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Brother Alfonso Parcutt Steele

Blake Bowden

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Brother Alfonso Parcutt Steele (April 9, 1817 – July 8, 1911) was the last remaining survivor of the Battle of San Jacinto during the Texas Revolution.

Alphonso (Often spelled "Alfonso" in Republic of Texas records) Steele was born in 1817 to Stephen Parcutt Steele and Susannah McCarty Steele, a pioneer family in Hardin County, Kentucky. His grandfather, Thomas Steele, a native of Dublin, Ireland, had served on the schooner "General Putnam" in defense of New York during the Revolutionary War, and had settled in Kentucky with his family in 1798. At seventeen, Steele traveled to Lake Providence Louisiana, where he joined Captain Ephraim Daggett's volunteers bound for Texas in 1835. Upon arriving New Year's Day 1836 at Washington-on-Brazos, he found that Texas had not yet declared independence from Mexico. He worked at a local hotel and gristmill across from what would later be named "Independence Hall" and served the signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence. After independence was declared, he then joined a company that marched toward the Alamo, which was under siege, to aid in defense of the Alamo, Colonel William B. Travis, and its defenders. While crossing the Colorado River and receiving word that the Alamo had fallen, Steele and the group then joined Houston's army.

Steele was a Mason and served in the San Jacinto Veterans Association. He was honored in 1909 by the Thirty-First Texas Legislature as being one of the last two living survivors of the Battle of San Jacinto and was invited to speak on the floor of the Texas Senate. Two years later, on July 8, 1911, he died aged 94, having outlived his co-survivor. He is buried in the Mexia City Cemetery in Mexia.

A life-sized portrait of Steele hangs in front of the Senate chamber, to the right of the dais, at the Texas State Capitol in Austin. There is also a roadside park dedicated in his honor in Limestone County.

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