DUANE
Duane's take
The way the official marker tells it, Round Top is one of those places that sounds like somebody made it up — but every word of it is true, and the stone and timber still standing there will back me up. Start with the veterans. The Townsends, the Hills, and McH.
Winburn — all of them came out of San Jacinto. That battlefield made Texas, and the men who walked off it carried weight the rest of their days. Round Top drew more than its share of them.
Then there's Joel W. Robison. History has a way of giving the big moments to the big names, but Robison was one of the men who actually put hands on Santa Anna himself — one of his captors.
You don't forget a community that sheltered a man like that. And speaking of Santa Anna — the marker gives us one of the strangest turns in the whole Texas story. John C.C.
Hill was a boy, a captive of the Mier Expedition, and somewhere in the aftermath of all that, General Santa Anna adopted him. The very man Texas fought against, raising a boy who called Round Top home. Chew on that for a mile or two.
John Rice Jones held a distinction that belongs to the whole Republic: first postmaster general of the Republic of Texas. Round Top sent a man to that office when Texas was brand new and figuring out what it even was. Now, by the nineteenth century, German culture had taken deep root in this community, and what came out of that roots-down settling is something worth cataloguing slow.
There was Nassau Plantation. There was the art of Mathias and Rudolph Melchior. Reverend Adam Neuthard ran a school.
Carl S. Bauer laid stone masonry that still tells you everything about a craftsman's pride. A Lutheran church stood with an organ built by hand — Wantke's handmade organ, the marker is careful to say, because that detail matters.
And S.K. Lewis ran a Stage Coach Inn that would've heard more stories in a single evening than most towns collect in a year. Round Top, Texas — San Jacinto veterans, a captor of Santa Anna, the Republic's first postmaster general, a boy the general called his own, and German craftsmen who built things meant to outlast them.
Turns out, they did.
What the marker says
Home of the Townsends, Hills and McH. Winburn, veterans of San Jacinto; Joel W. Robison, one of Santa Anna's captors; John Rice Jones, first postmaster general, Republic of Texas; and John C.C. Hill, boy captive of Mier Expedition and adopted by General Santa Anna. A center of German culture and crafts of 19th century. Examples: Nassau Plantation; Art of Mathias and Rudolph Melchior; Rev. Adam Neuthard's School; Stone Masonry of Carl S. Bauer; Lutheran Church with Wantke's handmade organ; and S. K. Lewis Stage Coach Inn.