This Day In Texas History - May 4

[joe817]

1821 - On this date in 1821, Jean Laffite and his men, abandoned Galveston. Due partly to the determination of the United States to end Laffite's Galveston privateering base, the pirate Laffite decided the game was up. Laffite sailed to Mugeres Island, off the coast of Yucatán where he continued his privateering until 1825.

1836 - Ad interim President of the Republic of Texas named Peter Wagener Grayson Attorney General. He was the signer of the Treaties of Velasco that ended hostilities that existed between the Republic and Mexico.

1847 - Pope Pius IX established the Catholic Diocese of Galveston and named Jean Marie Odin the new diocese's first bishop. Odin, born in France in 1800, had come to Texas in 1840 to revive Catholicism there in the wake of the secularization of the missions and the Texas Revolution. The Diocese of Galveston initially encompassed an area of almost 360,000 square miles, including all of Texas as well as parts of present Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming.

1886 - Albert Richard Parsons, a labor organizer from Texas, was implicated in the infamous Chicago Haymarket Massacre. He had spoken at a meeting in Haymarket Square to protest police brutality. In the chaos that followed seven police officers and seven members of the crowd were killed. Parsons and three other men were eventually hanged for their involvement. Six years later Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned three remaining defendants and condemned the previous convictions as a miscarriage of justice.

1922 - Austin is hit by a tornado which leaves 12 dead and half a million dollars in damages.

1928 - After 31 years of being entombed in the cornerstone of the Eastland County courthouse, only to survive alive, the famous Texas horned toad, "Old Rip" paid a visit to the White House, meeting Calvin Coolidge on this date in 1928. The story of his 31 year survival made headlines nationwide, and lead to his national tour. Old Rip became immortalized in the Looney Toons character Michigan J Frog, who sang and danced for the construction worker that discovered him, but no one else. He sang "Hello, My Baby" and "Michigan Rag".

1942 - The Fort Worth Quatermaster Depot was activated which served as a distribution point and supply center for the United States Army during World War II. Fort Worth was chosen as the site because of its proximity to area army camps, large packing plants, highways, and railroad lines. Construction of the $10 million depot began in the winter of 1941–42 and included extension of lines of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas and the Santa Fe railroads to the site. Within two months the eighty-four-building depot also became a distribution center for the armed forces. In December of that year the army designated the site as an emergency supply point for troop trains. The Fort Worth Quartermaster Depot's supply area covered all or parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico, Louisiana (excluding New Orleans), and Arizona. By the end of 1943 it was the second or third largest military supply center (according to the number of troops supplied) in the nation.

1953 - Representatives of eleven mainline Protestant denominations met in Dallas to form the Texas Council of Churches. The council advocated elimination of all forms of discrimination based upon race, color, national origin, or sex. A major program was to mobilize member churches in world relief efforts. The council was succeeded by a more inclusive organization, the Texas Conference of Churches, in 1969. The conference is an association of the largest judicatories in the state of twelve Protestant denominations, fourteen dioceses of the Catholic Church, and the Eastern Orthodox churches, forty-nine groups in all, with a total of over three million members.