Sunday, March 18, 2012

Presidio La Bahia


Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Soldiers’ Chapel

You could spend a day at Presidio La Bahia outside Goliad and never come across the fine old Irish name of O’Conner, and that’s pretty much how the O’Conner family wants it.  And yet if not for Kathryn O’Connor there wouldn’t be much to see.

Presidio La Bahia was established by Spain along the Gulf Coast in 1721, and after two removes was permanently located in 1749 on a hill along the Rio San Antonio near present-day Goliad.

The Presidio was a royal fortress and administrative center.  Its chapel, Nuestra Senora de Loreto de la Bahia, served the soldiers and administration, their families, and the town.  The Franciscan mission to the First Nations peoples, Espiritu Sancto, was situated down the road and across the river because, although church parade was mandatory, soldiers were still considered a bad influence.

The chapel was the first structure built, and except for five years in the early Republic has served the faithful as a church since 1749. 

The fortress, although miles from the Gulf, was the center of coastal defense against the French.  Later, when Spain was one of the first friends of the USA, soldiers from La Bahia went into action against the British.

Economically, La Bahia was the beginning of the Texas cattle industry.   Mission herds and private herds were rounded up here for cattle drives to other settlements, guarded by soldiers of the local command.

According to the pamphlet, La Bahia was involved in six revolutions and many raids, and has been a fortress for the armies of Spain, Mexico, and Texas.

La Bahia is, unfortunately, most famous for the mass murder of Colonel James Fannin and some 350 of his men on Palm Sunday, 1836 on the orders of a particularly nasty little man.  What is less known is that many of the Mexican soldiers and their wives, including Francisca Alvarez, a true mother of Texas, managed to conceal some of the Texians, and saved others by listing them, apparently some falsely, as doctors and medical attendants so that they would be spared take care of the many Mexican wounded from both the Alamo and Coleto Creek battles.

With independence, La Bahia was no longer an economic and administrative center, and although the chapel was still in use the little fortress became a source of building materials, and by the 1960s little was left.

Then came Mrs. Kathryn O’Connor, who inspired and funded a historically accurate restoration of the fort through the research and work of San Augustine architect Raiford Stripling and using mostly local labor and artists. 

A correspondent who once worked for the family remarks on their generosity and industry.  Each generation of young O’Connors begins in the family businesses with a broom and a mop, not an attitude, and while their contributions to numerous causes and charities are great, of modesty they do not put their name on things.

La Bahia and the area around it include the fortress and its chapel, the excellent state reconstruction of Mission Espiritu Sancto, the site of the Battle of Coleto Creek, the mass grave and memorial to the murdered soldiers, the birthplace of General Ignacio Zaragoza, who defeated the French at the Battle of Puebla on 5 May (hence Cinco de Mayo)1862, and the eminently shoppable town of Goliad centered on its beautiful courthouse.  The three murder sites are all on private property, and perhaps that peaceful isolation is best.

The docents on site are very welcoming, and one of them, Jeremy, allowed an old man to help raise the Goliad Flag one morning.

At the State of Texas Parks sites the staffs are equally helpful, and the springtime beauty of the woods and fields around the mission are a naturalist’s happiest dream.

Useful sites:




The wars and raids have passed, and governments come and go, but on every Sunday a priest of the Diocese of Victoria still offers Mass under the same roof raised for the purpose in 1749.

A small red flame…relit before the…doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again…It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.

-Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

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