DUANE
Duane's take
The official marker tells it this way, and I'm just along for the ride. George Washington Gentry — now there's a name that carries some weight — was born in 1808, and by 1835 he was already in Texas. Didn't come alone, either.
He rode in with his father and his brother, part of Stephen F. Austin's Colony, which tells you right there this man arrived before Texas was even Texas. They settled in what is now Washington County, and Gentry got to work doing what needed doing — farming the land, surveying it, making sense of a place that was still figuring out its own edges.
But here's the thing about living in Texas in those years: the land had a way of calling you into history whether you planned on it or not. Gentry participated in the Texas Revolution. He was there.
Then came Indian skirmishes — more than one — and if that weren't enough, he was still standing in San Antonio in 1842, when the invasions came. Two of them. First Rafael Vasquez rode in, then Adrian Woll, and George Washington Gentry was part of the defense both times.
Some men see trouble coming and find a reason to be somewhere else. Gentry appears to have been the other kind. After all of that — the revolution, the skirmishes, the sieges — he eventually made his way west to Comanche County, where he took up farming and ranching and, one imagines, appreciated a quieter morning.
He died in 1883. The marker remembers him in the county where he spent his later years, but the story stretches all the way back to that first ride into Texas with his father and brother, before the republic, before the state, when everything here was still being decided — and George Washington Gentry was one of the men doing the deciding.
What the marker says
(1808 - 1883) A member of Stephen F. Austin's Colony, George Washington Gentry came to Texas in 1835 with his father and brother. Settling in what is now Washington County, he worked as a farmer and surveyor. He participated in the Texas Revolution, several Indian skirmishes, and the defense of San Antonio during the 1842 invasions of Rafael Vasquez and Adrian Woll. He later moved to Comanche County, where he was a farmer and rancher. Recorded - 1980