, was commissioned and placed in the State Capitol.  In 1919, Pompeo I. Coppini finished an eight-foot bronze statue of Joanna, and placed it near her grave.  Coppini’s other work includes the Littlefield Fountain on the Austin Campus of the University of Texas.

       In 2011, two Georgia historians visited the planetarium at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, Georgia.  With the aid of a computer program called “Stellarium,” they were able to roll back 176 years, and view the night sky as it appeared from their location on November 15, 1835.

       Sunset occurred at 6:30 that night and two prominent stars appeared; Vega, in the west, a part of the constellation Lyra, and Capella in the east, a part of the constellation Auriga.  About 9:30, the planet Jupiter and the star Rigel, of the constellation Orion, started to rise from the eastern horizon.  In 1835, all of these were easily visible from Joanna’s wrap-around porch.

     The museum professional assured the historians that Joanna would have seen virtually the same sky any night within ten days either side of November 15, 1835.  The three men agreed that the planet Jupiter was, without question, the most dominate light in the sky and almost certainly the inspiration for Miss Troutman’s flag, and for the Lone Star of Texas.

     Other flags bearing one star have flown over Texas, some of them much earlier than January 8, 1836.  In 1818, the filibuster group headed by Dr. James Long carried a red and white flag similar to the United States flag, with thirteen red and white stripes and a single white star in a red field.  In September of 1835, Sarah Bradley Dodson designed and sewed a flag for Texas similar to the French Tri-Color.  It consisted of three equal vertical stripes, blue, white, and red, with a white star centered in the blue stripe.   This flag is believed to have flown over the Alamo.

The painting of Joanna in the Texas Capitol

      The De Zavala Flag, a single white star on a blue field with “Texas” spelled between the points of the star, may have been used briefly, but the first official flag, approved by the Texas legislature on December 10, 1836, was the Burnet Flag, a single white star in the center of a blue field.  This flag was identical to Joanna’s flag, with the letters deleted and the colors reversed.  On January 25, 1839, a sketch of a Red, White, and Blue Lone Star Flag done by Dr. Charles B. Stewart was approved and adopted by President Lamar and the Republic of Texas legislature, and is still in use.  Today, the flag that evolved from a Georgia teenager’s imagination is recognized all over the world.