Joanna  Troutman

Portrait of Joanna  Troutman Portrait of Joanna  Troutman Headstone Photograph Headstone Photograph Headstone Photograph Headstone Photograph Headstone Photograph


This monument is erected to honor Joanna Troutman for the service she rendered the cause of Texas independence.

Born in Crawford County, Georgia, February 19, 1818. She lived to see Texas free and one of the mightiest states in the American union, and died August, 1880.


When Texas was struggling to establish her rights as a state in the Mexican republic, she sent forth an appeal for help. Georgia responded by raising a battalion of volunteers, and Miss Joanna Troutman then 18 years of age, fired with her love of liberty and the zeal of the volunteer, with her own hands made a beautiful lone star flag and presented it to the Georgia Battalion and they landed in Texas with it in December 1835. The flag was symbolic of the lone struggle Texas was making. The flag was unfurled at Velasco and later carried to Goliad where it proudly waved over the walls of that fortress. This flag was raised as national flag on the walls of Goliad by Fannin when he heard of the Declaration of Texas Independence on March 8, 1836. It was constructed of white silk with an azure star of five points. On one side was the motto: “Liberty or Death”, and on the reverse side in Latin, “Where Liberty Dwells There Is My Country.” The tattered shreds of this flag silently witnessed the murder of Fannin and his men at Goliad Sunday March 27, following. Gentle, pure, patriotic, the hands of Joanna Troutman wrought her love of liberty into the beautiful lone star flag which witnessed the sacrifice of the men who brought it to Texas as the emblem of independence.
Full Name: Joanna  Troutman
Location: Section:Republic Hill, Section 1 (C1)
Row:A  Number:3
Reason for Eligibility: Creator of the first Texas flag 
Birth Date: February 19, 1818 
Died: July 23, 1879 
Burial Date: Reinterred February 26, 1913 
 
TROUTMAN, JOANNA (1818-1879). Joanna (or Johanna) Troutman, designer of an early Texas Lone Star flag, was born on February 19, 1818, in Crawford County, Georgia, the daughter of Hiram Baldwin Troutman. In 1835, in response to an appeal for aid to the Texas cause, the Georgia Battalion, commanded by Col. William Ward, traveled to Texas. Joanna Troutman designed and made a flag of white silk, bearing a blue, five-pointed star and two inscriptions: "Texas and Liberty" on the obverse and, in Latin, "Where Liberty dwells there is my country" on the reverse. She presented the flag to the battalion, and it was unfurled at Velasco on January 8, 1836, above the American Hotel. It was carried to Goliad, where James W. Fannin, Jr., raised it as the national flag when he heard of the Texas Declaration of Independence. The flag was accidentally torn to shreds, however, and only its remnants flew above the battle. Joanna Troutman married S. L. Pope in 1839, and the couple moved to Elmwood, their prosperous plantation near Knoxville, Georgia, in 1840. They had four sons. Her husband died in 1872, and Joanna married W. G. Vinson, a Georgia state legislator, in 1875. She died on July 23, 1879, at Elmwood and was buried next to her first husband. In 1913 Texas governor Oscar B. Colquitt secured permission to have her remains taken to Texas for interment in the State Cemetery in Austin. A bronze statue by Pompeo L. Coppiniqv was erected there as a monument to her memory; her portrait hangs in the state Capitol.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: George Pierce Garrison, "Another Texas Flag," Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 3 (January 1900). Annie Doom Pickrell, Pioneer Women in Texas (Austin: Steck, 1929). Henry David Pope, A Lady and a Lone Star Flag: The Story of Joanna Troutman (San Antonio: Naylor, 1936). Vertical Files, Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Claudia Hazlewood

"TROUTMAN, JOANNA." The Handbook of Texas Online. [Accessed Tue Mar 18 9:18:48 US/Central 2003].
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