DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it — and friend, this one earns every word. Somewhere out in New Mexico, in 1862, a Civil War battle called Val Verde changed the fate of six brass field guns. Lieutenant Joseph D.
Sayers' Company took those guns in the fighting — and then came the hard part. They brought them back to Texas. The marker doesn't soften it: it calls that journey back incredible difficulty.
Six brass field guns, hauled across rough country, against all odds. Now, most outfits would've been satisfied just surviving that. But those guns became something more.
They armed a new unit — hand-picked men, every one of them — and that outfit took the name Val Verde Battery, C.S.A. And when those guns spoke, people listened. The sound of the Val Verde guns in action set the pace for other outfits.
That's the marker's own words — set the pace. They helped secure the recapture of Galveston in 1863. Think about that.
Guns taken in New Mexico, dragged back to Texas, and then helping take back a city on the Gulf Coast. They weren't done. At Mansfield, Louisiana, in April of 1864, the Val Verde Battery captured new guns — longer range than the ones they'd carried all that way from Val Verde.
They traded up in the middle of a war. But then the war ended. And here is where the story turns quiet and proud and a little defiant.
These men were unwilling — the marker says unwilling — to surrender their guns when it was over. So they buried four of them. Just put them in the ground rather than give them up.
The last commander of the Val Verde Battery was T. D. Nettles.
And he brought one gun home. All the way to Freestone County, Texas. One brass field gun.
Carried from a battlefield in New Mexico, through the whole length of the war, to the soil of Freestone County. The men buried four rather than lose them. Nettles kept one.
Some things, apparently, you just don't give up.
What the marker says
Six brass field guns taken by Lt. Joseph D. Sayers' Company in Civil War Battle of Val Verde, N. Mex., 1862, and brought back to Texas with incredible difficulty, armed a new unit of hand-picked men. Sound of the Val Verde guns in action set pace for other outfits, helped secure such victories as the recapture of Galveston, 1863. At Mansfield, La., April 1864, captured new, longer-range guns. Unwilling to lose their guns when the war ended, the men buried four. The last commander, T. D. Nettles, brought this one home to Freestone County.